"what you get out of the organization is fair for what you put into the organization""When the relationship is not employer to employee there are still the equity equations that get solved for each organization that people choose to join. However, instead of money the sense of fairness may be fulfilled by other characteristics of the organization. For instance, a person may volunteer time at a food pantry or homeless shelter because of the fulfillment they receive by doing those activities."

Equity and Rewards

"People tend to join organizations that allow them to chase their dreams and to have experiences that fulfill them. People become full of pride in the organization when the mission of the organization, the meaningfulness of what they are doing, what they are accomplishing is held in high regard by themselves and others."

Meaningfulness of the job-itself

"If a brand or the mission is well thought of in someone’s mind that makes joining that organization more attractive."

The Brand/Alignment with the Mission:

Why do people join organizations? A seemingly innocuous question that seems like it should be easily answered. To some extent the answer depends on which type of organization you are talking about. For instance, why do people join a certain employer over another? Why do they join various social or religious groups? Why do they…

career

Career

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Corporate Culture

business

Business

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Startups

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Human Resources

Why Do People Join Organizations?

In the IWW, our main model of organizing is the “solidarity union.” A solidarity union consists of a group of workers taking direct action in a workplace to get what they need and want, without regard to formal recognition by the bosses.

Solidarity Unionism

(Stardusters) were following the steps of a recognition campaign, just without the NLRB election. They believed the owner would see their strength and negotiate. But the union’s coming-out party didn’t have that result. Instead, the owner started firing people for union activity and hired a union-busting lawyer.At Arrow Messenger, the union of messengers did not go public as a “union”. . . but simply approached the boss with specific demands . . . When bargaining did not yield the results they wanted, a quickie strike and a series of prolonged direct actions won them most of their demands . .

Does going public heighten the risk of retaliation?

at Stardust as well, despite not one but two rounds of mass firings, workers were able to win on a majority of their demands, by using direct action in the workplace. The owner never sat down with them, but by taking on issues one by one, and coordinating work refusals and other tactics, the workers made multiple gains, including refusing unpaid work, fixing unsafe equipment, and generally improved working conditions.

Winning despite mass firings

Bosses are used to traditional recognition-focused union drives, and so are the professional union-busting lawyers and consultants they hire. The bosses’ and union-busters’ “playbook” usually does not account for a solidarity union strategy.

Does going public throw the boss off the scent?

There are special challenges to organizing a large target, whether one very large worksite, or a chain or franchise with multiple work sites. Underground communication across vast physical distance is difficult. Sometimes going public may be the less-than-ideal yet necessary road to reach out.

Is going public necessary to win?

going public can provide a psychological boost for workers engaged in organizingHaving said that, that boost can be devastatingly temporary, when workplace polarization hits and the boss’s anti-union onslaught begins in force. Too many of our campaigns rely too heavily on the adrenaline rush of going public.

Collective Identity?

If a solidarity unionism campaign is public, it’s more likely that NLRB bureaucrats will be able to fit the case into their narrow vision of what a union organizing campaign is, and treat firings as illegal.

Is it worth going public for the legal protections?

Smart organizers don’t go public as a matter of course, as if it’s the next box to check on a list . . . the question to always ask is, “Given where we are at right now, can we advance the campaign without going public?” Until the answer is a definite “no,” don’t do it.

Going Public

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Remote Work

Do Solidarity Unions Need to “Go Public”?

IWW has embraced a model of organizing different from the standard route of winning a National Labor Relations Board-supervised election, bargaining a contract, and servicing it with outside staff.&nbsp;“solidarity unionism:" based on workers forming their own self-managed committees and taking direct action in the workplace

Definition

The single most salient challenge facing the IWW today is how to build stable, long-term IWW workplace unions outside of the contractual framework — solidarity unions that can survive, grow stronger, and expand union conditions for decades

The Challenge

within the IWW, even though we have a critique of the mainstream, contract-servicing approach, many who believe in solidarity unionism still tend to assume longevity and stability require legal union recognition and a contract. The idea seems to be: “direct action is important, but if you want to make sure the union still has presence in the shop five years down the road, the only way to get there is to hold an election and put a contract in place.”

