Tag Archives: organizing conversations

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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Don’t Blame Coworkers and Give Them Space to Say No

[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?

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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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