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Episode 133 – Organizing For Power with Marianne Garneau
Marianne Garneau is a labor educator and organizer with the historic IWW, Industrial Workers of the World. She's the publisher of the website Organizing.Work.
According to Marianne, real-life examples of workers taking successful action anywhere, inspires, empowers and emboldens workers everywhere. The crucial tactic our labor movement currently lacks is the ability to exercise the muscle of collective action, acting in an organized, harmonious fashion, building coordinated disruption that defies authority, while spreading trust, preparedness and the very habit of defiance.
Labor has undergone enormous changes from the days of worker-powered assembly lines and shop floors, when workers could engage in day-to-day refusals. One tactic was "whistle bargaining." The shop steward would blow a whistle, bringing production to a halt. The workers formed a circle around the foreman and voiced their grievances. Another blow of the whistle could send everyone back to work.
Steve recounts the "work to rule" he engaged in as a member of CWA. By fastidiously following every regulation, every safety procedure, the workforce was able to slow things down to a crawl.
Today labor has been reorganized and decentralized, so strategy must adapt to modern conditions. It all comes down to workers understanding the workflow and the ways the employer depends on them.
The need for workers to communicate is as essential as ever. The means of communication are corporate-owned and can be heavily monitored and censored, again requiring creative adaptation. Marianne describes a tactic used by workers for a food delivery service in Canada. They couldn't contact each other through the app, so they organized the old-fashioned way, person-to-person, identifying each other by company logo and approaching the vehicles.
Marianne and Steve talk about the history of organized labor and the significance of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
…a lot of people in the left and in the labor movement still look back on that as a triumph for labor, which in some ways it was. But it was also meant to really regulate and tame the labor movement.
For a movement to build capacity, it must come from the bottom up. To survive, it needs to grow roots, so it is never dependent on individual leaders. Real power comes from mass collective action.
Marianne Garneau is an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor educator, and the publisher of Organizing Work (organizing.work)
@OrganizingWork on Twitter
Macro N Cheese – Episode 133
Organizing for Power with Marianne Garneau
[00:00:04.840] – Marianne Garneau [Intro/music]
All these restaurant employers are complaining that they can't hire people. And so what do they do? They're actually bidding up their wages or they're just shutting down and saying, "Poor me cause nobody wants to work," or what have you. But it shows that there's that dependency, right? They need those workers.
When they put in self-checkout kiosks at the grocery store or at the drugstore, that hasn't actually eliminated human labor. They've just made you the laborer, right? Like you, the consumer are now bagging your groceries. It's still actually a human being doing the work. You're just doing it for free.
[00:01:35.220] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]
Now, let's see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here's another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.
[00:01:43.050] – Steve Grumbine
All right, everybody. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. It's another episode this week. And rather than looking at history of revolutions and macroeconomic policy, today we're going to talk about something a little different – building and organizing and sustaining power, how to build power and how to keep it. And so I brought Garneau, who's an organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor educator, and the publisher of Organizing Work. And so, Marianne, thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:02:19.410] – Marianne Garneau
Thanks for having me.
[00:02:20.940] – Grumbine
Absolutely. I will digress. I'm going to talk a little bit about a revolution and some other things momentarily. Just to kind of tee us up. I've been covering the Haitian Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the American Revolution, and different organizing tactics that Labor has tried to do, and the history of labor.
One thing that we rarely talk about is how do we build sustainable power? Every one of these revolutions, they always had power for just a moment. And in the wings was a counter-revolutionary force ready to snatch it all right back from them. All the gains they had snatched 'em right back. And that's the way my experience has been with labor unions as well.
You gained something this bargaining period, and then next one feeling like it's Groundhog Day and they're coming back to the same things you just won last time. There's always a counterforce ready to take back what you gained.
And so sustaining power seems to be elusive. It's definitely been elusive in the progressive movement, politically speaking, and it seems to be elusive in the labor market as well as we have watched labor laws and protections erode consistently over the last 50 to 70 years. Marianne, what is the key to building and sustaining power?
[00:03:38.470] – Garneau
Well, that's a huge question. I think that one thing that's important to realize is that you have to start somewhere. And so I'm always interested in the practicalities of how do you build power on a small scale, but then also how you scale that up. And I think you're right that a lot of times when we look at the present and at history, it feels as though these things happen in these sort of swings and waves that we are not really in control of.
So I am particularly interested in the question of how do we start building power in a way that is stable and predictable and that we know that we can actually develop from. And so the website that I run is called Organizing Work because it's just about the nuts and bolts of what is the best organizing practice in order to build as much power as possible with your coworkers. You're right that there's always some kind of counteroffensive.
And again, it's easy to start to think or feel these things as like just historical swings that we're not in control of. But there's another approach where I think you can start to anticipate that you're going to get a counteroffensive from the boss and then prepare for that. And the best organizing campaigns, for example, are very prepared for that. They have told all of their members, they have told all the workers involved this is what the boss is going to say.
