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labour @hexbear.net ratboy [they/them] @hexbear.net

Any organizers/bargaining unit members in here?

I work at a non profit and we just won union recognition and are slowly moving towards first contract negotiations and I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING. Would love to chat with some folks about their experiences, especially if you've negotiated around contracts/grants/etc.

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59 comments

  • Your first contract can be harder than the union recognition fight itself. This is because it us in admin's interest to stall:

    • Dragging their heels means they can try to let momentum die down and for your bargaining ability to be weaker due to disengagement.

    • Slower means they get to maintain the status quo longer, saving time and money.

    • If they're particularly competent and assholes, they can eventually push to undo the union itself and will just avoid a contract until they think they'll win decert.

    I say all of this because you need a campaign just like you needed one for unionization and the exact same tactics apply:

    • You need an organizing committee/structure to ensure the work gets done and you can beat admin.

    • Keeping lists and using them. Always track who shows up to what and always contact and invite non-anti-union people first.

    • Build enthusiasm and lists by organizing meetings and actions. Both of these are also structure tests. If you get 90% turnout to a meeting and folks are on your side, you're basically ready to strike and just need a forceful campaign to convince them it's necessary.

    • A competent admin will force you to strike, but nobody actually wants to strike. When the time comes, your position is always, "we are trying in good faith but they're screwing with us, it may be our only option".

    • Do surveys / ask questions about what matters most to your membership for a contract. Track the results. Remember that pay is always important no matter what the answers say. Take the most important issues and turn them into initial demands. Your initial demsnds need to be more than you expect to get because bargaining will be about "compromise", effectively by law. Be creative with your demands. Is childcare important? Demand a very large childcare fund based on projected cost of living in your area and frame it in equity terms. When admin balks, take note of it for when you need to organize a strike: "look what those bastards wouldn't negotiate".

    • Pay very close attention to bargaining time and scheduling. Demand to bargain any time, anywhere.

    • Expect to need a lawyer and to file ULP. This is mostly useful for convincing your members it's time to strike. The state will not actually punish the employer.

    • Constantly give updates to membership. A feeling of participation is very important for your strength. Updates should tell this overall story over time: (1) it's amazing that we won our union but the fight isn't over! (2) take our surveys / come to meetings to share what's important to you (3) here are our great demands in X issue that we presented to admin on [day], (4) here's how bargaining is going (good things you achieve/TA and things about how admin is fucking around), (5) take part in X action!, (6) the bargaining committee needs your authorization to strike because admin isn't bargaining fairly, (7) it's time to strike, here's all the info you need, here's how you will survive during this time, and here's our first action and picket.

    • If you are a small union without a good strike fund, begin making connections with other unions to build yours up. When it comes time yo strike you can leverage a strong network to bring in thousands of dollars.

    You may not need all of this if you are already very powerful, i.e. have high engagement. You can stomp admin if you present your demands as articles, move ahead rapidly in the horrible bargaining process, and scare them with actions.

    Basically... you just organize, same thing you've already been doing. Cross your Ts and dot your Is during negotiations, but otherwise treat this as the same fight. Be prepared to use direct action, particularly around when it is time to strike.

    Feel free to ask questions and/or PM me.

    • Oh, and PS: always be professional/polite-ish during bargaining meetings. "[Not] bargaining in good faith" is a weapon to use against admin but it can also be used against you.

    • PS in case it's helpful and/or enticing, I organize unions and have bargained as part of bargaining committees with successful strikes and 80-90% strike auth votes.

    • How do you manage ULPs in such a way that people don't become focused on them?

      I've seen so many organizing campaigns lose power because of some BS legal strategy. ULPs take like 2 years to go through the system so the fact that they are bound to fail won't be clear for some time. But they kind of let people procrastinate doing challenging, scary organizing/action because that ULP is on the back burner.

      It is the case especially with people who have some sort of deep down belief that that state will protect them. Even if you know in your brain that's fake shit it is sooo tempting to relax into it. Because of how egregiously unfair the practices of the boss really are. This time even the pigs at the NLRB will see through the lies!!

