Workplace Organizing and Member Development Checklist

Submitted by Juan Conatz on July 5, 2011

Below are two checklists we can use to help us be systematic and deliberate about developing our fellow workers into good wobbly organizers.

1. Checklist for people we’re working with in an organizing campaign

Goals: Make this person committed to the campaign, make this person join the IWW, make this person into an organizer, make this person become a good wobbly

- Have an organizer do a one on one with them

- Attend an organizing meeting (meeting to plan an action, meeting to discuss goals, etc)

- Attend a short Organizer Training (OT)

- Attend a two day OT

- Go with an organizer on a one on one and take the co-pilot role, debrief afterward

- Go with an organizer on a one on one and take the lead role, debrief afterward

- Set up a one on one with a co-worker on their own

- Hold a one on one with a co-worker on their own

- Participate in a job action

- Join the IWW (and do the stuff on the first checklist, the member checklist)

2. Checklist for people who just became IWW members

Goals: build relationships between new member and other IWW members, educate members so they can understand and make use of IWW procedures and democracy, build people’s sense that being an IWW member is part of who they are

- Attend branch social event

- Attend GMB meeting

- Attend new member orientation

- Report at GMB meeting about IWW activity at their job or that they’re otherwise involved in

- Attend some local public event with the IWW (picket, demonstration, speak out, etc)

- Attend 3 GMB meetings

- Give a report at a branch meeting about an IWW activity somewhere else (this involves calling at least one person in another branch and having a conversation with them about what’s going on in their branch/campaign)

- Participate in a branch committee

- Chair a GMB meeting

- Attend a meeting about organizing (either long term drive or short term issue/workplace action) other than in their own workplace, debrief afterward

- Read and discuss IWW literature and pamphlets

- Attend 6 GMB meetings

- Deliver a report or otherwise speak publicly as a representative of the IWW at a local event/meeting (and report back to the GMB at a meeting and/or by email)

- Write something for the branch newsletter (or, have someone else interview this person and turn it into a co-written article)

- Play a key role at some local public action with the IWW – picket captain, hand out leaflets, etc, (and report back to the GMB at a meeting and/or by email)

- Write something for the Industrial Worker (or, have someone else interview this person and turn it into a co-written article)

- Attend a Union-wide Event (and report back to the GMB at a meeting and/or by email)

- Deliver a report (speak publicy) as a representative of the branch at a union-wide event (and report back to the GMB at a meeting and/or by email)

- Participate in a committee of the international (and report back to the GMB)

- Start organizing in their workplace (and therefore go through the other checklist)

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