Tag: how-to
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18 Tips from a Veteran Union Organizer
Workers need bread, but they need roses too. Labor unions generally focus on negotiating wages, benefits, fair work rules, and safety. That’s all very essential. But one thing we often fail to do is acknowledge workers’ need for recognition. People have dreams and values, along with a desire to be respected and to connect to…
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To Build our Power, We Must First Understand our Employer’s Power
While many unions do corporate research to design organizing or contract campaigns, it’s usually just a staff project. The members, and even local leaders, are expected to take marching orders from the staff team. This approach is backwards, write the authors. Their model involves members in the research right from the start, all the way…
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How to Organize Against Authoritarian Creep(s)
Simply, we can’t do the same things as before because what we’ve done wasn’t enough. Living in these “interesting” times, it bears remembering that in crisis there is also opportunity. We find ourselves in a closing space — our inclusive civil society under attack. There is an element of claustrophobia bearing down upon those of…
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How Unions Can Fight Back Against Deportations
The battle won’t be fought only in the courts. “We need to expand our base beyond the already converted,” Goodner says. “We need to go and talk to people, including Trump supporters, and win them over one by one, the same way organizers do when they organize a union. So we have a plan to…
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Management Rights: A Pitfall When Negotiating Your First Contract
In the past year, retail and service sector workers have started organizing unions with success in companies like Starbucks and Amazon. The negotiation process for their first contracts is challenging, with employers seeking language that weakens the union. Management rights clauses have become a point of contention, as employers aim to limit union rights. Changes…
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‘It is hijacking my brain’ – How to Help People Addicted to Social Media to Cut the Craving
Problematic social media addiction is associated with a host of negative effects including moodiness, anxiety and an excessive amount of time and energy spent on or thinking about social media. People with clinical social media addiction levels experience those same effects but to a great degree, with their habit patterns around social media resembling that…
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How to Organize in High Turnover Jobs
By Jenny Brown for Labor Notes, published May 22nd 2023 Original article here. When the Amazon Labor Union first submitted union authorization cards, “we had to withdraw and file again,” recalled organizing committee member Justine Medina, “because Amazon challenged over 1,000 of our signatures saying they no longer worked there.” The sky-high turnover at the…
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How to stay cool in hot weather
Though access to air conditioning helps prevent deaths from heat, relying mainly on AC may not be an ideal solution. In urban areas with a lot of AC use, waste heat from the units can make the local environment even hotter. And the carbon pollution caused by running AC can fuel further climate change, leading…
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When activist burnout was a problem 50 years ago, this group found a solution
Our first decision was to adopt the proposal of long-time activists George and Lillian Willoughby to put training together with cooperative living, in a center. Learning together, in a supportive community, would handle anxiety by emphasizing over and over, “It’s not all about you, it’s about us. Together we’ll learn to make a difference.”
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Liberatory Education 101
First, attend to how you see yourself in the process of radicalizing others. Are you treating other people as vessels in which you can pour your “superior” knowledge into? If so, the radicalisation process, if it proceeds at all, is likely to be an unnecessarily arduous one. Liberatory education is a process of mutual growth and is…
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