I work for a small-ish company of laborers. We have ~100 full-time employees who work in labour, a small team of administrative employees, and very few managers all things considered. The reasons for this are part of the reason I need to be vague in public talking about this, because the details make the company very identifiable to anyone who knows anything about the industry.
Some previous employees tried and failed to unionize over a decade ago, but the vote was very close. Since then, wages have stagnated to a degree that make me laugh and cry, we are being pushed to work more and more overtime, and in general morale is very low. I am in contact with a small group of very well-connected employees who are 100% on board with unionizing, and I believe that we can successfully get the required signatures this time if we play our cards right.
- How does one go about choosing a union to work with? I have done some Googling but the results are useless. I need some kind of leftist search engine, please! I know of the major Canadian unions like Unifor and Teamsters, as well as the IWW, and then the very specific ones like the postal union or the teachers’ union.
- Does the IWW even do workplace organizing? I was under the impression that it was more of a thing you joined solo.
- Are any of the bigger unions in Canada actually useful? We need a hard wage correction upfront and then guaranteed cost of living increases after that, and I don’t want to do all this work to have some centrist ‘union’ let us down in negotiations.
- Do you know of any trade-specific unions for things in the realm of carpentry and space finishing? (Again sorry for being vague in public about industry) I know that my industry is largely unionized in the US, but here it rarely is. I have not found any info from my Google searches as to which unions those other companies work with.
- If we can’t find anything that’s a good fit, is it advisable to start an industry-specific union for us and others? Is that doomed to fail?
- I’ve found a few different groups that say “contact us if you want to organize your workplace” but basically
- Most of them seem US-centric and we are in Canada
- I worry that they’re ops lol
- Not sure if this is the IWW’s wheelhouse or not. I don’t want to take help from them and then form a union under Teamsters or something, kind of feels like wasting their resources idk maybe this is fine??
- So uhhhh please recommend a good group to talk to about this in Canada! Or I mean a US group is fine so long as they have the knowledge about local rules and can help us.
- There is some complex stuff to explain about the company structure that make it hard to know how many people we’d have to get to sign cards and I would really appreciate someone knowledgeable messaging me privately so I can explain a bit, or point me to a good group where I can ask this question
Gosh sorry I am rather at a loss of where to start here so I’m someone could just give me a stick and point me in the right direction I would be exceptionally pleased, thank you!!
Edit: as a bonus I may have slam-dunk proof of wage theft by the company not paying certain employees overtime, would be great if we could also get some resources on how to retaliate for that in as big of a blow as possible. ✌️
Sorry for the late reply, my inbox keeps marking things as read without me seeing them. It looks like glans has made some good points, and I agree with it on all points. I’m going to try to reply to all of the comments on mine since I posted in this comment instead of just this one I’m replying to.
I would like to reiterate not counting on the perceived politics of coworkers. All of us here have had experiences with leftists flaking out at critical points, so you can’t trust that just because someone, say, listens to punk music and talks about XYZ political theory shit that they’ll actually put in the work and be there when you need them. Just the same, a lot of these old conservative guys that are against unions are against those other, bad unions, but not their good union (similar to the only good abortion is my abortion type crowd). You just have to figure out what actually motivates other people.
I won’t cover mapping too much, as it seems you’ve done a lot of the work already. The only thing I’ll say here is: good points on watching out for the boss’s buddies, and I include managers with bosses. Basically, real “managers” are those with hire/fire authority. Everyone else is fair game for unionizing, but you gotta keep your wits about you to detect snitches before looping them in. You’ll want to keep the unionization efforts as secret as possible for as long as possible, as the bosses will try to smother it in the crib as soon as they catch wind.
As far as marching on the boss being a hard sell: it always is. There is no part of a unionization effort that’s easy. When the Peet’s Coffee union in the East Bay was unionizing, they got everyone they could to make the drive out to the regional corporate headquarters across town, pack the lobby, and then wait outside of the office for hours until they basically forced themselves into the boss’s office to make demands. Like, I get that it’s a big ask, and you’ll have to be creative about it, and planning something like this is something that a dedicated External Organizer can help with.
The thing about concentrating on card checks and elections is: It’s gonna take a good 6-12 months to actually have the election, then you’ll spend the next 6-12 months negotiating a contract, then you’ll spend the next 6-12 months fighting them to actually honor the contract, and they’ll drag it out until they can force another election and, oh it looks like you didn’t actually improve conditions and now everyone’s mad and they’re not motivated to keep the union certified. However, if you engage in direct action you can get shit like payraises and benefits without ever filing for an election, which will motivate your coworkers to work harder to unionize. A Fellow Worker of mine who is organizing his own workplace, which is a surprisingly similar situation to yours (as far as working on customer sites, everything being handled through leads, rarely interacting with the office which is inconvenient), got ratted out by a snitch and everyone got a $2 payraise, which has just motivated the committee to work harder (and more secretively).