wobbly_noob [comrade/them]
How is it going so far?
I’m simultaneously more empowered/excited than I’ve ever been at work and also scared shitless. So pretty good. Incompetence by management has made a lot of the startup easy
From your username, I’m assuming you were able to access some support from the IWW? If so, how has that been? If not, why do you think they’ve been unable to help you?
Yes! They’ve been awesome. Real quick response, very supportive, and my contact seems decently radical. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my chapter has a decent fund in case we get retaliated against. And I’m also coordinating with an industry-specific union. My IWW rep said it’s common for us to dual-card and that, if the business unions fall through in terms of supporting their workers, the IWW will fill in the gaps. Business unions will sometimes tend to be less radical and more open to making concessions. My rep said, “it may take decades, but if what you want is to buy the company and make it into a worker coop, we can set up a campaign for that”.
One thing I remember being told that was important for unionizing was getting a list of employees, phone numbers/addresses, and figuring out if people are cool with unionizing, neutral, or outright hostile.
The whole “incompetent management” thing has made getting the employee list real easy. Still working on getting the sentiment analysis done.
If you’ve been doing that, how has covid and the pandemic affected that effort? I’m assuming not a lot because all the restrictions being more or less lifted, but I was still curious if that’s been hard to do.
Our office is all remote, so the big challenge is setting up pretenses for us to speak on less formal platforms where management doesn’t have admin access to monitor everything we say. Luckily, people have been down for an informal happy hour so far and I had one group join a local gaming Discord. It may be silly, but I think a lot of silly things have the potential to become serious as time goes on
do you have an organizing committee that meets regularly already or are you building up to that?
My supporting IWW chapter meets regularly, but is too far away physically for me to attend so far. Working on possibly starting up regular meetings for us.
what % of the company workers have you already done one on ones with?
When I say I just started, I mean I’m less than a month in. So less than 10%
what’s the level of support for the union you have had so far?
I’ve started with a group of people who know each other from outside work, are younger, and are more left-leaning, so support of collective action so far has been nearly universal, but I expect that will drop drastically as this continues.
are you close to getting a representative survey of the list of your most urgent demands?
Not yet
what kind of retaliation are you expecting and how are you preparing for it?
Management has a major impulsivity streak as well as a few more savvy people. So it’s kind of hard to pin down because it depends on who has the reigns. We have some messaging and narratives we’re looking at running with and, whether their retaliation is effective or not, I’m expecting it to be aggressive
Thank you. I’d seen it as the “right thing” to do for a while, but I didn’t actually decide to do it until after I’d already decided to quit due to mismanagement. Someone told me to unionize on my way out the door and it turns out this place is ripe for some power struggle. Now it looks like I’m sticking around.
I appreciate the advice. We’ve had 5 resignations in the past week so I hadn’t even thought about new hires yet. I told my IWW contact to watch out for me overworking because I will absolutely hyperfocus and burn out if I don’t consciously try not to. I want this to be a marathon, but I absolutely have sprinter’s energy at the moment.
