"we don't want to create an us-and-them mentality with management"
Hey, dipshit, it IS us versus them! WE didn't make it that way!
Fucking politically illiterate libs. Literally think the fucking company is a family.
"we don't want to create an us-and-them mentality with management"
Hey, dipshit, it IS us versus them! WE didn't make it that way!
Fucking politically illiterate libs. Literally think the fucking company is a family.
They literally want to just talk to HR.
Imagine fighting a war and saying you want to commit your soldiers to the place where the enemy has its strongest fortifications.
This group needs inoculation. Ideally it would've happened earlier but we never get ideal conditions, eh?
A meeting to share stories of people who fought and won in similar workplaces would be good. And maybe where they failed due to trying to "work with management".
If you don't have labor buds that could come in and share these stories from their own experience, see if there are active IWW or EWOC groups locally.
This this this. Regular meetings too, if that’s not already happening. These folks need to be taught the playbook so they can recognize it when it starts rolling out. By the sounds of it, it won’t be long, so this is super time sensitive.
Very important. Especially liberal friends I know who prepared for work place action did fail when they weren't inoculated (cause they didn't present their demands or didn't push through).
Funny enough those were and often are those that didn't want talk about inoculation, since it was so "hostile" and their boss is "nicer than those other bosses".
Also having an active vote in which people have to actively say yes for action is sometimes helpful, to have this collective decision baseline.
That said I had some success with "stress tests", to gauge what people were willing to do. The term I didn't know till recently, but basically seeing who does stuff and how they do it.
Yes, stress tests, i.e. structure tests, are also a great idea. See who shows up to meetings. See who volunteers to do actual things. The real structure test is the first real action, of course, which should be not just a list of demands but a walkout or similar.
:agony-minion: man as someone who does some organising as well I just don’t know how to overcome the level of false consciousness we’re dealing with. I’m almost getting kinda blackpilled honestly.
I know some folks who are like encyclopedic in terms of being able to remember some relevant organizing story for every single situation. It involves a lot of homework and I’ve always been shit at homework, unfortunately. Makes educating folks really difficult.
Yeh I know a few union organisers who really know their stuff, but that often adds a new battle of “rare good union organiser versus their own shitty union”
Damn straight. Most unions I’ve been in rely almost entirely on cultural attitudes to enforce basic solidarity norms. The agitation and education aspects are nonexistent and left up to being passed down by union leadership on a need-to-know basis after someone has a bad experience with management.
Although I’m lowkey in love with my current union despite the liberal leadership. Good unions do exist in the US, still. But the turnover rates at their shops are super low, so go figure they’re hard to get into.
Remind them that HR only exists to protect the company from its employees