      Also I think union staffers like them because they have all the expertise so it kind of makes the workers reliant. The boss likes them because they know they will win.

      With really good inoculation it's possible. I've seen it too, once in a long while. Where ineffective tactics are pursued on purpose just to let people get it out of their systems and teach about power. Not easy to pull off and requires knowing the situation backwards and forwards.

    • actual answer, upvote this shit, folks

    • guys its mao

    • This is such a based fucking response thank you so much kitty-cri

      I've shared a ton of info in other responses, but basically I feel like my particular union is pretty weak, im convinced that my union rep is inept as hell. They are currently bargaining a first contract with another BU in my agency so hoping that can move things along for us in terms of boilerplate language but we will see. The agency hired some of the top union busting lawyers in the state, who in a news article, admitted that a tactic of theirs is to force impasse. It's been one full year since they were recognized and they are getting down to the Financials of the contract, where management has attempted to cut benefits that exist already (sick time accrual specifically).

      I just started disseminating our BU survey this week and are going to have a first kinda celebratory party/mixer in a couple of weeks, I'm really hoping we get some folks but I think everyone is so burnt out from the structural trauma going on and the everyday trauma of our jobs; my coworkers have been responding to overdoses at least 1-3 times a week for months (we work with people who are unhoused/use drugs/have mental health issues or some combo). I'm starting to get pretty upset and demoralized because the organizing committee seems to be totally checked out since we won recognition, like I'm still going to union presentations online and doing research on bargaining strategy and trying to gather info and it's just crickets from nearly everyone else. So I dont think we have any other people who have a fully vested interest right now, but also I think are mostly just distracted by the work. That's really what I'm struggling with right now. I want to build that momentum so we CAN win a good contract but I can't force it and that sucks.

      • Of course, comrade! Happy to help any way I can.

        Union staff is usually meant to fill in when full-time workers can't (ideally you have high engagement and spread the work among workers instead). So you're in a tough situation by having low engagement and presumably ineffectual staff. It's not impossible, but the bad news is it's usually a lot of work for the people still ready to fight.

        How are you all doing in terms of lists and actions, and when was your last action? Members usually need three things: (1) to see activity and build solidarity with one another, (2) to see that collective actions create material movement (e.g. forced to bargain or TA an article), and (3) think that admin sucks and needs to be fought. I mention this because messaging and organizing has to strike a careful balance of not just stressing how much admin sucks in lieu of 1 and 2, otherwise people start to think, "what is the point of the union?"

        Basically, I think you should consider doing a mild structure test and use that to build a more militant action to achieve your next goal (force to bargain, e.g.), and prepare to escalate to a strike given their tactics. You don't want to go straight to a "big" action because it might look small and have the opposite effect.

        For an idea: organize for an all-hands meeting to lay out what's been happening, why it's important to come together and act, and to get volunteers for planning the action. Emphasizing the importance is key, and ideally you could invite someone to speak about a successful contract campaign in your area (use that to get people interested in attending).

        If you can confidently set a date a couple weeks out, do that and begin talking to every single person to get them to commit to going to the event. Make it easy to attend. If you can, have your most persuasive people do the talking/calling.

        Attendance of the meeting is the structure test. If you get good attendance, you're golden to do a real action. Here are some achievable options:

        • Show up en masse to management's offices, demand to bargain, come with stories about why you need money/better working conditions, come with chants. Take pictures and videos (announce it if in a one-party state). If you have media connections, have them come to the action and write a story. If you don't have those connections, start asking around and try to make them.

        • Do a picket in a small space. Exact same idea but it's at a building entrance or something public.

        • Begin tabling for your campaign. Talk to the community and get signatures of people on a petition that says they support you. Get contact info so you can build a community support list. Make direct asks for your strike fund. You can get $100-$300 per hour in a busy area and a good location. Do farmer's markets, storefronts, sports events - crowds (on a public sidewalk). Get a couple hundred or more signatures and present the numbers to your membership and to msnagement. Don't tell anyone your exact fundraising, but say thousands if you get at least $2k (make that your target).