This is what the boss is going to do. And when they've been prepared in that way, it only increases people's resolve and it only makes the campaign stronger. If they haven't been told that, then the first taste they get of the boss's punishment, they start to get disorganized and they start to lose their nerve. So all of these things, I think, are very important strategic questions.
It's interesting because we often see going into macroeconomics momentarily, we see NAIRU and Phillips Curve and some of these other tools that neoliberal powerbrokers at both the Fed and politicians use to discipline labor and to keep labor in a sort of sense of precarity that forces them to accept things that are less than desirable, to say the least.
And so it's the state of precarity that creates wedge issues, the lack of solidarity, if you will, to actually act as a collective body. It seems to me this concept of not being prepared for the counterattack is as obvious at the political level as it is at the labor level, seems to be a lot of parallels with gaining political power and gaining labor power.
Yeah, I think so, and I mean, look, there are constraints based on, let's say, what the prevailing wage is for a particular kind of job. Even if you organize that job, you're not going to be able to say double the wage for the workers at your particular corner of that, the employer that you've taken on, or the workplace you've taken on. There are things that are constraints.
However, basically, I think that you can increase power and you have to sometimes take on an entire industry or you have to build pressure and build power more broadly in order to make significant change. So there are constraints, but a lot of times we are operating in a way where we're not even really paying attention to those constraints and we're just kind of hoping for the best. I'm basically agreeing with what you're saying, but it doesn't mean that it's impossible to act, let's say.
Well, certainly, and in fact, I think that I can speak at least for the purposes of this podcast anyway, that in my opinion, education is key to being able to build any of these things. Folks can't imagine what they can't imagine. And educating people about how the levers work allows them to dream a better dream. And if you can dream it and you can organize around it, you probably can build it.
Dream, but also have a realistic assessment of what you can accomplish, right?
Yes. Labor's in a precarious state. If you look at the way workplaces have been organized or reorganized by employers over the last 50 years, it's very strategically to their advantage. So if 100 years ago, we were working shoulder to shoulder in factories and there were hundreds of workers on the same shift in the exact same space, that's a situation where and this is what Marx used to point out, you've got the possibility for organizing that group of workers, for organizing that class and deploying their power against their bosses.
Nowadays, walk into, let's say, a grocery store. It may have a couple of hundred of employees, but they don't work shoulder to shoulder. They all work completely different shifts. They're scattered throughout. Half of them are nominated supervisors or something like that. So they're sort of divided hierarchically. They're scattered around. And it's a lot harder.
There's a lot less of that shoulder-to-shoulder aspect of work that is what used to make it very ripe for organizing. But that doesn't mean that employers don't depend on those employees. Right? They try to minimize that dependence by, for example, making them casual and making them part-time and having as much as sort of a loose relationship of employment with their workers as possible.
But at the end of the day, they do rely on those workers to come in and to bag groceries and to ring people through and to stock shelves and what have you. And we're seeing that right now, for example, with respect to something like fast food, where all these restaurant employers are complaining that they can't hire people. And so what do they do? They're actually bidding up their wages or they're just shutting down and saying, "Poor me," because nobody wants to work or what have you. But it shows that there's that dependency, right? They need those workers.
Well, let me ask you this because we have a segment of the population that seems obsessed with automation, and for as long as I've been alive and history shows us that I'm pretty sure the wagon wheel maker absolutely despises the steel radial. And I'm pretty sure that the abacus is still hating on the calculator. So with this kind of truism, let's say this bold proclamation of resentment among the displaced, we see that at McDonald's, for example, there are these kiosks where they can place orders.
And typically this is one more modern libertarian right-to-work-minded thing where they are putting this automation above labor. They're assuming that there is no alternative. The robots have destroyed any potential for labor to have value. You organize they'll automate you away. What are your thoughts there? That seems to be a recurring conversation, even if it's overdramatic in terms of its claims.
In broad strokes, I do think that automation is an attempt to discipline labor. And again, even Marx wrote about this 150 years ago. Right? Even more. He was talking about the fact that capitalists, employers, are always trying to look for ways to eliminate their dependency on labor, on their workers. And automation is just another form of that. Where have we seen it?
In the auto industry, for example, on assembly lines, which was one of the most powerfully organized sectors of the American economy for a long time. We've seen it in fast food, especially around the time that there started to be some murmurs of organizing there. And so it is a move against labor. And I also think it's worth noticing that the more we have automated jobs, whenever we automated jobs, it doesn't somehow, let's say, free the other workers up to only work 30 hours a week. Right?
And in general, in society, it doesn't give us any more time. It hasn't made us any wealthier. Instead, wages keep basically falling and we get more and more miserable and overworked as workers. So it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing according to the people who are positive about it. And I do think it's a disciplinary force. But again, all those restaurants, fast food, grocery stores, whatever, that used automation, desperate for workers, we're calling those people heroes during the coronavirus pandemic, rightfully so.
