Building a committee

Does the lack of answers here mean that chuck and thugarchist have been banned? I would disagree with this.

But just to get this going, I'll throw something into the ring. IMHO, you're primarily looking for people who have natural leadership - who others will talk to, listen to, and follow. I don't know of ways to really find this out except to watch and see who's recruiting/involving others already or, second best, ask around for someone who 'gets things done', etc. Often these people will have been around for a relatively long time, and had time to build relationships with co-workers. But where possible it should involve drawing people from different sections of the workforce, in terms of demographics and work organisation. You need at least one or two people who're fairly 'on the case' - in that your 'key persuaders' may need someone to keep them focused, and always escalating. If you can find a good thief - i.e. to steal a sign in sheet or employee list, or something - then that's all to the good.

Normally I'd say that your key person/people are those who'll be public about their union membership/involvement, but I guess you're saying that's not important at this stage. It sounds like you're saying discretion is key right now. But apart from that, tbh, unless someone's a total liability, at a very early stage, why not involve as many people as possible? Even if someone can only involve one other person, that might be someone no one else can reach. I reckon organising theory gets too fixated on the idea of the 'leader'... whereas really things work more organically.

I take it you've got an actual organising drive going on here? Would help if you gave a bit more info on current membership levels, issues, company size, industry, etc.

p.s. just by the by, it's been suggested by revol on the locked Left Communism thread that I'm somehow ashamed of what I do for work. Am I fuck. I'm going to write a post on practical attitudes to unions/response to revol's 'critique' when I have time. But let's not derail this thread with that now.

Yes Duke and I been banned. Too bad I got two accounts.

1. Contacts vs. Committee -- at an early stage in a campaign you can decide to go down the route of looking for natural leaders, folks that "lead a group.." These people could be great or jerks. I'll never forget Pam, she led a group of slot workers in a casino and she led about 15 folks. everyone thought she was great because she was caring, and compassionate, she was a mother figure to alot of younger workers. Over time it became clear that she was also a bit of a pyschopath. I was never able to recruit her to the union committee, but it in the end was ok, because her craziness came out during the course of the campaign and i'm glad I didn't recruit her. While she was a leader, she was also a negative figure. She couldn't maintain any discipline or have any commitment. She had no "fire in her belly".

There was Brian, who was not a natural leader in any form. He was grumpy, and a bit of an asshole. He had tons of fire but no friends. He was a dumpy white in a department of all young african american's and latinas. He really really wanted the union. He stuck with the union for four years of organizing, every week doing assignments and being secret and on target. He learned to lead a group of workers through changing himself. Having BBQ's, taking young black guys out hunting, learning to control his temper, etc.

Pam would have been committee
Brian was a contact

This was a campaign were we could take contacts and mould them over years into committee folks.

2. Once you've made your decision you recruit accordingly.

Committee -- whoever leads a group. its that simple. visit and map with workers throughout the property, learn as much as you can and when you figure out who leads a specific group meaning, Pam leads George, Charles, Bob, Sam, Araceli and Derrick, and even though Charles is good friends with Jack and Rebbeca she doesn't led those two.

Contacts -- who is willing to maintain their discipline, do what the union says and willing to put lots of effort into doing assignments, but does not have to be a leader (does have to not be hated or untrustworthy)

your second account and any subsequent ones will also be blocked until we've discussed the length of ban, keeping re-registering will just piss us off

Can't believe you'd ban chuck and thugarchist but not revol and LR. Not that I think those two should be banned either, I don't, but behaviour wise it's totally out of proportion. And they both contribute stuff that few others do. Or is it a reason other than behaviour?

post retracted because they were unbanned

chuck and thug are much more recent posters than revol and LR, so get less slack. If either of them starts doing multiple pages of "your mum" outside libcommunity or the bin they'll get a temp ban from me as well though, especially this week because it's getting very, very annoying.

Revol's been temp banned before twice though, and for longer than these two were. Also, chuck barely contributes other than trolling, thug's a bit more prolific but it was only ever going to be a 24 hour ban with thugarchist (on my part anyway).

The ideal committee is 10% of the shop
Representative of each work area, job, class etc
Representative of the general workforce... gender, ethnicity, etc
And made up of leaders. The definition of a leader is someone who has followers.

I support a groups right to ban people. I used to applaud NEFAC everytime they banned me from their friends of NEFAC list.

i wouldn't bother organizing a workplace of ten people so I don't know what to tell you on that. Ten people should be able to fucking make a decision in about ten minutes about what they want and what they want to do about it.

Timeline depends on the workers, the boss and the goals. If your building towards card check its gonna take lnger than building to an election. If the boss is fighting hard you better move quicker than if they aren't.

As for personality conflict... there's always personality conflict. Bring it back to the issues and give them organizing assignments. If they're accomplishing the organizing goals and succeeding then they'll care a hell of a lot less about personality conflicts and if they're not succeeding then you gave them the wrong assignments.

Good advice from people. I want to second having a diverse committee and making sure you have good penetration throughout all applicable departments. I was on an AFL-CIO union organizing committee at a call center once, in a somewhat atypical campaign...we were trying to bring a couple more folks onto the committee but no one could agree because of the personality conflicts or perceptions of potential conflicts.

That's when you sit folks down and see how badly they want the union and if so, let them know that they need to get over their shit, that they don't have to be best friends with everyone, etc., etc. The union organizer should have taken more of a lead with that.

Now, how about how to identify leaders...it's not always the most gung-ho union people from first glance...