        • Target the funding. Whoever is the source of income to the org. If they are sympathetic, first contact them, then consider a mass action / demand session when they are present, phone banking them, getting them to agree to apply pressure, etc. If they are not sympathetic, print flyers that shame them and leave them all over a location where their funders go, put yourself on their radat. Keep going up the chain to get sympathetic pressure or a shaming campaign.

        • Obviously you can get creative based on your particular conditions. The idea is to make them pay attention and for your members to see some kind of win, even just carrying out the action.

        • Involve local politicians if any of them want union cred.

        At a meta level, get local labor connections. Get other unions and socialists to show up to these things and do work with you.

        Obviously the hard part is that initial piece: getting people to show up to 1 meeting. Do everything you can to make that a success. Get other unions to speak there. See if anyone can provide food in solidarity. If you have friends in a band, do a freeish concert. That kind of thing. Socialists, anarchists, etc can often help with this. And take attendance at the meeting.

        All easier said than done, I know, but I hope this gives some inspiration or an angle you can latch onto.

        In terms of the impasse angle, there are two common options. Tge first is rhetorical at the bargaining table (make sure someone is taking verbatim notes), i.e. finding ways to move (even small ways) and identifying when management is itself stonewalling when you have already countetred. The second is to use actions to make them move. The second is the important one and it's why it's all I'm focused on lol.

        Solidarity and let's keep chatting.

    • chavez-salute good ass post

  • First of: Thanks for doing what you do comrade! transshork-happy

    Try to contact the fine folks at the IWW, try to contact some of the already organizing labour campaings, have a look at the - not ideal, but somewhat useful - "No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age" or an "Organizing for Power Seminar" i.e. Jane McAlvey's, something for the people after you that could be relevant are "bargaining unit seminars", too.

    For help with contracts you need unions who already have contracts or political lawyers.

    Remember that moving forward means to somewhat include the workers in your company.

    If you have a contract don't exclude the right to strike during bargaining agreements for too long and/or include points for which you can strike even when an agreement is going on for points that weren't part of the previous ones (this is legally contested depending on where you are).

    Have a meeting with your workers about what are the most pressing needs. Companies will try to low ball you, dare to say: "We can take your suggestions and talk with our workers about them" and if they walk back on things make that transparent.

    Often the company tries to enforce discretion about what is discussed in those meetings, trots often argue that you ought to say no to that and talk with the full worker base about stuff. If this works is contingent on a lot of things. Why I write that is mostly to say: While the techniques used against you are often similar, the path you and your workers take is unique. More than what would be the perfect solution is the one that is done.

    • Thank you rat-salute-2 so much for this response! I've been in touch with EWOC(emergency workplace organizing committee) and they got me in on a Zoom presentation with Jane! I love the tactics of big open negotiating and full transparency, that makes so much sense to me.

      I haven't reached out to other unions or IWW, even if you're apart of a different union will they be able to provide advice/support?

      I feel like our union situation is kind of weird because when I look at message board posts or websites to get more info, it seems geared to much larger unions. We unionized with a local of a large national union. The local is fairly small; there are only two union reps and they do have a lawyer that they bargain with. For our unit, we are a couple departments of a larger agency that were able to unionize apart from the rest. We have like, 30 people. So we are pretty separated from the local so far, like not really sure what other businesses are part of the local, where it seems like usually there is a lot of participation in the local itself instead of individual bargaining units? I could be wrong.

      That being the case there is no previous contract to negotiate from although there is another BU in the agency thats in negotiations rn so that may provide boiler plate language. There are no shop stewards or anything like that assigned, we would just pick from our BU. And we have had no help with organizing, there is no one at the local that assists with that specifically, it's been explicitly grassroots, workers researching, calling places, talking to coworkers etc.

