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.
First of: Thanks for doing what you do comrade!
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
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?
I went to look up a video that would convey Labor Law for OP at least in part and learned that Staughton Lynd died in November. Found this but unsure as to relevance.
OP, here is a PDF of Labor Law. It really is #1 to read. At least assign it as homework to your union rep. ;)
I have not read those. I’m really bad at reading books, unfortunately though I do try. I have a huuuuuuuge list I need to go through. Luckily the only things that interest me are like, political literature and sociology
Our department just won our election two months ago where one started negotiations in February, and the other just doesn’t want to collaborate with anyone for some reason, I have no idea why. We arent even exactly sure when we will start negotiating either. So I don’t think it’s realistic, which sucks because more people is more power.
I read in this article from a union busting lawfirm that they can get away with it so long as they can prove that it wasn’t due to anti-union animus. Do you mind sharing your experience with fighting that? Also, it is true that before our first contract we cannot receive raises across the board until after negotiations?
On the management retaliation:
Unfortunately, my experience is that the rep filed a grievance and it was out of my hands. What is important imo is immediately framing it as retaliation and making the boss the bad guy before the boss can blame the union. Make it an issue to organize around or management will.
Management can give you a raise whenever they want. Ant “my hands are tied” rhetoric is the bosses trying to blame the union for their own retaliation.
On the coordinated bargaining: you don’t have to bargain at the same time this time around to line up expiration dates and bargain at the same time in 3 years.
Yeah, the narrative control had been frustrating because the first BU had been so hush hush about their negotiations and never stood up to management during all staff meetings that management took control. Every meeting started with “so union negotiations are going great!” Followed by a new rule or power taken away with a “sorry guys it’s because union!” tacked on at the end. My dept wasn’t unionized and we were afraid to push back on that then so I really want to start pushing back and getting way more vocal/transparent when we start negotiating, AND to push on this particular issue.
Our union rep has told us multiple times that since this is our first contract negotiation that the conditions of employment would be frozen until getting a ratified contract, which includes frozen wages. We don’t get normal raises, it’s been like 5 years so idk if that has something to do with it?
Idk how big your workplace is, but at mine, everyone in the Organizing Committee picked a few leaders to talk to on an ongoing basis. and that way, the most influential people in the workplace were getting their opinions on union stuff from us. That way the 4 person OC was able to reach all 60 workers with pro union messaging.
my actual union is pretty small, its like maybe 1/7th of the whole org population. I think we do tend to split and talk to different folks, but the two anti union folks in my department are vehemently opposed to changing their minds in the slightest. Heels dug in hard. I’m hoping that over time as they see updates and such they might come around but I don’t know. As for talking to other people in the agency, we are all pretty siloed; working remote and in different buildings across town. Especially since the pandemic lock downs it’s been even worse. I think some of us have tried to have conversations with the non unionized folks but it still does seem to be for naught. Idk WHY the first BU didnt start giving updates/announcements to the whole agency to try and innoculate people a bit, but i definitely plan to with our negotiations
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.
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).