Category Archives: Organizing

A grainy white and black photo of a bridge being built over a wide river. Long metal arches are being built between concrete pylons.

Building Organizing Networks through 1-on-1 Conversations

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

For those who get really involved in union activism or political activism, there are different ways that such activists use their time. There are what I call the “floater” activists. Floaters go to all the meetings, go to all the protests and rallies, and spend a lot of time socializing with other activists. I call them floaters because they float around to everything, but this floating happens without being social rooted or having deeper political designs. Floaters will often think they have the most influence on social change because they do everything and go to everything, but I think this detracts from a more grounded approach that is more than the sum of its parts.

In contrast to the floaters, there are the activist “builders.” There are two things that builders do: 1) they build and cohere networks of people who are affected by a problem, and 2) they organize these networks in a particular direction to address that problem.

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Three butterflies with black and white spotted wings fly through the air against a clear blue sky.

Organizing Conversations for Union Contract Campaigns

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations. A pamphlet version of this post is available for download here.]

No other US institution gives workers as much agency over the terms of their own life and livelihood as a union contract campaign. The fortunes of the entire labor movement are recorded in the language of thousands of settled contracts year after year.

For most rank-and-file workers in recent decades, sadly these have not been contests we’ve fared well in as wages have stagnated and inequality has grown. At its most dreadful, a contract campaign is a long procession of bureaucratic bickering and deflating concessions.

But when workers get organized and unite around a common purpose, they become an unstoppable force. The campaign transforms into a vessel for realizing collective ambitions, passions, and values. The power of workers to win their demands is carried forward by the trust and solidarity that exists in the relationships between them. To go from weakness to strength, workers need to talk with each other.

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A white tern with a black top of its head is pictured flying left-to-right, with its wings stretched out in front and its head tilted slightly down, as if scanning the ground below.

The Question for an Organizer Is What the Wing Is for a Bird

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

“You can get all your ideas across just by asking questions, and at the same time you help people to grow and not form a dependency on you. To me it’s just a more successful way of getting ideas across.” – Myles Horton in conversation with Paolo Freire in the book We Make the Road by Walking.

Myles Horton co-founded the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1932 and developed a model of popular education that played an important role in stimulating the bottom-up leadership of both the 1930s labor movement and the 1960s civil rights movement. Horton paid close attention to crafting and wielding questions as an essential tool of grassroots organizing.

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A color quilt of diamond shapes that converge in the middle of the image like a star. The colors produce concentric circles of mostly reds, pinks, and yellows.

So You Want to Organize with the Union Movement?: How to Get Started

[A pamphlet version of this post is available for download here.]

Recent cycles of crisis and protest have created an ever-growing number of radicalized youth and young adults. While there’s been wide variation in social movement activity year by year, since 2011 there’s been a significant upsurge.

As initial phases of intense agitation and involvement pass, many young people think about how to turn their change in political consciousness to a change in their life. The crests of heightened action are too intense emotionally to sustain indefinitely, and the troughs of demobilization are too long for a committed protestor to remain perpetually engaged.

The union movement is one place where you can build towards long-term radical change as part of a sustainable, consistent, and long-term commitment. Almost everyone who isn’t already rich has to work for a living. If that includes you, there’s a lot of people you can unite with against those few who profit off your labor.

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Talking to Your Coworkers about Socialism

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

As socialists we spend most of our time talking about socialism with other socialists, whether in our radical book groups or with our activist friends. When it comes time to talk to non-socialists about socialism, we often stumble as we apply our activist-talk to our neighbors and coworkers who aren’t part of the radical scene. Rather, we should adapt our conversational strategies to the needs of the current context and moment.

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