Revol no one's asked you to be helpful and you know it, all I'm asking is that you let some folk who want to have a conversation you disapprove of do so. At this point arguing you has made me less interested in this thread, actually arguing with you has made me less interested in raising any topic I think you may raise objections to in what seems to be the way you habitually raise objections.
Jul 12 2007 01:50
Jul 12 2007 14:11
EdmontonWobbly wrote:
In the end I like the idea of rotated temporary organisers backed up by part time and possibly permanent administrative staff. Having people hired to file paperwork is not such an issue to me, it's the front line organising that can lead to dangerous egos and power trips.
That seems sensible.
Paid staff for things like administration, tech roles like server admin, newspaper publishing/editing is ok.
I can also see that paid organisers could sometimes be necessary, and have been used by every large anarchists + rev syndicalist organisation, including the IWW, CNT, etc. Taking an example say of a large call centre which was self-organising, it might be sensible for workers there to pay people to head to other call centres to try to organise them too, to prevent work just being outsourced. Like EW says though these, and any roles with power (like newspaper editor) should be temporary, elected/delegated and rotated.
Jul 12 2007 15:49
John. wrote:
EdmontonWobbly wrote:
In the end I like the idea of rotated temporary organisers backed up by part time and possibly permanent administrative staff. Having people hired to file paperwork is not such an issue to me, it's the front line organising that can lead to dangerous egos and power trips.That seems sensible.
Paid staff for things like administration, tech roles like server admin, newspaper publishing/editing is ok.
I can also see that paid organisers could sometimes be necessary, and have been used by every large anarchists + rev syndicalist organisation, including the IWW, CNT, etc. Taking an example say of a large call centre which was self-organising, it might be sensible for workers there to pay people to head to other call centres to try to organise them too, to prevent work just being outsourced. Like EW says though these, and any roles with power (like newspaper editor) should be temporary, elected/delegated and rotated.
Organizers have only the amount of power the workers will invest in them because of a respect for skill, ability and trust. Oh wait, thats true for anyone. I'm wondering, and Nate will have some good examples having been a paid staffer for the big green, about when thts not true in different unions and why?
Jul 12 2007 16:08
One problem at the place I worked at was that the strategy and the tactics were all laid out in advance. The organizers' job was to talk to people, build relationships, and agitate so that people would be like "something has to change!" then we'd be like "here's the plan for change." There's not necessarily anything wrong with that - the winning plan is the winning plan, I guess - but it was very much like the role of the workers was to follow. There was no effort made to involve workers in formulating any part of the plan. There was no effort to really walk workers through the steps by which the plan was made and no effort to teach workers how to strategize and so on. The other problem was that there was very little attempt to change small conditions through actions, like marching on the boss for respect and so on. The emphasis was on the long term to the exclusion of the short term, the response to every workplace issue no matter how small and winnable was "this is why need to have the union get in here" (it was a really big target with a several year plan). I think with some of this it was more a case of bad organizing than staff organizing per se.
These kinds of dynamics can all occur in situations where there are people working full time who aren't paid organizers (someone whose unemployed or whatever) and when people aren't working full time.
The main pro is that the organizer has way more time to knock on the doors of all the people in the areas they're organizing than any of those people do. I think this connects to the main con, which is that the extra time that organizers have can allow organizers who get impatient to substitute themselves for the workers - "we need this done fast so I'll just do it" whether it's writing a press release or chairing the meeting or whatever. I'd really like to hear more about non-substituting organizing.
Jul 12 2007 17:13
John. wrote:
EdmontonWobbly wrote:
In the end I like the idea of rotated temporary organisers backed up by part time and possibly permanent administrative staff. Having people hired to file paperwork is not such an issue to me, it's the front line organising that can lead to dangerous egos and power trips.That seems sensible.
Paid staff for things like administration, tech roles like server admin, newspaper publishing/editing is ok.
I can also see that paid organisers could sometimes be necessary, and have been used by every large anarchists + rev syndicalist organisation, including the IWW, CNT, etc. Taking an example say of a large call centre which was self-organising, it might be sensible for workers there to pay people to head to other call centres to try to organise them too, to prevent work just being outsourced. Like EW says though these, and any roles with power (like newspaper editor) should be temporary, elected/delegated and rotated.
That's not really being full time, that's being covered in your expenses , afterall they will be working in the other call centre.
Jul 12 2007 17:35
revol68 wrote:
John. wrote:
EdmontonWobbly wrote:
In the end I like the idea of rotated temporary organisers backed up by part time and possibly permanent administrative staff. Having people hired to file paperwork is not such an issue to me, it's the front line organising that can lead to dangerous egos and power trips.That seems sensible.
Paid staff for things like administration, tech roles like server admin, newspaper publishing/editing is ok.
