Solidarity Sunday: Organizing is a Process
I feel for Organizers. They are stretched incredibly thin, and we often expect them to perform an impossible job.
Answer the phone. Call leads back. Answer emails. Administer assessment tests. Visit jobsites. Attend job fairs. Follow up with prospects. Find new workers. Explain benefits. Handle paperwork. And somewhere in between all of that, go out and organize somebody.
Then we measure success by how many people they converted.
But I think there's an opportunity to look at organizing in a different way.
Most workers don't change jobs because an organizer happened to walk onto their jobsite Tuesday afternoon.
They change because something changed in their life.
They got passed over for a raise. Their insurance got worse. Their foreman pissed them off. Work slowed down. Their company lost a job. They had a baby. They started thinking about retirement. Or maybe they simply realized they're worth more than they're getting paid.
We don't control when that moment happens.
What we can control is whether they know who we are when it does.
The Process of Organizing: Relational —> Transitional —> Transactional
Relational
This is everything we do before they're looking.
Advertising. Sports Sponsorships. Social media. Jobsite visits. Videos. Community involvement. Word of mouth from our members. Showing up at trade schools and job fairs.
The objective isn't necessarily to organize somebody that day.
It's to make sure that when something changes six months from now, they already know our name, understand what we offer and hopefully trust us enough to take the next step.
Transitional
This may be the part we're missing most.
The worker has started looking, but they're not ready to walk into the hall.
They're lurking.
They're watching our videos. Comparing wages. Reading comments. Asking a buddy who's already union. Wondering about dues, layoffs, travel, testing, pensions and whether all those things they've heard about unions are actually true.
Technology gives us an opportunity to meet them there as well.
A private Discord community. A monthly Zoom "Ask an Organizer" session. Text messaging. Automated email or text follow-up. Short FAQ videos. An anonymous question form. Online wage and benefit calculators. Even virtual job fairs where somebody can quietly talk with an organizer without taking a day off or walking into a union hall.
None of those replaces an organizer.
They make the organizer more scalable.
Instead of answering the same question individually 40 times, answer it once on video and let 4,000 people hear it.
Instead of losing someone because an organizer couldn't return a call until Thursday, automatically sending that prospect useful information and give them another way to communicate.
And instead of asking a worker to go from complete stranger to walking through the union hall doors in one step, give them several smaller ones.
Transactional
Eventually somebody raises their hand.
They call. Fill out the form. Send the text. Ask about testing. Want to know what jobs are available.
Now they're not an audience anymore.
They're a lead.
And this is where speed matters.
If somebody has finally reached the point where they're considering changing their livelihood, that's probably not the lead we want sitting in somebody's voicemail for three days.
That's when the technology should get out of the way and the human being should take over.
The organizer's greatest value isn't administering another form or repeatedly answering questions a website could answer.
It's building trust with another tradesperson at precisely the moment that person is considering a change.
Jobsite Organizing Still Matters
None of this means we stop visiting jobsites.
Quite the opposite.
A conversation on a jobsite today may become a phone call eight months from now.
We just shouldn't assume every organizing activity is supposed to produce an immediate transaction.
Some activities plant seeds.
Some nurture them.
Some harvest them.
The mistake is expecting every organizer to do all three simultaneously, manually, while answering the phone.
Our organizers are stretched thin. That's not an indictment of them. It's a reason to give them better systems.
The locals that figure this out won't necessarily have organizers who work harder.
They'll have organizers whose time is spent where a human being actually matters.
Relational —> Transitional —> Transactional.
Be known before they're looking.
Be useful when they start looking.
And be there when they're ready.