We desperately needed those people to keep working in order to actually be able to have those businesses function. Despite all this automation, you got all these viral images of Burger King's saying we're closed, we don't have enough employees, yada, yada.
Umhum.
The final thing I want to point out about it, too, is when they put in self-checkout kiosks at the grocery store or at the drugstore, that hasn't actually eliminated human labor. They've just made you the laborer. Right? Like you, the consumer are now bagging your groceries. It's still actually a human being doing the work. You're just doing it for free.
Yes. It's pretty slick, isn't it, in the worst possible diabolical sense.
So in this automated world, how does one overcome that in terms of building power as a labor force? Let's look at that because I think that is germane to the current environment as we assess what sectors could even make an impact at a much larger level with that mindset of an injury to one is an injury to all.
So I don't think of these things in terms of mindset, and I don't think of them in terms of consciousness. A lot of people on the left do, and a lot of them talk that way and they think that we need to breathe the spirit of socialism or solidarity or what have you into people in general. And then suddenly they'll start to organize or join unions again or display working-class power.
I don't believe that at all. I think it's basically a fairy tale. I think that what happens is people show up to work. They have very specific interests, objectives, fears. Those are pretty common across people, but it's basically like they want a decent wage so that they can take care of themselves and their families. They want to be treated with the minimum respect at work.
They want some control over the work process. And that, I think, is the thing to tap into. So I don't think you convince people ideologically first and then sort of work on the nuts and bolts second. I think the nuts and bolts actually comes first. And in terms of what we can do as a class to build our power right now, wherever you see that dependency that employers have on their employees, which is basically everywhere, as we were just describing, that's leverage.
So normally the way that we operate when we go into work is that we obey commands. We work as organized basically from the top down. We follow orders, we comply. We don't spend a lot of time talking with our coworkers and certainly not exerting collective power with our coworkers to assert what we want and how we think things should be. And the biggest hump to get over is developing that one person to another, one coworker to another, willingness to talk about what work is like and how it affects you, and then what you're willing to do about it.
So what I'm hearing you say, and I think this is an important distinction. If we use language that is germane to their existence, to their daily work, their survival, the conditions that they live in, as opposed to starting with an ideological lecture and lesson plans, so to speak, that that is a stronger organizing tool than trying to teach people the history of labor and all the theory behind it.
I just think on a practical level, so I think everybody agrees, first of all, that most people are busy, they're stressed, they're overworked, they've got several responsibilities. And one of the biggest complaints you'll hear people talk about is nobody has time to join my left organization or read Modern Monetary Theory or study revolutions, right?
People are distracted. They're too bogged down with their everyday lives, whatever. So to me, it just seems like the inroad to that is taking on the conditions of their everyday lives, which I think have a ton of political significance. We don't think of this as political, but the fact that you show up to work every day and get told what to do that has political significance.
If you can develop the capacity with your coworkers to turn the tables a bit and tilt the power a bit towards yourselves and against the bosses and say, "Actually, we want X. We want Y." I think that's very significant. And I think that that's the kind of thing that does ultimately empower people and change their consciousness and develop to bigger and broader struggles – that sense of empowerment in a place where we usually have none. And I say that as somebody who's seen it happen a lot. Right.
It may be fulfilling the type of work that you actually do, but it's generally speaking, not exactly an empowering experience, at least for the vast majority of us. If you can turn that into an empowering experience, which is entirely a matter of learning to function in lockstep with your coworkers against the employer that is genuinely transformative and that, of course, people have time for because that's their lives.
Right. So give me some examples of some of the successes that you've seen.
So, for example, I was helping out an organizing campaign, and at one point we were having a meeting and the workers were going around introducing themselves and they were talking about how long they've been working at this workplace. And a lot of people had said, "Oh, I'm proud to work here," so on and so forth. And this one worker said, "I actually am not proud to work here. It's not someplace I thought I would end up working. To me, it felt kind of like settling or leveling down.
But since we started this organizing campaign, actually I leave my work uniform on after I leave work so that people can see that I work at this place, because now that they know that we're unionizing, I'm so proud of what we're doing here." So that's just an example of the transformative that I've seen this have. But talk to any worker who's part of any organizing campaign, especially if they have succeeded in forming a union and wresting some concessions from the employer, they're extraordinarily proud of that.
It's been a while since we've seen a real powerful labor movement, and I think there's a very small percentage of people, both private sector and even public sector, public's a little bit more than the private but very low union levels right now. What do you think is a way of sparking that back to life?
I think we have to start undertaking it in a completely different way. I think that the main problem is that the labor movement was disciplined into acting in a way that was very tame and very not militant. So I'm actually dating this back to the Labor Relations Act of 1935 in the US, which is celebrated because it gave workers the right to unionize and it required that employers recognize them and bargain with them.
So in some ways, this is the beginning of unionism as we know it. And it was the government sanctifying that and saying from now on we're going to have a clear path for your workers to form a union and to be able to negotiate with their employers. And we as the government will oversee that process and make sure that it happens.
