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.
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).