Dual-Carding!
Disclaimers:
I don't represent the IWW as a whole. Hopefully that's obvious.
I haven't done my homework. I've been doing work-work, so I haven't read other wobs' stories about dual-carding, or even looked up the rules about it in the constitution.
Context:
I started working at Starbucks in September 2010. I woke up, activism-wise, during the uprising in 2011 and, after some difficulty tracking them down, joined the Starbucks Workers' Union and the IWW in February 2012. During my semester back in school (Fall 2012) I joined the TAA, and I continued paying in and organizing for them after I finished my degree.
A couple months ago, I heard from a fellow worker (that's code for "member of the IWW" although sometimes I use it more broadly) that the people coordinating the fast food worker strikes in Milwaukee were coming to Madison and asking for support from local groups. I couldn't go to most of the meetings because I had to work (at Starbucks). There didn't seem to be any information written down and I only got the URL for the website yesterday, Google having failed me, so all of my information about the campaign came second-hand, and for all I know, some of it is STILL erroneous. (Corrections of my facts are totally accepted. Just remember to sign your comments.)
Local organizations, including the IWW, were asked to do the on-the-ground work of "organizing," which meant getting low-wage workers to sign strike pledges or contact cards (the IWW has a different definition of "organizing"). I heard a rumor that the contact cards were being used in some cases as authorization cards calling for union representation, and declined to ask people to sign them--on the grounds that I didn't want to organize for a union other than my own.
But Zee! You are saying. Wasn't the TAA a union other than your own? Don't you ask people to sign cards for them all the time? How come you are willing to dual-card into the TAA and not the Madison Low-Wage Worker Thing (FF15 for short)?
Deciding to Dual-Card
Dual-carding into the TAA was obvious. The IWW and the TAA aren't competitors, the TAA was already established, and both unions share democratic traditions, in theory and practice. I wore my IWW hat for Starbucks and related campaigns and my TAA hat on campus. I had two jobs, and a union for each job. I carried my IWW rigging when I went organizing for the TAA, but only on the off-chance that I'd meet a labor radical who seemed like a good philosophical fit, or someone who wasn't represented by one of the established unions who needed a "grievance procedure" based on direct action. (I haven't met anyone so far that I thought needed that conversation.) I attended organizer trainings under the aegis of each union, and considered it cross-pollination.
Dual-carding into FF15... is different. To start with, although the IWW allows dual-cards, other unions don't recognize IWW membership as meaning anything (to date, the lead FF15 staffer has yet to acknowledge in my presence that the IWW EXISTS)--so when other unionists bring up IWW "dual-carding," what they really mean is IWW members acting exactly like other members but paying dues twice. (Members of socialist parties fairly often propose this "strategy," because it's how socialist parties work.) But the IWW isn't a political party or a philosophy. It's an organizing drive, and it collectively believes that everyone should be members--that you don't have to be a labor leader to be a good Wob, you just have to be a worker. It organizes unions, not as separate entities, but as branches of itself, coordinated nationally but bargaining locally. It has won a couple of victories, getting recognized representation in small companies and concessions from big ones. Its national organization also protects local power and local control.
FF15 wants to organize the people I've been talking union to for two years now, the co-workers I see on a daily basis. Moreover, it wants to limit their voice to a few mandated actions around a very small list of talking points.
Side Point About How I Don't Hate FF15 That Was Too Long For A Parenthetical
If you want national legislative change, you need a national campaign, a massive budget for advertising and legal advice, full-time staff to coordinate everything, and goals that reduce to easily-digestible sound bytes that everyone can rally around. National legislative change raising fast-food worker wages is a good thing. The loss of democratic control is fine--SEIU wants a higher minimum wage, and they can afford to campaign for it. I'm glad that they're making this effort.
Moreover, the strategy of doing lots of little strikes as practice runs to teach people how to strike and make them less afraid of action is a good idea.
And the SEIU has a history of winning meaningful victories--better pay and benefits for huge numbers of people. Their Justice for Janitors thing was literally a textbook case when I was in school.
They should keep doing all these things. Better them than me.
Anyway, back to what I was saying. I have spent a year and a half building credibility with my co-workers, listening to their complaints, talking to them about how together we could make work suck less. The low wages are a big deal, probably the biggest single point--but they're not the only thing, and they're the only thing FF15 is really equipped to deal with. I don't feel comfortable signing up for a campaign that may or may not be a union, that doesn't allow its organizers, much less the workers who are intended to be its constituency, access to its lists, its plans, its budget.
