Persuader

“After spending such a lot of time and life in the union, to switch sides and be a unionbuster, wow, what is up with that?”

Well, Fury & Grace is the long answer I wrote at the time. Here’s my short response to that question now.

First by way of ‘qualifying’ as they put it in twelve-step meetings: here’s where I and my views on organized labor come from.

I’ve spent most of my adult working life in and around organized labor. I did ten of those years on the union side as an elected leader, with most of the time spent as Treasurer then President of AFT Vermont and President of the Vermont AFL-CIO. I was even on the primary Gubernatorial ballot for the Working Families Party some year, either 2012 or 2014. Boy that was weird. But my union was very politically active, and I was a registered lobbyist for many sessions.

I put my name on ballots and ran for office. I had a simple platform every time I ran: “Organize more members into the union and make our existing unions stronger.” I made it clear that that’s what I would do with the union if I were elected, and I did my very best to deliver on my campaign promises. I learned all I could about how organizing and campaigning and legislative campaigns work. I think I must have made as many mistakes and errors of judgment as I could manage. I did some things I regret.

We funded and ran a Single-Payer Healthcare organization I’m still very proud of, “The Vermont Cure” to support passage of that legislation in Vermont. The whole effort by the Vermont political establishment was ultimately a travesty; ask absolutely anyone in Vermont politics in the 2010-2016 era. If you find someone who thinks it was great, they need extended rest and relaxation.

We had elbows, and we used them. I caught quite a few myself, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Except I hated it as much as I loved it, and it was very bad for me as a human being. I learned to push people and see people as targets. I learned to steel myself for encounters where I knew I would be willfully causing another individual human being pain because it was what advancing my side required. To learn how to be an organizer I had to learn how people’s emotions work in specific ways, and how to make groups of them do what we needed them to do. Not many people put it so baldly, but as far as I could see, if you leave out the quasi-inspiring language, that’s what it is that you’re doing when you’re organizing people.

I heard a lot of rhetoric about democracy and values, and then I also know what we did and how we did it. I heard nice-sounding stories about abstractions that gave the listener permission to treat actual individual people as objects.

As an aside this seems to be one lesson we can safely take away from the horror shows of the 20th century: Never ever do harm to an individual human being in service of an abstraction, like ‘Winning an election’, or ‘God.’

I saw what it was that I was learning how to do, and be. I don’t speak of other union activists. I do speak of myself and my own manipulative cast of mind. Be critical of the stated motives of all elected people. That’s your hot tip of the day.

I saw that the only way for me to go on doing it was to either embrace it as a dark art that someone has to master and so why not me, or else delude myself and live in willful ignorance.

Ignorance of my own mistakes, for one thing. I was a union activist because it served a lot of needs for me. I was under-engaged by my job as an academic librarian. I got involved in union stuff because it was interesting and real, like books and ideas.

It was new and novel. I met the oddest sorts of folks. Odd to my sheltered eye. But they were all serious people who read and thought about things and then did them. These were union people. I liked them. I just said yes to things in the union, got there early and stayed late and before you know it I was walking out the door of the Old Socialist Labor Hall in Barre in 2016. In between I did all manner of things. Lots of it I’m really proud of, lots of it I’m not. And for the most part the details all involve real people. I was The Boss to many of them, whether literal or figurative, and so I hope I’m successful enough at saying away from the details that aren’t mine to share. Errors of judgment, zigging instead of zagging, those don’t stick in the mind. Other things do, though. Times I did things that I know hurt people because they were what I had to do to get where I wanted to go.

But that’s just not how it goes in your head when you’re behaving like that. I knew, I Knew, I KNEW that if we could get where we needed to be it would all be worth it. You need to be hard in the union world, not all soft and sentimental. You’ve got to shame people you don’t like and get them out of the way by hook or by crook. They’re the reason the plan isn’t working. I developed the uncomfortable hypothesis that the plan was never going to work, and we would always be able to find a villain that explained why. In the union we’d call them ‘Reactionaries.’ Just as soon as we could cleanse our ranks of them things would really start humming.

