Writing out of frustration:
Member-run unions are, apparently, great, right up until the moment that your members start telling you that they would like to not receive quite so many mailings related to the upcoming political election. At that point, they somehow (get a team of monks on it!) transition from members whose opinions we value and nominally represent into whiners who need to suck it the fuck up and realize that if Obama loses this election we're all going to hell.
I agree that unions have the right and duty to inform their members about the upcoming election, who the union supports, and why. I fully accept that union members genuinely value receiving the union's opinion and facts about the candidates. I think our greatest resource is our willingness to hit the streets and organize, while the Republicans split their time between the pews and the links. I think this election is very important.
I also happen to believe that one of our greatest strengths is our willingness to listen to our members. We are not thundering from the pulpit, we are not hinting that everyone will lose their jobs if they don't vote for the pro-business party. We listen to our members. We can tailor our message to their needs. We shape them and, in turn, they shape us. We're all in it together.
That's why I refuse to see members who complain about the relentless propagandizing from their union as anything less than brothers and sisters who are trying to tell me that the union's tactics are not sitting right with them. And I'm not talking about Republican members here. I am talking about people who are protesting the sheer volume of the propaganda they receive from their union(s), from mailings to phone calls. We need to listen to them at the risk of alienating them. Only listening to the voices that agree with us is what got us into this fucking mess in the first place. (I mean that sentence as broad as it reads. The whole idea of the organizing model is that we engage all of our brothers and sisters. If the organizing model is not the way out of every mess we're in, I still haven't heard what is).
Anyway, back to the grind. You might be surprised to find that your union supports all the Democrats and is against all the Republicans. You will receive 1-2 mailings per day to that effect for the next 38 days.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
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9 comments:
A couple things occur to me here.
First off, Oregon might be atypical in that the campaign season is a bit more compressed. Ballots go out, if I'm not mistaken, on the Oct. 20, so the various organizations might feel compelled to do saturation contacts now.
That said, the data shows that the more political contacts a member receives from their union (ie face-to-face convos, phone calls, mailings, etc.), the more likely they are to support the union position. The goal as I understand it is to contact each member 7-10 times, with at least 2-3 of those being personal contacts. If that's what it takes to win an election, I'm willing to put up with a handful of complaints or members resigning their membership.
I don't know if there's a contact level at which the law of diminishing returns kicks in, or that actually turns people against what you are trying to accomplish.
Finally, I'm not sure what the current volume of contacts are around your parts. If it is 1-2 a day - and I imagine that the contacts are coming from different organizations (the state fed, the national, AFL-CIO, etc.) - it suggests a certain lack of coordination on the part of the different groups in their campaigning. This not only pisses off a few members, but it seems to not be the most efficient use of resources.
Well, I read the same thread that you started and are now complaining about, and I can't quite understand what you're objecting to. Yes, AP is passionate about the issue, but the most cogent thing anybody said came from MS, and I think it reflects what advocates of the organizing model believe, and pretty obviously so.
--snip--
As the TAA is one of the most politically active grad locals, I have some experience with this issue. What we've been experiencing is a few, a very few, members upset with the number of political PHONE CALLS they receive from us. We've had no complaints about emails. And almost all of the phone call complaints have been relayed onto us via stewards. These complaints, in my view, are excellent organizing opportunities to talk about the importance of electoral politics, and I feel that no complaint about excessive contact should be let slide without a follow up organizing conversation. If they're insistant, we take them off our call list.
--snip--
I got no beef with what AP said. I know she's right.
I completely disagree about what MS said. How, exactly, is calling a member who complains about something the union is doing a whiner and a weak member the organizing model? Again, these people are not complaining about the union being involved in politics or who the union is supporting.
They are, again, objecting to receiving 1-2 mailings per day, plus phone calls and home visits. It's not like they are trying to buck something the union voted to do, they are just tired of the union harassment (sorry for the buzz word).