That said, a union is better than no union. If FF15 calls an election, I will vote for them. I will tell other people to vote for them. I will swallow every nasty thing I've ever thought about the SEIU until the election is over and then form a reformist caucus. They are bigger and better-funded than the IWW. So if they're winning, or even if they're just at a decision point where they have a chance for making real change, yes, I will put my weight (what little I have) behind them. I even talk them up to low-wage workers as is, reservations aside. They are doing this, someone needs to do it, and I don't have the staff to try to do more than the Madison Starbuckses myself.
What do I want? I want recognition that the IWW has been organizing Starbuckses in Madison. I want an open discussion of terms of alliance. What I've gotten so far is a line of "you're with us or you're with the bosses," which is not helpful. I know which side I'm on, boys, but, strange though it may seem, SEIU isn't the only union over here. The IWW has a different, and I think complimentary, approach to organizing, focusing on committee development and tactical variety at the point of production, which could fit very well under an SEIU air war.
Also, there's an I-was-here-first quality: the TAA was organizing grad students long before I got there. They were formed democratically out of their constituency, and they belong, so I yield right-of-way and organize for them. FF15 is new, and they haven't shown respect for right-of-way in Starbucks organizing.
(Nor do I have any illusions that my little plucky band of guerrillas is going to win the war--that's for the guys with the airplanes, or at least giant purple buses. But we're equipped to deal with the small stuff, and support big stuff.)
If I know a worker who is ready to join a union, I'm going to ask them to join the IWW. It's about money. The IWW is a shoestring organization pretty much everywhere. The $9 a month that a worker pays in makes a significant difference in a committee's budget. SEIU is, I assume, in this thing partly for the money (although I hope that most people in the organization at least believe that the money then goes to helping yet more people...) as well, but I don't think the number of workers the SWU can reasonably "claim"--even every worker in every Starbucks in Wisconsin, which is waaaaay overstating our influence--is enough to really hurt their bottom line. Whereas it IS enough to offer an example of an alternative way to run a union, based on worker empowerment and radical democracy.
I suppose I should say, FF15 organizers are welcome to come talk to my co-workers, who deserve a chance to be members of a union that doesn't ask much of them beyond money (and gives them more money in exchange). But since I'm already here, that's not for me to do--my calling is to offer them the IWW, with its different set of flaws and expecations. So I won't dual-card until it's democratically decided by my co-workers that another union is the right one for my shop.
I don't represent the IWW as a whole. Hopefully that's obvious.
I haven't done my homework. I've been doing work-work, so I haven't read other wobs' stories about dual-carding, or even looked up the rules about it in the constitution.
Context:
I started working at Starbucks in September 2010. I woke up, activism-wise, during the uprising in 2011 and, after some difficulty tracking them down, joined the Starbucks Workers' Union and the IWW in February 2012. During my semester back in school (Fall 2012) I joined the TAA, and I continued paying in and organizing for them after I finished my degree.
A couple months ago, I heard from a fellow worker (that's code for "member of the IWW" although sometimes I use it more broadly) that the people coordinating the fast food worker strikes in Milwaukee were coming to Madison and asking for support from local groups. I couldn't go to most of the meetings because I had to work (at Starbucks). There didn't seem to be any information written down and I only got the URL for the website yesterday, Google having failed me, so all of my information about the campaign came second-hand, and for all I know, some of it is STILL erroneous. (Corrections of my facts are totally accepted. Just remember to sign your comments.)
Local organizations, including the IWW, were asked to do the on-the-ground work of "organizing," which meant getting low-wage workers to sign strike pledges or contact cards (the IWW has a different definition of "organizing"). I heard a rumor that the contact cards were being used in some cases as authorization cards calling for union representation, and declined to ask people to sign them--on the grounds that I didn't want to organize for a union other than my own.
But Zee! You are saying. Wasn't the TAA a union other than your own? Don't you ask people to sign cards for them all the time? How come you are willing to dual-card into the TAA and not the Madison Low-Wage Worker Thing (FF15 for short)?
Deciding to Dual-Card
Dual-carding into the TAA was obvious. The IWW and the TAA aren't competitors, the TAA was already established, and both unions share democratic traditions, in theory and practice. I wore my IWW hat for Starbucks and related campaigns and my TAA hat on campus. I had two jobs, and a union for each job. I carried my IWW rigging when I went organizing for the TAA, but only on the off-chance that I'd meet a labor radical who seemed like a good philosophical fit, or someone who wasn't represented by one of the established unions who needed a "grievance procedure" based on direct action. (I haven't met anyone so far that I thought needed that conversation.) I attended organizer trainings under the aegis of each union, and considered it cross-pollination.