After some time, I no longer thought that our plans were going to work out very well ever, really. Then it got much harder to push people. Why? Because banging on people a little now for something better later, that’s sort of something you can get your head around. But if there’s not really much on the other side except what we’d call burnt turf and a radically polarized work environment where about half the people feel aggrieved and victimized by the other half no matter which side wins, that just looked awful to me, like the dead opposite of what we wanted. I felt this dynamic was clear to me, and yet there was so much incentive to just go on looking the other way and not notice it.

I am easily as capable as the next guy of living in ignorance, but just staying blind to what I was doing after I became aware of it, I didn't want to choose that. For me choosing to stay deluded is choosing death. I am not saying that I believe that my views are inherent in being an organizer. I am saying this is true about how I viewed what I was doing. For me to assert that our whole enterprise was worth it because of what lay in the future would have been dishonest.

I rue that I made choices that landed me in that stance toward other people, and I am thankful that I did not spend more of my life viewing things like that. But that was a slow unfolding over ten turbulent years on one side and five on the other as a persuader. Most of the time I was just embroiled in drama.

To make a 90,000 word story very short, after ten years on the union side I just couldn’t get in front of what we were doing anymore. Not because the general idea of unions doesn’t make sense. Not because I don’t know that many have more bargaining power than one. Not because after all that time I suddenly decided that unions are corrupt and all about the money.

No, it was none of that. I just could not get in front of people and sell them on the realities of the whole system I was part of. The law, the regulations, the long culture that’s developed within unions as organizations, the overwhelming incentive on organizations to resist unions for economic reasons that simply are valid. No, the whole thing is just going to have to rely on others if it wants to survive.

But I had experience in an odd little backwater of the economy, and I knew all about the NLRA. The National Labor Relations Act is the law that governs the part of organized labor that most folks are thinking about when they think about unions: workers at jobs voting on whether to be represented by a union at their job in a warehouse, hospital, factory or store.

The entire system of Unions work very differently in other parts of the economy, such as in the building trades unions for carpenters and plumbers, hiring hall unions for folks like longshoreman and seamen, and unions in the entertainment and creative world, like the WGA and DGA. I have zero experience in any of those realms and they are only somewhat less inscrutable to me than they are to anyone else outside them.

And I know from direct experience that the overwhelming majority of voters in union representation elections just have no reason to already know the rules of the game, and they’re mostly stuck just hearing from the two sides. I get a paycheck from management sure, but that’s the first thing I acknowledge and then they can evaluate what I say however they like.

Most of what I do is give campaign advice, train managers, and do “Persuader” meetings. Anyone who gets a paycheck from a company or organization to talk to employees about the NLRA and organized labor generally has to register with the Department of Labor as a ‘Persuader’ which just sounds really cool. It’s neck-and-neck with ‘Unionbuster’ for coolness, but that one is fraught because it’s also a slur, and who likes to be slurred?

Sadly the title ‘Persuader’ puts me at a severe disadvantage because I don’t particularly think it’s possible to persuade people of things. I used to try, back when I first started. I thought I had persuaded people of things on the union side, but now I don’t really think so.

As a new Persuader I wanted to make sure people were prepared for a lot of the standard bits of sleight-of-hand one learns on the union side. But that’s just me inflicting my views on them, and I saw that most people in meetings really just want to understand what’s going on. If I’d wanted to feel like I was leading people on I would have stayed on the union side.

When I’m doing a meeting and the audience and I look at each other, I can see that may of them are really actually hoping that I’m going to be honest with them. Most of them feel they are in a difficult situation they don’t understand, but which has the potential to greatly effect their jobs. They know the union wants a yes-vote. They know the company wants a no-vote. They don’t necessarily know a lot else and they are often agitated. I experience that as an opportunity to connect with my fellow humans. They are vulnerable, and they are willing to trust me, if they see, hear, and feel that I am being straight with them, no matter who pays me. It feels to me now like anything except respectful engagement with someone in that scenario is manipulative, and just too complicated for me to deal with.