However, there was certainly a labor movement before that, and that labor movement looked like mostly going on strike against an employer to basically demand some kind of negotiation over wages or recognition, loosely speaking. So we are the union and you're going to bargain with us and then going on strike over particular demands, things like wages, safety, working conditions, what have you.
And what the Labor Relations Act did was say we'll have a process for recognition and for bargaining, but it's not going to look like that. So instead of these big strikes and disruptions to the economy, we're going to supervise a process that is very rationalized where you have to sit down at a table and exchange proposals back and forth where you have a formal secret ballot election to determine majority support for the union.
And again, a lot of people in the left and in the labor movement still look back on that as a triumph for labor, which in some ways it was. But it was also meant to really regulate and tame the labor movement. The title of the act itself was like an act to diminish the causes of economic disruption or something like that. I forget that offhand.
How can we prevent strikes is like Smokey the Bear – Only you can prevent strikes.
Exactly. It was very explicit. And so for a while, you still had a militant labor movement because it was used to acting in that way and you still had strikes and sit down strikes. In fact, you had a lot of strikes, for example, during the Second World War, when the union bureaucracy overall foreswore the strike weapon, saying we're at war.
The more important thing is the military effort. We pledge not to have our members go on strike. And yet you still did actually have a lot of strikes and labor disruptions because predictably, employers just immediately took advantage of that. They had profits guaranteed by the government that they would squeeze the workers even more, etc. So for a while, you had a labor movement that was still used to acting like on their feet.
But over decades that eroded. And you had a labor movement that, after a couple of generations was not used to acting that way. Plus, there were many legal decisions that happened to really reinforce the idea that we shouldn't have economic disruption. So, for example, you can be legally, permanently replaced by what are called scab workers if you do go on strike. There's a lot of constraints on when and how and where you can strike.
We've had all kinds of legal decisions undermining the labor movement and labor union membership and that kind of thing. Right. But once they had created a labor movement that was very tame and that mostly operated at the bargaining table, at the boardroom table, of course, it was less powerful and it was easier to attack as we were talking at the beginning of the podcast in terms of that assault, that counteroffensive, it was very easy to go on the offensive against labor because it had lost its ability to fight on its feet.
And once all you have as a negotiating partner at the boardroom table and they have no leverage, then of course it's easy to beat them back. So I don't think that these processes are mysterious. The power of the labor movement was taken away, kind of like you sawing at the legs of the table, and then at some point, you just kick the table over.
And in order to get back to that, it's not going to be a matter of playing better by the rules of the existing labor relations framework, like having to win a majority election in a certain way while the employers are allowed to run around and union bust among the employees and then sitting down nicely and bargain for a contract. I think we're going to have to build power in a completely different way and a lot more like what we used to.
Well, what a great segue to my next question. In the new framework, they've made us domesticated workers. Here you. Come sit at my table. You're out of your element. You're in my element. Come sit down and let us tell you how it's going to be kind of thing.
And now you're saying we've celebrated these victories of getting to the table when in fact, getting to the table was basically just putting a tether around our neck and keeping us right where we were actually kind of diminishing our power. So what is the next step now that you've identified that which is clearly not a win based on that? Where do we go from there?
I think we have to refine our ability to deploy the leverage that we have. So at the end of the day, that means, of course, workers learning how to exert control over work and exert refusals with respect to work. And I think a key part of that that often gets overlooked, even among people who want to revive the labor movement, is the way that workers used to actually engage in a lot of disruptive activity right on the job.
So they didn't used to just walk out on strike and nowadays walk out on strike at the end of the expiration of a contract. So, every three or four or five years at a time, the employer can predict, the fact that you're still allowed to strike, which many public sector workers aren't, so they've become these very intermittent and predictable events.
Instead, workers used to actually just engage in a lot of day-to-day refusal, day-to-day disruption. One thing I heard it described as is whistle bargaining, where as soon as something was happening on the production line that workers didn't like, their shop steward would blow the whistle. The entire line would shut down. They'd all basically form a circle around the foreman and tell the foreman, this is what we want or this is what we don't like or whatever.
The foreman would then grant that to get the production line up and running again, and then the steward would blow his whistle and everybody would go back to work once they were satisfied with the solution. That is something that you would never see today. That is completely alien to the labor movement and even to the imagination of most people who want to revive the labor movement.
So I think that it's a matter of building that back up. Now how do you do that? That's, of course, a huge question. But I think that it's a practice that existing unions, for example, should turn towards. And this is the kind of education I try to put out there through the projects that I'm involved in and so on. But it would take a different orientation in the labor movement in general.
I used to be part of CWA Local 2222 in Virginia. At the time, it was CMP Bell Atlantic Company, dating myself here, and we would often call into the union hotline and it'd be like local 2222. We're going to work to rule, work to rule. And so we would bring things to a crawl. We made sure every single safety measure was taken.
