Beyond Organizing
by AdministratorOrganizing is a challenging craft. It’s more like gardening than construction. You have to know general rules about soil and sun, water and pests but the results are at best a controlled accident. One of the factors that doesn’t get enough attention is the quality of the soil. We can plant our great organizing seeds and nurture them with all our heart but if the soil is unreceptive, if the climate is hostile to unions or to community organizing and collective solutions, then it will be hard for our seeds to take hold, let alone flourish.
One element of making change, then, is to look beyond the immediate urgency of campaigns to the broader landscape in which it takes place. If we can build public support for organizing and sympathy with poor and working people and other marginalized groups, the efforts of any particular organizing effort are more likely to succeed. Areas with strong traditions of popular resistance, say United Mine Workers areas in Appalachia or areas of Indigenous concentration are more likely to support organizing initiatives than places more dominated by corporate culture and historical amnesia.
Some of our posters have always been oriented toward soil preparation. While some pieces are meant to help strengthen campaigns and win victories, others are to stimulate quite conversations or spark and interest in grade school students. Unions seem to be becoming more conscious of this. We’ve been engaged in discussions or meetings or fielding inquiries, particularly from public workers’ (AFSCME and some others) and teachers’ unions, about how to create relationships with the broader public that will make it easier to defend against attacks from management and even seek to improve conditions.
There are all kinds of tools we can make use of and others we can improvise as we go. The specifics depend on the conditions in our particular area. I heard one account of an education support staff union spread out across a wide area that included a historically working class region at one end and farm country at the other. A lot of the women from farm country had the idea that unionism was a weak response compared to the individualism of proud and independent farmers. We started talking about the real history of farm country, the mutual aid organizations, granges, cooperatives and farmers’ unions that were the foundation for the small farm economy. The struggles against the railroads and big agricultural companies. The idea came up to tell stories, maybe through oral histories carried out by high school kids. These could be paired up with photos, old and new, and turned into billboards or printed as placemats and offered free to all the cafes, restaurants and truck stops in the area. Its not the kind of thing that wins a dramatic battle but it begins to validate the idea that communities have always grown stronger through collective action.
There are plenty of other strategies that we’ve explored with all kinds of groups and some are pretty different from each other. It makes a difference if you are facing a strong hostile media climate or if you are trying to build ties across racial or nationality divides. The right stories embedded in appropriate art forms can greatly affect the direction things go.
