We need an all of the above organizing strategy to transform industries and welcome tens of millions of workers into our movement. This is a resource challenge, a coordination challenge, and an intellectual challenge, to be sure.
But it’s first and foremost a political challenge, and the labor movement must confront the barriers in its way to build and grow. Here are a few ways to potentially inspire the level of organizing we need.
Idea #6: Experiment with Public Campaigns to Encourage Independent Organizing
It has become an accepted principle of union organizing that most workers like unions and want a union. But the combination of a lack of organizing resources and severe anti-union campaigns leaves most unorganized workers with few pathways to a union. The labor movement cannot hire enough people to even think approach organizing 18 million people, so independent worker organizing will have to be a part of that solution.
We should experiment with ways to encourage and support independent organizing. Here is one proposal. AFL or CTW should commit several million dollars to run public test campaigns in several cities to help people start organizing. This would have two major components:
First, unions would try to induce independent organizing through public campaigns, working with academics to test out different versions. Each campaign would feature different messages and dissemination strategies. For example, unions might run three types of campaigns, each in a different city or media market. In Birmingham, say, AFL might run a campaign featuring faith, racial justice, and worker leaders emphasizing the unfinished struggle for justice, the need for resistance to white supremacy and economic oppression, and the possibility of changing the future of the city for the better through union organizing. In Memphis, say, AFL might run a campaign focusing on the benefits of unionization, with workers offering stories of how they organized and won respect on the job, a strong pension and good health benefits. And in Providence, say, AFL might consider working with the state and city government to treat worker power as a public health and safety issue, enclosing pro-union mailers along with water bills and public assistance mailings, sharing union information at the DMV, and encouraging public officials to promote unionization.
On the back end, unions would coordinate institutional support for organizing. Primarily, they would create online courses teaching the public how to join a union, to equip workers with the tools and information they need to do this work. They would also hold public, in-person and online trainings on how to organize a union. They would also provide meeting space and perhaps make the first contact between interested workers: for example, if twenty workers at one company all reported that they were interested in organizing at their workplace, organizers might establish the first meeting between them. Unions would also make sure that union halls and meeting spaces were open and available, and could be reserved online, so that workers have safe places to meet. Finally, unions would coordinate free legal support when workers were ready to file a petition, to ensure a fast, fair and free election.
By teaching workers how to organize themselves, and supporting them through the process, unions may be able to help far more workers form unions than if the union ran the campaigns itself. And because workers would run their campaign, it might diffuse some of the anti-union messaging tactics common in boss campaigns.
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