Longevity and stability

What does a long-term solidarity union look like in a single shop?<ol><li>Consistent, Dues-Paying Membership</li><li>Rotation of Administrative Roles</li><li>Development, Growth and Inreach</li><li>Regular Meetings</li><li>A System for Taking Action on Grievances</li></ol>

Single Shop

What can the solidarity union model achieve?<ol><li>Recognition: "In the first case, the workers forced the boss to recognize their organized power, in the second case, the state told the bosses they had to recognize a bargaining agent. One form of recognition was effective, the other was not, but proponents of NLRB elections usually have it backwards."</li><li>A Union Shop</li><li>A Grievance Procedure</li><li>Bread-and-Butter Gains</li><li>Other Shop Norms: Health &amp; Safety, Weinfarten-type Rights, Shopfloor Meetings, Discipline and Just Cause Rights</li></ol>

What can be achieved?

Two things should be noted:&nbsp;First, benefits and working conditions have been getting worse for workers who are covered by union contracts. (It is a distortion to fault solidarity unions for not living up to standards even some of the largest business unions are failing to meet.)Second, some of the biggest material gains that have been made in the last decade have been achieved by working outside of existing union infrastructure, essentially using the solidarity union model.

Two Notes 

we need to stop thinking of solidarity unions as synonymous with that kind of initial, all-out war, for one thing because no group of workers can sustain that exhausting level of conflict for more than a year or two. It’s also a standard we arbitrarily hold solidarity unions to and not contract shops.In reality, there is nothing wrong with a lull in a solidarity union as workers take a breather or regroup or quietly keep an eye on conditions, as long as they have a durable administrative infrastructure, and the ability to take action again, when necessary.

All-out War

The bottom line is, we think it is more powerful to keep power in the hands of workers, rather than shifting struggles off the floor and into closed boardrooms, in discussions between company and union experts like lawyers and paid officers while the workers work now and learn the outcome of the grievance process later.

Bottom-Line

Boom Without Bust: Solidarity unionism for the long term

<a href="http://libcom.org/blog/contracts-14122011" target="_self">(</a>Solidarity Unionism) emerged as an alternative model to contract-oriented organizing.We live in the era of the no-strike clause as baked into the very notion of bargaining a contract with an employer; the same goes for management rights clauses, and binding arbitration as a final step of the grievance procedure.

Contracts & Solidarity Unionism

I believe it’s possible to envision a contract that does not limit workers’ power on the job: a contract that only enshrines our victories without trading away the tools that gave us those victories in the first place.But this goes against our lived experience . . . a contract devoid of the boss’s right to uninterrupted production goes against our lived experience of how the contract functions on the current terrain of the class struggle.

Lived Experience

If we use direct action and we succeed in surviving to build a long-term shop presence, the solidarity unionist’s “contract” will come to us from the boss on his knees, not because we simply managed to get him to sit across the table from us.

"Contracts"

https://archive.iww.org/about/solidarityunionism/explained/minority2/https://archive.iww.org/about/solidarityunionism/explained/minority4/https://libcom.org/library/potentials-solidarity-unionismhttp://libcom.org/blog/contracts-14122011https://libcom.org/library/contractualism-should-be-avoidedhttps://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/229652

Links in this document

What Solidarity Unionism Also Isn’t (A Reply to Don White)

There seems to be the assumption that solidarity unionism and direct action are the same thing. They are not.Direct action and solidarity unionism are not the same thing.Direct action is a tactic, solidarity unionism is an organizing model.

workers organizing a democratic workplace committee to develop strategies and tactics to further their material benefits, defend themselves from managerial discipline, and create a workplace culture where people care for one another and don’t buy into capital’s logic of worker competition.

IWW won certification as the bargaining agent in 2013, but still has yet to negotiate a contract. The organizer was frustrated that so many people in the IWW were “solidarity unionism purists.” By that he meant that he didn’t think that the shop should have to rely solely on direct action; they wanted to sign a contract.Solidarity unionism is not necessarily opposed to contracts . . . The difference is that with staff-driven unionism the staff negotiates and is responsible for the enforcement of that contract. With solidarity unionism the workplace committee would assume those responsibilities

Contracts

An important requirement for solidarity unionism is that a committee is organized, and what determines whether or not their plan succeeds or fails mostly depends on the abilities of that committee; not on staff (staff-driven unionism) or a single charismatic leader (leader-driven unionism). Put even more simply, solidarity unionism is workplace committee-driven unionism.For it to be organized through solidarity unionism would mean it was organized worker-to-worker. This was the organizer’s confusion.

Requirements

Solidarity Unionism: What it is and what it isn’t

Many industrial relations researchers are not convinced that union tactics play a significant role in determining election outcomes.Findings suggest that union success . . . depends on using an aggressive grassroots rank-and-file strategy focused on building a union and acting like a union from the very beginning of the campaign.

