[This post is part of my series on 1-on-1 conversations.]

There are two standards that I hold myself to that have become absolutely central to everything I do in my union organizing. First, I never blame my coworkers for not being involved or not caring. Second, whenever I invite a coworker to get involved or to share their opinion, I want them to feel comfortable to decline or disagree.

This might seem counterintuitive. If the point of organizing is for more coworkers to be involved in making things better, isn’t it their fault if they don’t get involved and things remain bad? Similarly, shouldn’t I be finding more ways to get coworkers to say yes and agree rather than say no and disagree?

Regarding the first standard, it’s certainly tempting to blame my coworkers when they don’t seem to care or want to get involved. Organizing is a ton of work and when it fails or moves at a snail’s pace it can be the most frustrating thing in the world. 

But blaming coworkers has two extremely corrosive effects on organizing. First, when I blame my coworkers it stunts my creative problem-solving and saps my motivation to keep trying. Instead of asking myself what I can do to help my coworkers get more involved, I absolve myself of responsibility and take the easy road by blaming other people. This makes me feel good in the moment but absolutely destroys any possibility of success in my organizing.

However, venting is totally natural and can be a useful way to let off steam and move through cycles of frustration without resorting to blame. It’s important for me to NOT vent directly to the coworkers I am trying to organize with, as venting my frustration at them directly will only lead to them disengaging further. Having a friend or fellow organizer who I have a strong and trusting relationship with who I can vent to when I need to helps me express frustration in a safe way and helps me be heard. Letting off steam with a little venting allows me to move through the frustration and get to the other side of it. Only then can I take a fresh look at the problem from an organizing perspective.

The second corrosive effect of blaming coworkers is that it damages my relationships with them. When I blame my coworkers for not being involved I’m accusing them of being part of the problem. This will make my coworkers defensive and rightly think that I don’t know where they’re coming from. They’ll not want to be around me or talk to me, and all prospects of future organizing will be greatly diminished.

At my best, I can get curious about why my coworkers aren’t involved in addressing an issue. I can get to know them. I can build trust that might later result in mutual understanding that might result in a shared interest in addressing shared workplace problems.

Most workers for most of their working lives have been immersed in the values of obedience to workplace authority. That’s what it means to live under capitalism. When I start to prompt coworkers to think about their workplaces differently, I’m often working against an entire lifetime of learned thought patterns. When I remind myself of this, I can be a little more patient with coworkers who I’m conversing with about problems on the job.

Whose responsibility is it to fix workplace problems? In terms of moral responsibility, it’s everyone’s duty to do what’s best, including addressing problems at work that cause harm. However, organizers aren’t gods. I do well to remind myself of this when I get frustrated and feel the urge to pass judgment on my coworkers. The real world isn’t one where moral responsibility determines who wins and loses.

Rather, organizers live in a world of practical responsibility. The practical power that I have a practical responsibility to use is to keep building relationships with coworkers based on care, trust, and solidarity. When I run up against obstacles in my organizing, I have the practical power to re-evaluate why my coworkers aren’t involved or don’t seem to care. I have the practical power to find new ways to relate and connect to them so that organizing can move forward. I can save the blame for the bosses and stockholders, because blaming coworkers has no place in grassroots organizing.

The second standard I hold myself to that has become central in my organizing is making people feel comfortable saying no or disagreeing with me. Letting people say no may seem counterproductive because it may seem to make my organizing more difficult. I stole the idea of giving people the space to say no from consent discourse and just plopped it into my thinking about organizing. This has actually made my organizing so much easier, smoother, and more effective.

For some coworkers with assertive personalities, who I know well, and with lots of experience on a particular issue I can often expect them to be up front with me. But for those who might be more reserved, new to an issue, or I don’t know as well, I have to put extra effort into making sure they feel comfortable voicing their thoughts and making a decision exactly in line with what they want. Particularly because organizing against the boss is new to most people and kind of scary for people when they first think about it, it is absolutely essential that organizers know how to navigate these conversations in delicate ways when they need to.