I can also see that paid organisers could sometimes be necessary, and have been used by every large anarchists + rev syndicalist organisation, including the IWW, CNT, etc. Taking an example say of a large call centre which was self-organising, it might be sensible for workers there to pay people to head to other call centres to try to organise them too, to prevent work just being outsourced. Like EW says though these, and any roles with power (like newspaper editor) should be temporary, elected/delegated and rotated.
That's not really being full time, that's being covered in your expenses , afterall they will be working in the other call centre.
Thats salting. The biggest union salting program in the U.S. is in UNITE HERE. They don't pay salts. You are more reactionary than Chuck Hendricks. Awesome.
Jul 12 2007 17:44
thugarchist wrote:
revol68 wrote:
John. wrote:
EdmontonWobbly wrote:
In the end I like the idea of rotated temporary organisers backed up by part time and possibly permanent administrative staff. Having people hired to file paperwork is not such an issue to me, it's the front line organising that can lead to dangerous egos and power trips.That seems sensible.
Paid staff for things like administration, tech roles like server admin, newspaper publishing/editing is ok.
I can also see that paid organisers could sometimes be necessary, and have been used by every large anarchists + rev syndicalist organisation, including the IWW, CNT, etc. Taking an example say of a large call centre which was self-organising, it might be sensible for workers there to pay people to head to other call centres to try to organise them too, to prevent work just being outsourced. Like EW says though these, and any roles with power (like newspaper editor) should be temporary, elected/delegated and rotated.
That's not really being full time, that's being covered in your expenses , afterall they will be working in the other call centre.
Thats salting. The biggest union salting program in the U.S. is in UNITE HERE. They don't pay salts. You are more reactionary than Chuck Hendricks. Awesome.
You really don't get logical fallacies do you.
I hear the NSDAP were also big on having rallies, eating and breathing.
Jul 12 2007 18:47
EdmontonWobbly wrote:
Catch would you consider union organising 'political work'?
In short, yes. Unless it really is just signing people up for direct debits, in which case it's about the same as a charity mugger.
Jul 12 2007 18:51
Mike Harman wrote:
EdmontonWobbly wrote:
Catch would you consider union organising 'political work'?In short, yes. Unless it really is just signing people up for direct debits, in which case it's about the same as a charity mugger.
Charity muggers need shot but for different reasons, the bastards are worse than Big Issue, even worse is they often use pretty alternative girls and they smile at you and you feel torn.
swines.
Jul 12 2007 19:04
thugarchist wrote:
revol68 wrote:
Quote:
Its not my fault you have an internal contradiction between nutty ultra-leftism and reactionary positions on worker's movements dude.You can't be guilty of a crime that hasn't taken place.
btw when you're clever you call it dialectics
Clever is a synonym for pontificating asshole?
It's funny union hacks seem to suffer the same strain of anit intellectualism as middle managers, a kind of chip on their shoulder that despite their 'practical' skills no one takes them seriously.
Jul 12 2007 19:07
revol68 wrote:
thugarchist wrote:
revol68 wrote:
Quote:
Its not my fault you have an internal contradiction between nutty ultra-leftism and reactionary positions on worker's movements dude.You can't be guilty of a crime that hasn't taken place.
btw when you're clever you call it dialectics
Clever is a synonym for pontificating asshole?
It's funny union hacks seem to suffer the same strain of anit intellectualism as middle managers, a kind of chip on their shoulder that despite their 'practical' skills no one takes them seriously.
Talking like a normal person is anti-intellectual or not caring what you think is anti-intellectual?
Jul 12 2007 19:49
revol, thugarchist, I'm temp banning you both, at least for a couple of hours so I don't have to spend my whole even doing
"delete"
"are you sure?"
"yes"
back, back
"delete"
"are you sure?"
"yes"
back back
Jul 12 2007 21:09
This is very useful as most often these arguments jump straight to ideology and wishful thinking without first considering, even in the abstract, what the actual problems being solved are.
gurrier wrote:
The pros are obvious (to consider the comparison in a somewhat simplified form):If you have one well-defined job that needs doing, equating more or less to 40 person-hours a week, you might get 40 person-hours of productivity out of a full-time paid person.
If you use volunteers, you realistically have no chance of getting one person to do they job - if you're lucky, you might be able to get 8 hours per week work from each volunteer. However, a certain portion of these hours are going to be taken up with communication - what the other volunteers have done, what needs to be done, and communicating the same to the others. Realistically, each volunteer is going to have to spend a couple of hours of their eight getting up to speed, and getting the other volunteers up to speed - meaning each volunteer has only got 6 hours of productivity left over - so you need at least 7 volunteers, each committing 8 hours per week each, to do the job of one-full-timer - you're wasting 2 whole working days of time.