I also think something is wrong if a member comes in the office to complain about something the union is doing and the union's first reaction is that that person is a whiner. Or a weak member. I don't care what the issue is.
Sometimes that has to be our reaction, because we know there is nothing we can do about it. Even in those times, though, we know that there is an "issue" out there.
I don't think we have the same sorts of organizing conversations.
Or rather, I think we do, but I think that you don't call the organizing conversations "organizing conversations".
I don't see where MS is calling anyone a whiner. I think that he is saying it's an opportunity to have a conversation with someone about why the union leadership (whether it be local, state, or national) is doing what it's doing. Maybe the union leadership gets a grudging acknowledgment that the member sees the point but doesn't like the incessant phone calls. Maybe they are still taken off of the list. Maybe they resign as members in a few cases.
But, in my experience (which, I should point out is much less than everyone else here), general members have a very limited knowledge of successful tactics. I think that we should listen to all members and I think that we should ask members "How would you work to get people out to vote and knowledgeable about the election?" More often than not, their answers will be very naive and/or ineffective and you can say something like "We tried that--or others have tried that--and this is why we think this is the best way." Occasionally, there are really great ideas and you can work with that member to implement their ideas. I'm sure that both Dave and DR have had these conversations far more frequently than I have -- I fail to see how this conversation discounts the opinions of that member.
I don't think that we should label anyone - but, I also think that we should be realistic that active members have more experience in campaign tactics than the general member does. And, it is just as insulting to the active member to say that everyone's opinions on all matters on all points because it basically discounts the time they have put in gaining that experience - which can be just as disorganizing. I'm not talking about policy matters where everyone's opinions should be heard, but on most strategic and certainly almost all tactical matters.
I don't see how this is that different from people resigning their membership or objecting to the tactical decision to strike or hold some kind of action. Yes, you'll lose some members and some support, but the gains are bigger than your losses.
Just to clarify, DR and I were talking about two different "MS"es. My "MS" responded off list, but I didn't catch it.
I don't agree with most of what you all said, other than, no, I don't have a lot of conversations with members wherein they express an opinion to me and I try to help them see the error of their ways. I might disagree with them privately, but I generally take their opinion/desire and do my best to accommodate it. I might argue with leadership, but not terribly often with members off the street.
And it's not like the leadership of the GTFF decided to send a bunch of mailings. If the GTFF held a vote about whether to stop all mailings from AFT, I am fairly confident of how that vote would go. That's why we don't bring these things up for a vote.
I think the MS who posted online and I essentially agree; he's just expressing it much more diplomatically.
But I'm confused about what the offline MS said and can't seem to reverse-engineer it from this discussion. Can someone clarify?
I can't endorse "weak," but I might get on board with "whiners".
AP, the passionate
Now that I understand the conversation better (thanks, DR), let me add a couple of things.
The structure of my email mimics my approach to a hypothetical member who complains (once I have listened to him/her, of course--by the way, I'd be interested in the gender breakdown of these complaints):
1. explain that there are technical impediments to getting the mail to stop, and that these impediments are related to things that are good about us, then
2. explain that there is good data showing that this tactic works in the pursuit of our strategy, and important reasons why other tactics will be less effective and finally
3. point out that this election is about more than us and our feelings; it's also about other people who are in even worse circumstances, and sometimes we have to suck up some extra mail in the interest of knowing that we did everything we could--everything that data has proven to work--in the service of this particular strategy to fix the problem.
Then I'd try to recruit the person to knock on doors.
I did say that I had "lost patience," by the way. I'm not claiming that patience is not an organizer's virtue (most of the time), just that even good organizers can and do lose it--indeed, that losing it is sometimes the best organizing tactic available.
I do not believe that we are all going to hell if Obama loses, but the city of Detroit is already 3/4 there.
Also, this particular state fed does not endorse all the Democrats and none of the Republicans.
Sitting around waiting for members to tell us how to approach them is not the work of an organizer. They're paying us for something more than that.
AP, still passionate
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