I think it’s really important that we not make organizing strategy ideological, but evaluate approaches based on the ability to get workers in unions, and scale the results.
In SEIU, we regularly used members.
But sometimes we hired members as staff from outside the workforce in the campaign. Other times we had member volunteers from outside the campaign’s workforce, and other times we had members within the workforce being organized significantly lead the campaign with minimal staff support.
I learned in my organizing career that there are many many viable organizing strategies on paper some based on experience, and some based on ideology. We tried most of them. But in the end, the question we asked was which strategies brought workers into the union and changed their lives.
That should be the primary ideology for evaluating campaigns, bringing workers into the union and changing their lives.
In the early part of the 21st century SEIU organized: 2001 79,821 workers; 2002 132,759 workers; 2003 62,121; 2004 66,993; 2005 182,466; 2006 30,951
To do that we spent from 2002 on between $170,000,000 and $200,000,000 a year on organizing.
We probably tried dozens of strategies that failed, in some cases for nearly a decade like home care workers, but our strategic imperative was to bring low wage service workers into unions, and we tried anything and everything to find the way to make it work.
Problematically because of the resource intensity of it, what worked best was industry organizing where we spent massive amounts of money on strategic industry targeting and campaigning to win neutrality coupled with using significant numbers of volunteers, and staff. It was a too resource intensive for most organizations, and I appreciate your effort and the efforts of others to try to find a lighter resource model that actually works and is scalable.
Experimentation, which often means failure, is essential.
Thanks Andy, I agree with these points and in my coming book I try to give SEIU in the 1990s and 2000s credit for clearly posing the question and dilemmas of how to unionize at scale. I hope SEIU today also starts experimenting with low-cost, worker-to-worker organizing, which seems to me like a necessary compliment to any orientation to making sectoral bargaining a reality on the ground
I think it’s really important that we not make organizing strategy ideological, but evaluate approaches based on the ability to get workers in unions, and scale the results.
In SEIU, we regularly used members.
But sometimes we hired members as staff from outside the workforce in the campaign. Other times we had member volunteers from outside the campaign’s workforce, and other times we had members within the workforce being organized significantly lead the campaign with minimal staff support.
I learned in my organizing career that there are many many viable organizing strategies on paper some based on experience, and some based on ideology. We tried most of them. But in the end, the question we asked was which strategies brought workers into the union and changed their lives.
That should be the primary ideology for evaluating campaigns, bringing workers into the union and changing their lives.
In the early part of the 21st century SEIU organized: 2001 79,821 workers; 2002 132,759 workers; 2003 62,121; 2004 66,993; 2005 182,466; 2006 30,951
To do that we spent from 2002 on between $170,000,000 and $200,000,000 a year on organizing.
We probably tried dozens of strategies that failed, in some cases for nearly a decade like home care workers, but our strategic imperative was to bring low wage service workers into unions, and we tried anything and everything to find the way to make it work.
Problematically because of the resource intensity of it, what worked best was industry organizing where we spent massive amounts of money on strategic industry targeting and campaigning to win neutrality coupled with using significant numbers of volunteers, and staff. It was a too resource intensive for most organizations, and I appreciate your effort and the efforts of others to try to find a lighter resource model that actually works and is scalable.
Experimentation, which often means failure, is essential.
Thanks Andy, I agree with these points and in my coming book I try to give SEIU in the 1990s and 2000s credit for clearly posing the question and dilemmas of how to unionize at scale. I hope SEIU today also starts experimenting with low-cost, worker-to-worker organizing, which seems to me like a necessary compliment to any orientation to making sectoral bargaining a reality on the ground
I love this Eric! Sharing with friends — thank you and Happy Labor Day!
Kathleen Fluegel