      I will say I've taken on the brunt of a lot of the organizing and I guess I just feel kinda blind like, what the hell is happening? Lol. And it sort of seems like our union rep is clueless. There are NLRB cases that I've read about where I've asked him for clarification on and he has no idea how to respond. An example was "can a business offer raises to non unionized employees and not the union members"? To which he asked if I'd heard of such a thing, and I responded with the source I mentioned. Doesn't inspire confidence, but we went with that union because the first BU chose them and thought it was a logical choice

      • See if you can negotiate your contract ending at the same time as the other departments. That way, next time you can negotiate together, with the power of three units threatening strike instead of just one.

        To answer your question about selective raises, that's retaliation and a ULP. They did it to us at my last job and we had to fight it.

        A lot of reps are fairly new, or are used to a particular wheelhouse, or know more about organizing than labor law, or more about labor law than organizing. That's why it's so important to have worker leadership.

        Have you read Labor Law for the Rank and Filer and no contract, no peace?

    • trots

      I think everyone argues this, not just newspaper boys

      • Trots were big on "industrializing" which is going into buisness unions to improve them. Labor Notes is actually partially the result of this movement.

        So a lot of our collective knowledge about relating to larger unions is from trot experiments.

      • trotsa

        Somewhat like Nagarjuna wrote and somewhat that I want to add. He wrote that trots were a major influence for labour literature in the US, but also their style of organizing means trying to have the whole lot of employees/workers active and talk everything through (this you can see in South American Trot influenced labour actions, i.e. Zanon/FaSinPat. However there are plenty of union who will discuss regularly in the whole group what happens but have the negotiations in smaller numbers. This includes a wide range of unions, even Trot labour actions sometimes did that, however the importance of the whole being activated was centered more by them than it once was.

        You can have:

        • workers -> active workers -> active workers involved in the negotiation prep -> negotiation team

        • workers -> full assemblies (decisions) -> cadres/negotiation team(includes non cadre)

        • workers -> full assembly for major decisions -> assigned task groups -> smaller assemblies -> negotiation team

        And plenty more in union action, not seldom some workers are not interested in being at every meeting, but only major assemblies (cause they have multiple jobs, are sick, have kids etc., aren't activated). In addition labour law in the US hinders unions from doing the amount of full assemblies that quite a few organizers (including trots) would like to have.

        (Would have loved to make a chart but instead you get this now).

  • @CARCOSA@hexbear.net could we please feature/pin this post (maybe without federation people being able to see it even)?

  • we just won union recognition

    party-cat

    How did the non-profit nature of your work affect your unionization push? I can see that making it much tougher because (presumably) workers see their work as intrinsically important, and genuinely bad things happen when it isn't done.

    • Unionizing is a good way to keep the work going. Otherwise people get laid off, burnt out, move out of the industry etc.

      • This is a huuuuge reason why we were able to get many people on board. Not to mention random retaliatory firings that were completely out of process bougie-wink

    • Fuck also to answer the point about "bad things happen when it isn't done": people absolutely are against striking due to ot disenfranchising our clients (we work with unhoused people). We really stressed that striking would be last resort and likely wouldn't happen. Crossing my fingers that's the case

    • Oh you're right on the money with that presumption. The white saviourism runs deep in the non profit industrial complex. People think that we should sacrifice livable wages in order to serve the underserved, that we dont need to better pur wprking/living conditions because we do this put of the love and passion for the work. Which yeah, we do but god damn we deserve to pay rent comfortably for taking care of the highest risk populations when no one else wants to. Our particular situation was a lil complicated though. If you wanna read my novel here goes:

      We have many different depts at our agency, and before us there were 2 depts that unionized together as one bargaining unit. Then came one other dept, and then mine and our sister department that unionized together. So in all we have 3 separate bargaining units which is silly but that's how it panned out. FYI if you're not familiar a bargaining unit is the employees that will be represented under one contract.

