Organizing Guide

• Organizing Guide by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a joint project by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the United Electrical Workers (UE)
  • Includes guides on how to: identify organic workplace leaders; do workplace mapping; have structured organizing conversations; create escalation and campaign arcs; organize public actions and engage with the boss; and inoculate against boss opposition.

Organizing Handouts

• Organizing handouts from Secrets of a Successful Organizer at Labor Notes (including how to have a structured organizing conversation or one-on-one).
  • Follow up with Alyssa Basttistoni’s “Spadework,” an autobiographical essay focused on relational organizing through one-on-ones

Five Basics of Organizing

Communications Workers of America (CWA)’s Five Basics of Organizing

• No one joins unless individually approached and asked to join.
• The more people who are asked to join — the more who will join.
• You cannot get thousands of workers to join the union unless you have thousands asking.
• You cannot get thousands asking people to join without strong organizing committees.
• You cannot have strong functioning organizing committees unless people are meeting regularly, making plans, working with lists, doing charts, taking assignments and reporting.

Phases of a Pressure Campaign

Probe

• Write a rap. Don’t wing it!
• Talk to members.
• Focus on listening.
• Map worksites.
• Build accurate lists.

Identify Issue(s)

• Are the issues deeply and widely felt?
• Is it winnable?
• Who is the decision maker?
• What is the strategy to move the decision maker?
• Watch out for the “action of the week” trap. Have a plan to escalate and win!

Leader Identification/Recruitment

• Who are the real campus, member/ student leaders?
• Are there cliques?
• In order to recruit leaders, you will need to accurately identify them, the issue they are agitated about, and have a clear plan to win.
• Write a rap!

Launch

• How do you go public with your demands?
• How does the launch feel powerful to the members and affect the target?
• Have a plan to debrief and review next steps.

Escalation

• Plan a series of actions. Each action must be bigger and more impactful than the last.
• Does the target care about what we’re doing?

Crisis

• Firing on all cylinders!
• The target feels pressure from multiple angles at the same time!

Win

• How does winning feel powerful to members?
• How do other members find out about the win?

Advice to Rookie Organizers

SEIU1199 Advice to Rookie Organizers (1985)

1. Get close to the workers, stay close to the workers.
2. Tell workers it’s their movement/union, and then behave that way.
3. Don’t do for workers what they can do.
4. The union is not a fee for service; it is the collective experience of workers in struggle.
5. The union’s function is to assist workers in making a positive change in their lives.
6. Workers are made of clay, not glass.
7. Don’t be afraid to ask workers to build their own union.
8. Don’t be afraid to challenge them when they don’t.
9. Don’t spend your time organizing workers who are already organizing themselves, go to the biggest worst.
10. The working class builds cells for its own defense: identify them and recruit their leaders.
11. Anger is there before you are: channel it, don’t defuse it.
12. Channeled anger builds a fighting organization.
13. Workers know the risks, don’t lie to them.
14. Every worker is showtime: communicate energy, excitement, urgency and confidence.
15. There is enough oppression in workers’ lives not to be oppressed by organizers.
16. Organizers talk too much. Most of what you say is forgotten.
17. Communicate to workers that there is no salvation beyond their own power.
18. Workers united can beat the boss. You have to believe that and so do they.
19. Don’t underestimate the workers.
20. We lose when we don’t put workers into struggle.

Foster’s “Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry”

William Z. Foster’s pamphlet “Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry” (1936) on how to organize steel workers (though applicable to all workers)

1. The workers cannot be organized by agitation alone; it requires thorough organization work to unionize them.
2. The work must be coordinated and planned—per organizer, per locality, per day, per week, etc.
3. Not mechanical blueprint tactics, but flexibility. The degree to which the proposals below can be applied depends on local conditions; the workers’ mood and strength of organization, the attitude of the bosses and government towards the campaign, etc.
4. The organization work must be carried out upon the basis of an energetic drive, not spontaneously and spasmodically, or merely a slow, gradual growth; sags in activity and loss of momentum are very dangerous in the drive by weakening the confidence of workers.
5. A strong discipline should prevail all through the campaign, but each unit must develop a healthy initiative, based on a vigorous trade union democracy.
6. A central aim must always be to draw the largest possible masses into direct participation in all the vital activities of the union:  membership recruitment, formulation of demands, union elections, petitions, pledge votes, strike votes, strike organization, etc. This gives them a feeling that the union is actually their movement.
7. Self-criticism at all times is absolutely indispensable to the working out of proper tactics.
8. High morale among the organizers and enthusiasm and confidence among the workers are indispensable conditions to the success of the work.
9. Organizers do not know how to organize by instinct, but must be carefully taught.
10. Every organizer and unit in the campaign must be activated at all times. The whole organizing force should move forward as one machine to the accomplishment of its goal of building the union.
11. Hard work and sobriety are basic essentials for success. Chair-warmers and irresponsibles should be made to feel unwelcome in the organizing crew.
12. Every step taken in the campaign must have as its central purpose the direct recruitment of new members. The main slogan is: “Join the Union.”