In general, the communication overhead grows much faster than linearly with the amount of people involved - if you have 4 people on a job having to communicate with each other, you have 4*3 = 12 interfaces, if you have 8 people you have 8*7 = 56 interfaces. Also, since no communication channel is 100% reliable, the number of miscommunications grows exponentially with the number of people involved. Meaning that you're going to do a worse job with a larger team, or else you're going to have to add more people - meaning even more wasted time. There's also the fact that training overheads have to be factored in and the greater the size of a team, the greater the probability of churn. There's a rule of thumb called Brooke's law which states that "adding (hu)manpower to a late project makes it later" - and there are surprisingly few known counter examples. Basically, it works like that because, at a certain point, the communication overhead added with each new member is greater than the productivity of that member.
Of course, this all depends on the nature of the role - if it is perfectly partitionable into blocks of arbitrary size, needing no communication between the parts and with simple, well-defined interfaces connecting them, then you can simply add people for more productivity. However such jobs don't exist in reality and there is always some overhead required in partitioning any task.
So, to sum up, the pro is increased productivity and normally better quality work (due to less errors due to miscommunication).
The con is that, all else being equal, a full-timer is in a much stronger position than any ordinary member in terms of their ability to influence the practical politics of the organisation.
I think there is a second con which is very many left political organisations actually make the full times into the leadership (or perhaps vice versa). This pretty much gurantees that you end up with a membership that at best can have an occasional and under informed veto over the direction the full timers wish to take. But often rule are constructed to not even allow this, the British SWP for instance only allows members to caucaus for 6 weeks before their annal conference, it is impossible to effectively do so once your in an organisations bigger then a few dozen.
On the other hand most modern anarchists refuse to recognise the problems gurrier outlines and substitute wishful thinking and ideology. We are simply told there are certain rules and we must follow them on fear of excomunciation. This attitude really holds things back - or rather condemns us to a constant cycle of growth, failure and collapse as wishful thinking hits reality.
Jul 13 2007 00:35
Whoops, just noticed that I made a mistake with the figures above. 4 people gives 4*3/2 = 6 and 8 people gives 8*7/2=28 interfaces. Forgot to divide by two (each person has to communicate with each of the others but each one covers 2 people). The point is still exactly the same though.
Quote:
I think there is a second con which is very many left political organisations actually make the full times into the leadership (or perhaps vice versa). This pretty much gurantees that you end up with a membership that at best can have an occasional and under informed veto over the direction the full timers wish to take. But often rule are constructed to not even allow this, the British SWP for instance only allows members to caucaus for 6 weeks before their annal conference, it is impossible to effectively do so once your in an organisations bigger then a few dozen.
That con just comes about because they see the first con as a good thing though.
Quote:
On the other hand most modern anarchists refuse to recognise the problems gurrier outlines and substitute wishful thinking and ideology. We are simply told there are certain rules and we must follow them on fear of excomunciation. This attitude really holds things back - or rather condemns us to a constant cycle of growth, failure and collapse as wishful thinking hits reality.
Damned straight. I mean, the whole point of such discussions amongst anarchists should be all about trying to find the best ways to minimise the problem - how do we sacrifice as little wasted time, energy and competence as possible without falling prey to the well known pitfalls of professionalisation. Unfortunately, it's not possible to simply divide the problem up on a traditional managerialist basis (i.e. according to the logic that technicians such as printers or programmers just follow orders and so its okay to employ them) as some do above. In reality, anybody who is in a required productive role is in a powerful position to influence an organisation's politics. Printers can spoil copy or deliver it late, website administrators can forget to put up new pages or lose them in the complexity of technicalities - both trades being a black art to 99% of the population. A good example of this being the fact that the most common failure mode of indymedia collectives has been the techie losing an argument and taking his ball home with him.
The question of where the best point of trade-off is, from an anarchist point of view, is difficult and not one that I know the answer to. It's hard to under-estimate people's willingness to let other people take care of stuff in non-crisis situations - and it's a process that has destroyed many bigger and stronger movements in the past, so it's certainly something to be wary of and very cautious about.
Having said that, simply treating the question as a closed historical issue, and deciding to march forever the line of maximum disorganisation, while treating the issue as a problem that has been solved in scripture, is an approach that others might advocate.
Can comment on articles and discussions
Catch would you consider union organising 'political work'?
I think the pros and cons are pretty self evident. Probably the toughest thing to get around is when you take organising entire industries seriously, and when you work in a workplace larger than about 50 people yoo have to have a pretty good mechanism for communication over that large of an area. Also if you add Skip's comments on the NYC organising, the fact that the workers on the floor are working over 110 hours a week, it makes for some pretty serious barriers to self organisation.
I read the Bangladesh garment workers federation uses paid full time organisers because everyone works too much for them not to.
One option is work release, of course that drives you into contractualism and may be used as a bargaining chip to get concessions, or even to try and use the organisation to demobilise the workers. Using black listed workers is a good bet, but in the long term its better for those workers to get back into the straight workforce, its not like the IWW is going to give them a career they are going to want to stick with forever anyways.
In the end I like the idea of rotated temporary organisers backed up by part time and possibly permanent administrative staff. Having people hired to file paperwork is not such an issue to me, it's the front line organising that can lead to dangerous egos and power trips.