We had our glasses on. We made sure our wheel [inaudible 00:25:51] were out; all stuff that they say they want you to do. But if you do, you'll end up way slow in the productivity. And so the bosses started picking up. So they come out to visit us and there we would be. Well, hold on. We got to get our 188 test set, make sure the pole's not hot and they'd just sit there with their hands on their hips because they were once union, too, and they know exactly what we're doing.
That was a different world. That was phone company. And we were all very required because if a hospital didn't have phones, there was some ramifications to us not showing up. A lot of the work out there is so decentralized and I'm interested in what kind of tactics a distributed, decentralized type organization might be able to do to get something like a work to rule. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on that?
So first of all, work to rule in this story you told wonderful example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. As for different modern kinds of workplaces which have been reorganized to the employer's advantage so that workers are more disconnected and so on, I still have seen it. So one story that I published was about a university that functions entirely at distance learning, like remote learning, which a lot of us ended up doing during the pandemic, but that's how they were organized and structured in the first place.
And so the workforce is technically very widely distributed around the province. This is in Canada and they don't work side by side. And so it takes some effort to coordinate all of them in order to act together. And yet they've been able to actually do that. And they organized. They got people to, first of all, basically rally around a particular demand or resist the employer on X, Y, Z. They use tactics from having some kind of picket or rally at the headquarters, I think.
Trying to remember the details, whatever other confrontation they engaged in, they just figured out a way to engage in it. And whenever I talked to workers and I talked to workers and like so many different kinds of workplaces. Recently, it was firefighters who again are spread all over an area and always on alert and on an emergency basis. I always ask them, what leverage do you have? What does work look like? What does workflow look like?
Because that's not a question that can be answered from the outside or in the abstract. There's no set way of tactics. It has to do with the way that work is organized. I have also spoken to coworkers who I think what they did was they would go on 15-minute breaks simultaneously and basically sort of a mini-strike or slow down. And they won.
They were successful in winning a raise and a bonus during the coronavirus pandemic. I publish these stories, and then I forget the details because my mind is a sieve. But I've seen that leverage deployed in every kind of workplace as the bottom line. It comes down to workers knowing the way that the work flows and the ways that the employer depends on them.
So in the case of some workers, like, let's say, for example, social workers who don't want to strike against the populations that they serve because they genuinely believe in the work and they care for those people. They also have to do a lot of paperwork.
And if you don't do that paperwork, the employer gets really frazzled because that is how they ultimately get paid through Medicare, what have you. Right. So you could still meet with the client and serve the client, but strike the paperwork at least temporarily, in order to put some fire under some demand. And that's huge leverage toward the employer.
Yeah, absolutely.
[00:29:43.240] – Intermission
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So, I'm being honest here, I'm a project manager by trade. And so every project I work on, typically there's some sort of a process improvement that goes with it, some sort of process development training.
And so that means my team will love me for saying this, that we have to focus on inputs and outputs and tools, and if you can understand where these different parts of the work go, how to gain leverage by understanding the process in which you work, not just one little area, but being able to see the end to end, it allows different groups to, in fact, take direct action and organize around slowing those things down to take the power back. Is that a fair statement?
Absolutely. The more you know about the process, the more you're going to be able to find places to apply power, for sure.
So let's go down the next route. Folks like Sara Nelson, who's become very political and getting involved in the Biden administration and trying to help people realize that there's no such thing as an illegal strike, but we know that they have taken great pains to make a lot of laws blocking real organized labor from executing any of its value. So with that in mind, the work to rule thing is a real game changer. How would we take that mindset beyond just that one local and make it contagious?
It does seem as though the examples in real life of workers taking action and especially obviously if they're successful, really do inspire other groups of workers. I think that does have a significant effect. It has, I guess, kind of an inspirational and educational effect. If you see that happening, especially in your industry or maybe nearby, it does empower and embolden people.
I think the other important piece of empowering people and you need a lot of empowerment and emboldening if you're going to, for example, defy a law against striking, which I work under as a public sector worker in New York State, I'm not supposed to strike. In order to embolden people to do that, you need to get them basically exercising the muscle of collective action.
And so I do think there's value in the work to rule type thing in building lower level disruption, because the thing that people are not used to doing is acting in concert with their coworkers, especially in a way that defies authority or that is risky, and that ultimately comes down to building up relationships of trust and building preparedness and the habit of that defiance.
And it's nice to say from above and I would say things like this, too, there's no such thing as an illegal strike. Workers in any sector should strike if they want to strike. But getting people to actually do that is the more difficult problem. And I think when people do not have a practice of taking action, it's especially hard to convince them to do so.
And also, at that point, the labor leaders there are constrained where they simply can't call for a strike, for example. They can't actually encourage tactics that are expressly forbidden because the leverage that the state has in forbidding that is going after those union officers and putting them in jail as has happened, or fining the union out of existence as has happened. Right.
