Tag Archives: AEIOU

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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The image is of the ruins of an old city, with dark yellow stone walls and pillars on a hillside. All of the buildings have long crumbled away. The image is of Jerash, a city in Jordan that dates back to 7,000 BCE.

Helping Coworkers Overcome Ambivalence Towards Change (Listening Series, Part 3)

[Parts 1 and 2. These posts on listening are part of my larger series of posts on relationship-based organizing.]

In the previous post, I used the example of Connor being ambivalent about standing up to his boss Bill to illustrate how to use the general listening tactics OARS (open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, summaries) to build trust and strengthen the relationship. While building trust is one essential ingredient, in the counseling approach of Motivational Interviewing (MI) there’s an additional set of practices that are used to help people get past ambivalence and that can be applied to specific such organizing situations. While these are not essential organizing tools that every organizer should know and practice (like AEIOU), I nonetheless have found them helpful in talking with those coworkers who seem stuck.

The goal of these methods is evoking the will to change that people already have inside of them, tapping those enormous reserves of motivational energy that everyone possesses but can be suppressed by ambivalence. The main way to do this is to support people in expressing their values, interests, abilities, and aims out loud. “In particular this process occurs in MI by literally talking oneself into change. People tend to become more committed to what they hear themselves saying.” 

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The image shows the old pillars of the Hera Temple in Greece, built originally in 450BC. The pillars are lined in rows and there's no remaining roof but a blue sky in the background.

Good Listening Skills for Organizing (Listening Series, Part 2)

[This series on listening is part of my larger series of posts on relationship-based organizing.]

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed how listening related to organizing at a more general level. In this post I get into specifics of how to practice good listening. Most of these listening skills apply to social relationships in general, but here I present them in the context of union organizing.

Motivational Interviewing

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a form of counseling that a reader first commented about on my blog, noting how it sounded similar in a lot of ways to how I write about relationship-based organizing. Piquing my interest, I started to look into MI, found a lot that I resonated with, and discovered some new angles for looking at my organizing.

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U Is for Uplift

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations. Check out the intro post here to see an overview of the whole framework.]

Introduction

The uplift part of AEIOU is where we follow-up and check in with people. Sometimes we’re following up specifically about tasks and sometimes we’re checking in generally about how their organizing and life is going.

In the previous post in this series on the “organize” part of AEIOU, I highlighted how we should avoid as much as possible leaving new people on their own to organize. There’s many steps to take from first getting involved to becoming experienced and knowledgeable about the many aspects of organizing, and taking each step in community with others helps foster relationships and share best practices. But no matter how collective we make organizing, there are still countless moments where people have to do something on their own, where they have to overcome some part of themselves and their environment using their own resources and confidence.

When people complete a task for the first time, it’s good to follow-up and debrief with them about how it went. When people don’t complete a task, it’s good to follow-up and see if there’s anything you can do to support them. A lot of the same concepts used for task follow-up can also be applied to general check-ins.

Life is hard, workplaces are complex, coworkers are complicated, capitalism is a big, bad jerk, and sometimes organizing doesn’t go as planned. Uplift is about staying in relationship with people through the ups and downs of organizing.

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O Is for Organize

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations. Check out the intro post here to see an overview of the whole framework.]

Introduction

The Organize step of AEIOU in 1-on-1s is about getting people involved in the concrete tasks of organizing. After having Agitated with someone around grievances, created a plan in Educate, considered the boss’s next moves and addressed people’s fears in Inoculate, you are in position to put the rubber to the road. “What do we do now?”

Just as workplace problems are complex, so are workplace solutions involving collective action. The organizer can help break the problem down into chunks and separate the solution out into a series of manageable tasks. In supporting people who are new to organizing and motivated to solve problems at work, the organizer’s role is to discuss with people what needs to be done and how to do it.

One of the contradictions of being an organizer is the opposition between the speed and effectiveness of doing things yourself vs. taking the time to show others how to do things. Everything an organizer does can be done by someone else, and if the organizer already knows how to do it, the aims of the organizing will be served in the long-term by showing someone else how to do things instead of doing them oneself. 

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