Simply throwing money and staff at campaigns is not enough to overcome employer resistance and worker fear. Nor does any individual organizing tactic—whether sophisticated media campaigns, stockholder actions, or a blitz house calling of every worker in the unit—guarantee success.

These tactics are truly effective only when they are integrated into a comprehensive rank-and-file approach to organizing that focuses on the use of personal contact, leadership development, and a combination of aggressive and creative internal and external pressure tactics.

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Cybersecurity

ResearchGate

101: Building the Committee - "undertaking their own campaign at work and even mounting a modest direct action with coworkers to settle a grievance or win a demand."102: The Committee in Action - a systematic grievance handling process based in workplace action, as well as the nuts and bolts and strategic questions involved in maintaining a functioning shop committee

The Organizer Trainings

“The Industrial Workers of the World do not recognize that the bosses have any rights at all,” testified Big Bill Haywood before Congress’s Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915. “We say that no union has a right to enter into an agreement with the employers … because it is the inherent mission of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish itself in its place.”

Big Bill Haywood Quote

<a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">Conclusions: are unequivocal:</a><ul><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">“NLRB slowed down organizing”; </a></li><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">“Bureaucracy of NLRB slowed down process, took away momentum and required a lot of time from multiple people”; </a></li><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">“Did not have a vision of the campaign that did not include NLRB recognition”; </a></li><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">“Did not recognize that direct unionism was working well without NLRB recognition”; </a></li><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">“Organizing focus shifted to NLRB election rather than remaining on worker issues and the fight for real gains”; </a></li></ul>

“Learning From Our Mistakes” Portland 2003

<a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at">Things to avoid doing again:</a><ul><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at">"Going to NLRB election”; </a></li><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at">“Using the NLRB”; </a></li><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at">“Seeking official recognition of the union”; </a></li><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at">“Aiming to win an official collective bargaining agreement”; </a></li><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at">“Abandoning democracy building amongst organizing committees to focus on the immediacy of an NLRB election”.</a></li></ul>

<a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">At a campaign where the election was won:</a><ul><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">“Real issues not addressed in bargaining”; </a></li><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">“Union was more real on paper.” </a></li></ul><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">Things to do differently next time:</a><ul><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">"more direct unionism tactics." </a></li><li><a href="https://deepstash.com/idea/90556/101-building-the-committee-undertaking-their-own-campaign-at" target="_self">“Experiment with more minority / direct unionism tactics.”</a></li></ul>

A history of the IWW’s organizer training program

This can be seen most clearly with the <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/labor-law-reform-bill-pro-act-workers">PRO Act </a>, a laundry list of reforms that recently passed the House. The legislation would roll back decades-old restrictions on unions, eliminate “right to work” provisions, and penalize corporations who violate labor law. It’s the real deal, at least on paper. Now many unions and activists are gearing up to fight for the PRO Act, seeing in it the key to reviving organized labor.

Joe Burns on the PRO act

Joe Biden Will Not Save the Labor Movement

Semantics and messaging: In the many videos flowing out of Bessemer on social media, activists and organizers regularly talk about “the union,” as if a union is something other than the workers who are trying to form one. A better slogan would have been, “When workers unite, real change happens,” or anything that didn’t make “the union” sound like a building name or street address.

Amazon Organizing Postmortem

Other insights:<ul><li>A common error made in hard union battles is for the effort’s leaders to think there’s something unique about their particular circumstances—the industry, group of workers, type of workers, region of the country, time in history, level of surveillance, and so forth—that justifies not following good organizing practices, like performing structure tests and eventually making those tests public once you reach a majority.</li></ul>

<ul><li>What “protects the workers” is when a majority of them take this action together, all at once. You are teaching collective power in the conversations and actions.</li></ul>

Structure tests are run over and over privately and quietly until a majority of workers are willing to sign. Once a majority signs, that is generally a serious indication that the campaign will be victorious. But you don’t stop with one public structure test. You keep going, because there’s generally an explosion of additional support once the hesitant coworkers who are holding back realize that, in fact, a majority of their coworkers are uniting. Majority structure tests prove that the people workers in a high-fear campaign trust the most—their own coworkers—are ready to declare for themselves that enough is enough.

This campaign likely should not have been run once the organizers realized how off their assessment was of how many workers were actually in the warehouse. There’s no justification for putting workers on what organizers call a “death march.

The warning signs of defeat were everywhere.

Why Do People Join Organizations?

Do Solidarity Unions Need to “Go Public”?

Boom Without Bust: Solidarity unionism for the long term

What Solidarity Unionism Also Isn’t (A Reply to Don White)

Solidarity Unionism: What it is and what it isn’t

gabriel morales