So it is going to have to be something that actually comes from below. So how you develop that from below, I think it has to do with building up that capacity from the ground up and also the inspirational examples of workers around you. Yeah. We're just not near that yet. Right. None of this is going to happen in the blink of an eye. But I do think it's important to kind of reorient our thinking about worker power and union practice so that we can begin to inch towards there.
I think you bring up a really good point and I'm going to counter it ever so slightly. Going back to a little pamphlet that Vladimir Lenin wrote called What is to Be Done? And he talked about communication, one of the most important things about the way that they organized in the early 1900s, they had a lot of ability to communicate.
And mind you, the technology obviously was not there that we have today, but they had the means to communicate with one another. They had the union hall down the road, so to speak. They could meet illicitly among each other. With the current decentralization and folks relying on instant messenger and social media and things like that, how do you envision the communication networks of today trying to take some inspiration from the messaging of old and leverage that?
So much corporate surveillance over what passes through IT, emails are monitored, instant messages are saved. I'm curious, how might that communication path look in an environment especially where people aren't sitting there in the same room together, they don't go to the same water cooler, they don't go to the same bar after work. A lot of the same things that even 20 years ago are no longer in existence with telework. How do you see that possibly play out?
It's funny because we are more connected and communicative than ever before. I am one of those people who spends way too much time on my phone, basically, a lot of it passively communicating with others, right. Reading social media and whatnot, and sometimes broadcasting messages of my own. So we're very connected.
But on the other hand, you're right that all of those methods of communication are basically privately owned and there are explicit mechanisms of censorship that are kicking in, let alone surveillance and what have you. Let me answer this by talking about my advice within an organizing campaign, which is obviously you try to keep your cards as close to the vest for as long as possible, whether you're just turning people on to the union and getting them part of a union effort or whether you are making plans to take action, which is the way that I advise campaigns, it's very action-centered.
And so you try not to let your plans leak. However, ultimately, you should be building up power and solidarity and trust in a way that isn't going to be felled by one particular person leaking to the boss what the plan is or the fact that there's a union effort going on or what have you. Because first of all, those leaks do happen. And I think that in the modern day and age, we should basically assume that our privacy is compromised and that eventually, whether it's just a hacker or a government surveillance or whatever, that's entirely a possibility.
But I don't think that our building of power should stand or fall on the basis of whether or not there is such a leak. If you're ultimately just developing trust and the capacity for action between people, it's upsetting and a bit demoralizing when that gets leaked to the other side. But at the same time, that shouldn't be enough to completely undermine people's willingness and ability to take action together.
I think back to Cypher from the Matrix and Cypher got pulled out of the Matrix and saw what a gloomy world it was and then dimed on the rest of the gang back to the suits and got reinserted in the Matrix so he can enjoy his steak even though he knew it wasn't steak. And you think of the scab and the person that is that counterrevolutionary force, that counter labor force that's always hiding in the shadows.
And you look at Fred Hampton. He had people snitching on him constantly as well. Every step along the way, I think we kind of have to accept the fact that we are going to always have Judas in our midst. And so, as I think to myself how far labor has gone and you nailed it. All these supposed wins, all they did was tame labor, mitigate Labor's bite.
And there may be some good, everything's got two sides to that dialectical perspective, but the flip side to that is in this case, it's dulled the tip of the spear. So I wonder if from a political perspective, how you even get the message to one another. When we started real progressives back in 2015, we were reaching approximately 30 million people a month.
And then the powers that be realized, oh, my goodness, these leftist groups are starting to organize using our tools and they have huge audiences and they're able to mobilize really quickly. And so they closed down to where we were reaching maybe five million a month. So that knife slice is pretty deep. So much of our effectiveness is tied to the whims of these groups, as you stated. I'm interested in understanding how you start the first step without having any good way of getting that communication path.
So this is the thing about depending crucially on an entity that is ultimately private and as a private entity, it can do whatever it wants. It can shut down your traffic flow for reasons of disagreeing with your political content or it can shut down your flow for reasons of feeling like they would benefit better by whether something having to do with their ad revenue, I don't know.
I don't work in that world. But if that's a critical piece of your infrastructure, then, yeah, that's extremely frustrating because they can do things like that. I think that when it comes to the labor movement, one thing I would say, going back to sort of the beginning of what you were talking about with Fred Hampton and with the way that people get attacked.
I think the extent to which the labor movement is going to genuinely build power and survive is going to depend on how bottom up grassroots it is and not dependent it is on individual leaders, whether those are the individual elected officials within a union or whether those are staff or whether those are political party luminaries or individual politicians.
I think the only real power and leverage there comes from mass collective action. And that does make you less vulnerable to, let's say, an individual person being targeted and brought down or an individual league or an individual relationship being ruined or what have you. I think that in a lot of ways, what happens in the labor movement and what strength and capacity looks like is different from the online world that most of us also live in in that in the online world.