I’m sometimes at a worksite for months. I want to conduct myself so I have the best relationship I can with the voters. If I feed them hogwash on day one, there’s not much chance they’ll come to me with a question on day 200, and I’ll feel dirty every day in between. I see this happen all the time with the union on campaigns. I’ve worked campaigns where the entire thing evaporated in the union’s face because an organizer flagrantly mislead the voters, whether out of intention or ignorance. Nothing the union could say or do had much effect after that.

Developing campaign advice is often challenging, but it doesn’t feel like work. I’ve been a campaigner a long time, I like it. My political instincts run in the background automatically, and they try very hard to figure out what’s going on in any campaign.

The hard part has been finding a stance with the voters. By ‘stance’ I mean as in the stance between an audience and a performer.

Who are they to me? Employees are ‘voters in elections’ to me, and each conversation and meeting is an opportunity for me to practice Respectful Engagement.

It’s a sort of zen practice I made up for myself, and the best way I’ve found to do my job. I just never know every time I talk to a voter what they are going to say and what attitudes they are going to project onto me. But If I am open enough it doesn’t really matter that much what they say. We can have as good a conversation as they want it to be.

It’s a demanding job, and everyone has to come up with their own way of going about it. Most voters I interact with get the purpose of my meetings and are grateful someone can tell them what is going on. Some are union partisans who can’t stand my existence, and some are union opponents who think it’s about time the company ‘did something to stop the union’, and why did they only hire one unionbuster?

That’s what makes ‘unionbuster’ such a strange word. Sometimes when people say it with contempt I hate it as much as I hated people making fun of my big front teeth when I was in second grade, or anything about my body, really. Once a fat kid...

But sometimes people call me a union buster like it’s the name of their favorite superhero. I’ve been brought cookies. I even ate them once, with severe trepidation.

See, I called people unionbuster all the time back in the day. It was reflexive, like a swear. I was in an aggressive union, and I walked across the stage at a public event to whisper “You’re a unionbuster” in the ear of the Executive Director of another union. His crime was not supporting a very cutting-edge project we had going to organize childcare workers. I only remember it because it I relished whispering it at him and seeing that he didn’t really like it. So I dunno. I can’t maintain a lot of ire about it. I’ve been in a high-conflict full-contact line of work for some time.

When I tell folks that I’ve been a union goon and a union buster, I also tell them it’s like a Rorschach test for them: since I’ve definitely been on the side the oppose and the side they like, I just get to see how they choose to engage with me.

So If you meet me on a job somewhere, just go ahead and call me a union buster. That’ll be a good Rorschach test for me. How will I choose to engage with you? I dunno. I hope I’ve had my coffee.

And if you’re in need of a persuader or other labor consulting, this is more or less what your employees will get: I’ll do my best to create an atmosphere where we can have a meeting that met people are glad they attended. They’ll understand the rules and the basic ramifications, and then they’ll vote.

I’ll talk with them, walk them through the rules, tell them how they generally tend to benefit either one side or the other, and listen to whatever they have on their minds and answer questions. That’s the softest approach I know of, and it works wonders for their morale for a while. But if you win an election and don’t listen to them and don’t make any changes, I’ll be willing to make a wager that the union will be back in a year and you’ll lose.

If I don’t think persuading people is possible why do companies pay me? What I’m confident telling clients is that what I can do is make sure the voters know what they’re voting on and that they don’t learn everything from the union side only. After that, the voters will make their decisions based on their overall relationship with the job. That’s just a simple feature of how these elections go, and there’s no pixie dust that can change that for either side. For some clients that’s like a reassuring daydream. For others it’s their worst nightmare. I know the feeling, and I can’t really help.

There’s a Rorschach test for everyone in the wild world of union organizing.

Is it a Butterfly or a Bat?