So much organizing, by newbies and veterans alike, is shallow and predicated on trying to get another person to do something. Framed in those terms, organizing becomes transactional, individual, and often manipulative. The whole philosophy of relationship-based organizing that I developed with fellow organizers and write about on this blog is precisely an attempt to make organizing the opposite of shallow (i.e., relational, collective, and based in trust). I’ve certainly gotten better at this over the years, but I still catch myself falling into shallow organizing in little moments or interactions when I’m trying out something for the first time, or I’m tired, or I feel rushed.

The best antidote I have against shallowness in my own organizing is slowing down and preparing mentally ahead of time for conversations with coworkers. Before going into a conversation with a coworker about a specific issue, I think through what I’m going to say in my head with the intention of giving the other person the total freedom to say no thanks or to disagree with me. I’ll come up with specific ways of phrasing key questions so that they are not presumptuous or patronizing. Other conversational tactics include providing pros and cons of each available option, letting them know I’ll respect their decision, saying they don’t have to make a decision right away, validating the reasons behind their thoughts even when I disagree with the conclusion, and just trying to create an atmosphere of openness and supportiveness.

Even if they do say no, making them feel comfortable with their decision will increase their trust in me and will make it easier to talk through other issues in the future. In organizing at work especially, where I’m often talking with people I spend a lot of time around, all of the little extra efforts I make to help people feel respected in their decisions pays off. I will not win over every coworker on every issue, but I’ll be there issue after issue to raise what’s going on. I’ll be there day after day, year after year to think through with my coworkers what we want collectively and how we plan to get it.

I talk a lot about care and trust in organizing, but it would be a huge mistake to interpret this to mean that we should never challenge coworkers in our organizing. In fact, I often find I’m organizing at my best when I challenge coworkers from a place of trust and curiosity, and NOT challenging them in a pressuring or blaming way.

It takes a certain degree of confidence to both be able to both retain my own opinion and to give someone else the space to freely form and express their own. The confidence comes partly from knowing the issue well enough that I can express my own opinion succinctly as well as tease out the reasons behind different positions. The confidence also comes from the self-assuredness of not seeing other people’s disagreement as a personal attack on myself.

Disagreement invariably creates a social tension in these conversations, and it’s a tension I can make space to hold. The key is to both not let the tension dissipate by running away from disagreement and to not let that tension turn destructive by externally pressuring my coworkers to think and act a certain way. Rather, getting curious about their views instead of defensive enables this tension to become generative.

Expressing curiosity takes the form of asking open-ended questions, like “Interesting, what lead you to see things that way?” Using “I” statements and talking about my own experience lets me share my own thoughts about an issue that can express disagreement but without the other person feeling directly attacked, like “I came to think this because in my experience …” People are most willing to reconsider their views when they feel respected and see the relationship as a trusting space to explore new ideas. Practicing these skills on lower-stakes issues and with people you are more comfortable talking to can prepare you for more prickly organizing situations.

When I hold this tension of disagreement successfully, in the long term most of my conversations with fellow workers move towards finding common interests and coming to a shared understanding of solutions to workplace problems. Even when a coworker and I maintain our disagreement, we both learned something and set ourselves up for further engagement.

Recently in my organizing I was asking coworkers if they would take a higher-risk action around a complex set of issues. There were a dozen coworkers I was supposed to talk to over the course of a couple weeks, and honestly these conversations didn’t really feel comfortable to me til I got to the third or fourth one. I spent a lot of time thinking through what questions to ask and how to frame things so people felt comfortable saying no, but even then it took me a few tries to really find the flow and balance I was looking for. Once I was in a groove, most coworkers said yes, a few said no. 

The action was mostly successful. Even more important to me than the result of the action itself was the deeper understanding we came to of workplace issues and the further trust we built by talking things through. The next time these issues come up, we’ll be even better prepared and stronger in our efforts to address them.