And when people become a problem once they are on the committee, I'd be curious about talking damage control, as I've been in a few such situations myself.

Its never the gung ho people. Well, mostly never.

When you talk to people you ask them probing questions about who the leaders are. Then when they've been ID'd you go have a leadership organizing conversation which is somewhat different.

When one of my organizers comes back to me and says they just talked to this great leader I ask how many coworkers ID'd them. Then they invariably say "I could just tell" and thats that. Not a leader. A leader is someone that coworkers respect, listen to and follow.

Er... just to add to that. Real leaders generally understand their social position and are reluctant to get involved because it means putting their credibility on the line. There's nothing more important in a campaign than presenting a vision to a leader and bringing them to a point where they'll put their credablity on the line to organize their workplace.

I'm late to this thread cuz I was away from libcom cuz life got hectic. I just want to second everything Duke and Chuck say here about identifying committee. Good and ongoing social mapping will tell you who the natural leaders are in the workplace. As for how to get the leaders on board, the best way is with a good sit down with them based on their issues. If that doesn't work sometimes you can move a leader by moving their constituency - if all of their people are onboard then they don't lose face by getting onboard - though that can backfire. I think it's also valuable to have ties to a leader's constituents in case something goes wrong and you need to try to neutralize that leader.

is this nu-anarchism 2007?

For fuck sake. There absolutely nothing wrong with leadership.

looking for people who others will 'follow' ?

Yes. And? That's what leadership is. If I say something, no matter how valid, and how much people agree with it, whether others will do anything about it is purely based on subjective issues, by and large. People are social animals, not robots - that's why they often do things that are objectively bad for them. People fear taking steps outside of the crowd and therefore it is necessary to get those whose social capital is such that, when they take action, others will see that this person has taken action so they had better do likewise.

I'm sorry if that cuts against the grain of the politics of Earth First! and anarcho-punk but it's not something that anarchist-communists have ever had a problem with. Nor is it remotely connected to a critique of hierarchy - which is something rather different entirely.

'do what i do, i know what's best for you'

The world is as you find it, not how you'd like it to be. Do you have an alternative suggestion with historical antecedents that's worked? The CNT of yore just trained cadre anarcho-syndicalists and then sent them to colonise workplaces as paid organisers. The IWW was the same. If you want to be a philosopher that's fine but you can't pretend people are not as they are. Whether you can change them through education and struggle is something entirely different but that's not what we're discussing here.

do you?

No but then I also don't believe unions are revolutionary so I'm not that bothered. I think they are good resistance tools, and the better they are the better the resistance tools, but the vehicle for revolutionary social change is always the councils and militias controlled by them.

I don't agree with oisleep here. AFAIK he's not an anarchist, but is arguing like a super-anarchoid. You can't deny "leadership" as a social force (and potentially useful one). One person had to say "I'm Spartacus" first... But anyway, this is incorrect:

That's not true. I only know of one paid organiser they used, in one instance to try to increase the number of female members.

I got that from hearsay from someone much better read than me so I concede I might be completely wrong as I'm not that well read on the early Spanish CNT. Perhaps others could clarify. What's your source John (mine as I say is not credible if it's disputed).

Oisleep, do you have a job? If so, are there people in your workplace who your coworkers pay attention to when they talk and others who people pay less attention to? That's most of what a leader means in this context. A leader is someone whose opinions carry a lot of weight with other people, for better and for worse. You may not like it but the fact is that pretty much all workplaces have these dynamics. In organizing in the workplace, we want to get the leaders onboard with what we're doing. If we don't, the boss will. Then we will lose.

It's really a question of influence, then. Often this is because they've been there a long time, people go to them to find out things, they know people, have developed friendships, etc. Obviously if they actually have influence, they need to be brought on board.

In one organizing situation I was in, at a newspaper, there was a woman who was, in this sense, the natural leader of the production artists -- an energetic, outspoken woman who'd been there a long time, was looked up to by others -- but she was unfortunately also a whiner. In other words, she would complain incessantly but it was hard to get her to commit to doing things. what do you do in that situation?

Developing people's latent leadership potential is a separate issue. That's something that takes time, and i think it is helpful to have some forms of training they can be involved in. This brings in the question of the larger resources that are available.

hi 'Cat,

Sure. There's two or three things when working with leaders. One is finding them, as part of building a map of how the workplace really works. The second is dealing with the ones you find - swaying them, making the swayed ones into organizers, dealing frankly with their behaviors (like not doing what they say they're going to do, or being rude in a way that turns off new committee member or whatever), and neutralizing the ones you can't sway. The third is making new leaders, which is really unlikely to happen in my opinion without some initial successes involving existing leaders.

With the person you're talking about, I would do a few things. First, make sure I know her issues at work and agitate her on them. If she's not agitated then she won't move. If she was agitated and said she wanted to make change, I'd give her assignments that I thought were manageable then increase their difficulty if she came through on easier assignments. If she flaked or dodged consistently I'd be really up front: bring up a discussion of her issues to re-agitate her then say, this isn't going to happen if the tasks don't get done. I know you're busy (or afraid or whatever), but everyone's busy. If everyone's too busy then nothing's going to happen. So, will you do this task?

I'd also say to her hey other people really look up to you around here, people follow your lead. When you speak up about the boss, people listen. People are also going to notice if you step and do the work to make this happen, and they'll follow your lead on that too. If you say you're too busy other people are likely to do the same thing, because you're a leader.

That's what I'd say, something like that.

I've rarely found it to be true that whiners are the natural leaders in a shop.

i concure with thug