There's something like virality, right, where something can be very, very big and get very big very quickly. I think in the labor world, it's very difficult to make things big and certainly in a sustained way, which I know is the theme for this particular episode, right, in a sustained and powerful way that can resist setbacks. It's hard to accomplish that without really genuine building worker-to-worker solidarity of capacity, of a sense of strength, of a willingness to take action and so on and so forth.
So the stronger you build things up in the basics, the more it'll be able to withstand pressures. And there are some differences, I think, between what happens in that world versus what happens in the online world. We're all at the mercy of corporations.
Yeah. Absolutely. I know that various people have tried to create private communication paths, private networks and to varying degrees have had moments of success, but I've not seen and I want to, I have not seen any successful communication systems out there right now. Honest to goodness, I do worry because one of the hardest things to do, going back to the earlier part of this is realizing that people are stressed, they're exhausted, their lives are difficult intentionally.
They've been disciplined by this neoliberal world we're in. And the imbalance, if you will, between capital and labor is at an all-time fever pitch. So with that in mind, having to create a complex system for communication to sustain the power that people build to be able to have that apparatus seems kind of core to being able to move forward, even the more grassroots.
Again, I keep coming back to a lot of the business places. Many of the people that are on the same team may never even see each other other than a Zoom call. I am very hung up on that communication network cause it seems like, probably the most important way of building and communicating, even grassroots up versus a top-down approach, I just don't see the worker ants being able to pull that off under the stress and precarity of their lives today.
I want to though. This is not a pushback. This is more of a hand-wringing moment here for me. How do we get to that? Is that beyond the scope of this conversation or is that something that needs to really be considered – is that communication tool?
So there are a lot of workers who are scattered and distributed, especially with the way that the pandemic has transformed work. My husband, for example, his employer just got rid of his office entirely. And now everybody works from home indefinitely, forever. So that absolutely has changed work. Having said that, there are also a lot of workplaces, especially, I think, lower-wage earners that do happen in person.
But even a lot of low-wage work has been reorganized in that way, and we can think of, for example, app-based work where people drive for Lyft or Uber or they deliver restaurant meals or groceries or what have you. And yet we've seen organizing efforts among those workers. And from my observation, I would say that the less successful of those efforts relied on communications networks and relied on things like buzz and social media and putting the idea out there and seeing who would join.
Well, OK.
The more successful among them, there's one that I published a story about where it was these food delivery couriers to deliver restaurant food to your house. It was called Foodora. Some places have this like [inaudible 00:45:43] seamless or whatever. Right. And this is in Toronto in Canada. And they really did go worker by worker and have conversations with them and collect their contact information.
So there was zero way of doing this through the app. The employer there had succeeded in completely scattering and decentralizing the workforce. There was no directory. There was no way of knowing who your coworkers were. So they would go to trendy restaurants and look for these delivery drivers waiting in the vestibule.
They would go to certain neighborhoods, certain parking lots, certain places where they thought they could find people and they perfected a 30-second organizing conversation, which had the goal of just at least collecting that person's contact information so that you could then have a bit more of a proper conversation with them about organizing and joining the union afterwards.
They would knock on people's windows at a red light. They would spot cyclists because there's both car drivers and bicycle riders. They would spot people wearing the telltale neon vest or whatever it was, or carrying the telltale messenger bag and have a conversation with them. And so amazingly, they applied very old school face-to-face communication efforts in order to build this union out.
So there are ways of engaging in old school organizing methods, even in the most unconventional of workplaces. And those methods seem to be the most successful because if your willingness to take risky action against your employer is ultimately going to be a function of how much you trust your coworkers to do that action also, to walk out also, then there is no shortcutting building that relationship through some face-to-face interactions.
If sometimes that has to happen through like an actual phone call because you literally don't work in the same geographical space, then so be it. But it's human-to-human connection that's ultimately going to build that kind of solidarity.
Right. And anecdotally, it's humorous. I watched the movie Stripes the other day. I don't know why.
With Bill Murray?
Yes, the old Bill Murray movie and he and Harold Ramis were reluctantly signing up for the military and Bill Murray wanted to get out. "Who went out of the base last night?" And it was those two, right? They did it. And sure enough, Bill Murray faked like he was going to step forward and Harold Ramis went ahead and stepped forward with him.
Bill Murray stood still. And I think of that when I think of we've been Ayn Rand into the mud here with this individualism that has swept the nation for a long time. I think part of that is just out of precarity, out of a constant deluge of propaganda about, hey, you, too can be a wonderful human being if you just buy this thing. And if you just invest in this dogecoin, there's always this thing . . . .
. . . .just do it, you'll be better than everybody else. And so that is an immediate solidarity destroyer and it's a huge cultural norm now. And the youth, as much as you see some of them trending toward collectivism, you see a lot of them really going the bootstrap, I can wing this on my own, give me a gig economy and let me be all I can be.