Dual-carding into FF15... is different. To start with, although the IWW allows dual-cards, other unions don't recognize IWW membership as meaning anything (to date, the lead FF15 staffer has yet to acknowledge in my presence that the IWW EXISTS)--so when other unionists bring up IWW "dual-carding," what they really mean is IWW members acting exactly like other members but paying dues twice. (Members of socialist parties fairly often propose this "strategy," because it's how socialist parties work.) But the IWW isn't a political party or a philosophy. It's an organizing drive, and it collectively believes that everyone should be members--that you don't have to be a labor leader to be a good Wob, you just have to be a worker. It organizes unions, not as separate entities, but as branches of itself, coordinated nationally but bargaining locally. It has won a couple of victories, getting recognized representation in small companies and concessions from big ones. Its national organization also protects local power and local control.
FF15 wants to organize the people I've been talking union to for two years now, the co-workers I see on a daily basis. Moreover, it wants to limit their voice to a few mandated actions around a very small list of talking points.
Side Point About How I Don't Hate FF15 That Was Too Long For A Parenthetical
If you want national legislative change, you need a national campaign, a massive budget for advertising and legal advice, full-time staff to coordinate everything, and goals that reduce to easily-digestible sound bytes that everyone can rally around. National legislative change raising fast-food worker wages is a good thing. The loss of democratic control is fine--SEIU wants a higher minimum wage, and they can afford to campaign for it. I'm glad that they're making this effort.
Moreover, the strategy of doing lots of little strikes as practice runs to teach people how to strike and make them less afraid of action is a good idea.
And the SEIU has a history of winning meaningful victories--better pay and benefits for huge numbers of people. Their Justice for Janitors thing was literally a textbook case when I was in school.
They should keep doing all these things. Better them than me.
Anyway, back to what I was saying. I have spent a year and a half building credibility with my co-workers, listening to their complaints, talking to them about how together we could make work suck less. The low wages are a big deal, probably the biggest single point--but they're not the only thing, and they're the only thing FF15 is really equipped to deal with. I don't feel comfortable signing up for a campaign that may or may not be a union, that doesn't allow its organizers, much less the workers who are intended to be its constituency, access to its lists, its plans, its budget.
That said, a union is better than no union. If FF15 calls an election, I will vote for them. I will tell other people to vote for them. I will swallow every nasty thing I've ever thought about the SEIU until the election is over and then form a reformist caucus. They are bigger and better-funded than the IWW. So if they're winning, or even if they're just at a decision point where they have a chance for making real change, yes, I will put my weight (what little I have) behind them. I even talk them up to low-wage workers as is, reservations aside. They are doing this, someone needs to do it, and I don't have the staff to try to do more than the Madison Starbuckses myself.
What do I want? I want recognition that the IWW has been organizing Starbuckses in Madison. I want an open discussion of terms of alliance. What I've gotten so far is a line of "you're with us or you're with the bosses," which is not helpful. I know which side I'm on, boys, but, strange though it may seem, SEIU isn't the only union over here. The IWW has a different, and I think complimentary, approach to organizing, focusing on committee development and tactical variety at the point of production, which could fit very well under an SEIU air war.
Also, there's an I-was-here-first quality: the TAA was organizing grad students long before I got there. They were formed democratically out of their constituency, and they belong, so I yield right-of-way and organize for them. FF15 is new, and they haven't shown respect for right-of-way in Starbucks organizing.
(Nor do I have any illusions that my little plucky band of guerrillas is going to win the war--that's for the guys with the airplanes, or at least giant purple buses. But we're equipped to deal with the small stuff, and support big stuff.)
If I know a worker who is ready to join a union, I'm going to ask them to join the IWW. It's about money. The IWW is a shoestring organization pretty much everywhere. The $9 a month that a worker pays in makes a significant difference in a committee's budget. SEIU is, I assume, in this thing partly for the money (although I hope that most people in the organization at least believe that the money then goes to helping yet more people...) as well, but I don't think the number of workers the SWU can reasonably "claim"--even every worker in every Starbucks in Wisconsin, which is waaaaay overstating our influence--is enough to really hurt their bottom line. Whereas it IS enough to offer an example of an alternative way to run a union, based on worker empowerment and radical democracy.
I suppose I should say, FF15 organizers are welcome to come talk to my co-workers, who deserve a chance to be members of a union that doesn't ask much of them beyond money (and gives them more money in exchange). But since I'm already here, that's not for me to do--my calling is to offer them the IWW, with its different set of flaws and expecations. So I won't dual-card until it's democratically decided by my co-workers that another union is the right one for my shop.