      In my case, organizing between the two departments was challenging to me, but seemed comparatively easy to the fights that other organizers have had to deal with. We are kind of the least appreciated depts in the agency even though we handle the toughest work. We also qualify for some of the programs that our clients do, we make such little money. A couple people in my unit have second jobs. Our agency has also undergone extremely traumatic change; it used to be based upon consensus, worker autonomy, and have a lot of radical ethics. Of course, that's all crumbling and being "restructured" with more of a top down business model. That was a huge impetus to unionize, so it only took a couple of months to get people on board. My agency didn't recognize our union cards, so we went to an election and won 98 percent of the vote.

      Now, we didn't try to unionize the entire rest of the agency because we knew it would be impossible to do. There are a lot of old guard who cling on to the white saviourism so hard. Along with refusing to recognize that there are many new bad actors making horrible, fucked up decisions, and refusing to believe that consensus is done for. Also there are folks benefitting from the restructure, and those, mostly Gen Xers, who are extremely antiunion and refuse to engage even though myself and others have spent months of researching tirelessly. In my union we still have 2 employees who refuse to talk about it and continue to spread misinformation across the agency like how we will have to pay $200 a month in union dues which is ridiculous.

      So yeah overall I think unionizing is pretty taboo in.the non profit world. There are very few who do direct service with marginalized communities, there are more that are climate oriented and law non profits, so the idea is growing but its still got a long way to go.

      If you're more interested in the origins of non profits, unions, and the break down of social safety nets in the US I found this paper to be super fascinating.

  • I got a friend who's a union organizer with a few decades of experience under his belt, so if you don't get enough answers you need I'll help forward them to him and help connect you if needed.

    • That's so awesome, I really appreciate that offer I may hit you up. I've been trying to get as many resources together as I can. It's also a unique position being a non profit because financial bargaining is so different from for profit business!

  • I haven’t been directly involved in a contract negotiation, but I’ve listened to my union leadership talk about the bargaining process enough to pick up on a few things:

    • Check and see if you can find out what similar unions in your area have won out of their most recent contract. It will both give you a baseline of what you can reasonably expect, but also may be what management themselves will use as precedent so you’ll be prepared either way.
    • Management offers often have a way of being presented in a similar manner as a slimy car salesman trying to pull the wool over your eyes with a great-sounding monthly rate that’s actually more expensive in the long term. Be prepared to run the math on their offers and counteroffers, especially when they say something like “well we can’t give you X, but we’ll give you Y which is better” as often it sounds nice but the math doesn’t pan out. This is particularly an issue with signing bonuses as they sound great to members, an extra grand in my next paycheck!, but you might run the numbers and see that the benefit you had to give up for it would have saved your members twice that over the life of the contract.

    • Dang the numbers part is such good advice! I've read a couple articles on bargaining strategy and avoiding concessions and of course they'd try to trick you with the numbers.

  • usually larger unions like the CWA or Teamsters have people on staff to help small unions with stuff like this, maybe reach out to them

  • They won't let me. I suggested we open carry to meetings and the cowards didn't like it.

  • Doesn't directly address the contract aspect or the NGO angle but you could do worse than reading Wages so low you'll freak by Mike Pudd'nhead for general left union ideas. Although I only read the first book of several in the series so maybe it comes in later.

    • Holy shit, dude tried to organize for a whole four years? Maybe I should be more grateful that it was so quick for me. Luckily our agency is propped up by social currency so if they really tried to fight union efforts the community would set them on fire lol.

      • set them on fire

        Don't be afraid to leverage that.

        The great thing about being frontline workers with strong community relationship is that sometimes people who feel strongly in solidarity take actions which would be "in bad faith" or even illegal if the workers themselves did same action. You can't be held responsible for what independent people do.

        A comrade was organizing at a nonprofit when they were fired. Big union did not back them up. Bricks started being thrown through the windows of the nonprofit by discontented service users. Comrade went on to another job but none of the other organizers were fired and now org has a contract.

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