Throw me my UBI and I don't have to be part of anything. And so we have so many fractures in this country, but there's a huge one between collectivism and rugged individualism. I imagine this has been going on for a very long time, but it's picking up steam because government had been largely designed to fail. Even though government itself is benign, it's contingent on the people running it and policies and programs.
So you build good programs, you have good government. You have lack of transparency, you have sneaky stuff going on. And many of these people have gotten so disgusted, not only with unions, kind of the mealy mouthed stuff you have spoken about earlier, but also politicians in general. So all these apparatuses that really are intended to be we the people or we the labor tend to end up having that fracture based on that rugged individualism.
I know this is circling back, but to finish this off, we did talk about this being about gaining and maintaining and sustaining power. With that rugged individualist mindset, having nothing to do with the workplace, how might we combat that as part of sustaining power?
So I think this is a great observation, and I do think that there is massive individualism that permeates all of our society, including the left and including even the labor movement. So, for example, the idea that the labor movement requires the right leaders at the top or something or that what militancy looks like and you really do see these things expressed.
What militancy looks like is one person stepping forward and mouthing off against the boss or leading the way or being the lone militant radical, and then eventually other people follow them. My friend calls it the Norma Rae moment, right, because there's that moment in Norma Rae where Sally Field steps on the table and is like "Union! Who is with me?" This notion that individual leaders . . .
The great man.
Yes, absolutely. And that's very undermining to the labor movement. So individualism takes many forms. And I think you're totally right that this is one of the things that is undermining us and holding us back. And I will also point out that in the context of an organizing campaign, what I have discovered as an organizer through doing this for a number of years, the absolute biggest hurdle to get over is convincing coworkers to talk to each other.
Convincing them to instead of being individually oriented in their employment relationship to their employer, which looks like both obeying but also trying to climb the ladder and sucking up and getting favors and trying to stay out of trouble or individually trying to get away with doing as little work as possible or stealing from the company, whatever it looks like, instead of that individual relationship with the employer, getting them to actually talk to their coworker about work is the hardest thing.
I was talking to a friend recently who's involved in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which is an experimental form of unionism that was created by DSA and United Electrical Workers, that union. And it's basically like they put out a hotline and said to workers, "If you're having trouble, give us a call. We'll walk you through forming a committee," as we say, "in the workplace and taking some action with your coworkers."
And it started during the pandemic for people who weren't being given adequate PPE or what have you. So I was talking to a friend who has been one of the volunteer organizers who has worked on this project, and he said that his back of the napkin estimate is that 80 percent of the workplaces that actually get to the point of forming a committee, in other words, they've got a group of coworkers in the workplace who are meeting, who are talking to each other about the issues, who are formulating plans.
Eighty percent of those, if they get to that point and they actually take action, then they win. And the hardest part is getting to that point. We think of the biggest barrier to developing unions or working class activity as stuff that you've mentioned, including the structure of the economy or the employers counteroffensive, all of that is true. But the biggest barrier is actually the huge hindrances we have to talking to our coworkers and looking left and right and developing a conversation about what our dissatisfactions are in the workplace and what we're going to do about them.
It's been sociologically and psychologically driven out of us. That's the absolute biggest challenge as an organizer is convincing people to do that. Once they do that, the action part is easier. It's the fact that we're so individualized that is actually the biggest problem.
And that's well stated. So let me give you the parting shot here. What would you say to folks that are looking at unions today and the dismal space, as it were, as things are today? And what would you say to them as your final shot to get them interested in taking action?
Honestly, I would probably say to anybody, "Talk to your coworkers. Talk about what your issues are at work. Have more conversations with your coworkers about those issues who you think are affected by them. Ask questions. My advice does not skew in the direction of giant big picture thinking.
My advice skews in the direction of those basic building blocks. I know a lot of people do the big picture thing. I have talked about the big picture, but my advice to people is to think about the place that you work and talk to your coworkers about what your issues are on the job.
And that is fantastic. Sometimes it just takes one person to take a step and want to lionize them. Sometimes it just takes you pick up that 50 million pound gorilla phone and make a phone call to a coworker and get the ball rolling.
And most people have never been approached in that way. So you're right, it does start with that step and that taste of solidarity and camaraderie is a big deal.
Absolutely. Well, Marianne, this was fantastic. I truly enjoyed this. Let us know, where can we find more of your work?
Organizing.work- that's literally the URL.
And that's pretty simple. Organizing.work. There you go, folks. And Marianne, I hope I can have you back on in the future as my brain coalesces around what we talked today. Hopefully we can get back together and talk about even more stuff in this regard. This was fantastic.
Absolutely. This was wonderful.
All right. Great. Folks, my name is Steve Grumbine. This is Marianne Garneau. Thank you so much. We are out of here.
[00:56:08.580] – Ending credits
Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.
Mentioned in the podcast:
Organizing Work by Marianne Garneau
NAIRU
Phillips Curve
Labor Relations Act of 1935
Work to Rule
Sara Nelson
Cypher from the Matrix
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