Notes Organizer
Niobe Hennigan
Workers at the Orlando Sentinel are among the thousands of media workers who have organized unions in recent years. The NewsGuild's member organizer program has trained dozens of rank-and-file members, many of them fresh off their own organizing campaigns, to help with union drives at other shops. Photo: The NewsGuild
Over the last five years, in big pro-union cities and small Southern towns, more than 7,000 workers in 145 shops have organized with the NewsGuild, a sector of the Communications Workers (CWA). After years of layoffs, buyouts, and pay cuts, workers across an entire industry seemed ready to organize.
Rank-and-file members, many of them fresh off their own organizing campaigns, answer emails and calls from workers at non-union shops, train new organizing committees, track assessments of support, win certification elections, and prepare workers for brutal first-contract campaigns.
Another goal is to front-load training, so that workers have the tools to run every function of their union, from planning and facilitating meetings to recruiting and training stewards and bargaining committees.
Pods mix members from different parts of the country so we can build new relationships and learn from each other. For example, Brittany was working with an underground organizing committee that was struggling to get more co-workers involved; committee members were taking on all the work of the union themselves.
Brittany found that others in her pod had overcome a similar challenge. She brought member organizers from The Austin American-Statesman in Texas and The State in South Carolina back to the committee meeting, and their advice helped the campaign move forward.
Andrew has spoken to many organizing committees about his experience in the election at The Florida Times-Union, where some workers dropped their union support at the last minute after a popular manager cried. In hindsight, he concluded the committee had not done enough to prepare co-workers for the highly emotional aspects of the anti-union campaign (though the workers still won the vote).
Learning from that experience, Andrew advised the committee at The Miami Herald to warn co-workers that their beloved manager would cry in front of everyone. When she did just that, workers were prepared and stood strong.
The campaign tracker is a comprehensive spreadsheet with multiple tabs that both staff and member organizers use to move through organizing drives and contract campaigns. Each campaign has a lead organizer (staff or member) who sets up a tracker and uses it to log conversations, set weekly goals, and measure progress on various metrics.
Staffers have a particular role to play: not on stage, but behind the scenes. Staffers rarely talk in spaces meant for workers to own, such as committee meetings, trainings, bargaining sessions, and confronting management.
While the campaign tracker is for tracking the progress of new organizing drives, member organizers use a personal benchmark tracker to implement the Learn It, Do It, Teach It model in their own (already unionized) shops.
The benchmark tracker groups skills into categories such as one-on-one conversations, answering tough questions, inoculation against union-busting, moving through an organizing drive, and steward skills. Members check off each skill as they learn it, do it, and teach it.
Brittany Carloni organized her newsroom at the Naples Daily News in Florida and now works at The Indianapolis Star. Andrew Pantazi worked at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville and now runs his own nonprofit news organization. Stephanie Basile is an organizer for the NewsGuild.
After the response to this recent LifeHacker piece, I thought I would explain the system I use to take notes, research books and keep track of anecdotes, stories and info I come across in my work.
-In the top right hand corner of each card, put a theme or category that this card belongs to. If a card can fit in multiple categories, just make a duplicate card. Robert uses color coded cards for an extra layer of organization.
*Animals (Weird stories about animals. For instance, according to the book One Summer by Bill Bryson, the hotel that Babe Ruth lived in for most of his career had a live seal living in the lobby fountain)
-If you are working on a book project where there are a limited amount of themes or you know exactly what they are, it makes sense to introduce a shorthand. For instance, with my last book Growth Hacker Marketing, I had 6 themes that roughly corresponded with the chapters and structure of the book:
Remember there is no right and wrong way to do this. The system that I have was taught to me by someone and I made my own modifications. His way works best for him, and I have a way that works better for me.
I saw a post about a similar system a while back, I believe it was from you Ryan! It has been a lifesaver, and really helped save my sanity. Reading this updated version has inspired me to upgrade my organization!
Trust yourself, trust the freaking process, just start doing it and make it right for you and your needs. If you pause or freeze up due to its perceived complexity then work through it. By working through it you gain proficiency and competence.
I was watching a show about Joan Rivers and she had a 3 x 5 index card system of her jokes and categorized them by type. She had them filed in metal card files and there were lots of drawers of them. She kept them from the beginning of her career.
Darwin had a similar system of organizing information. He collected facts and notes in different portfolios based on the subject matter. He further maintained an index for each of these portfolios and so was able to efficiently reference his accumulated knowledge of any topic. See point three in the link below if interested:
An organizer is a person who works towards the realization of a societal concern by seeking out natural leaders for the purpose of mobilizing as many people as possible towards a collective future grounded on shared values. The particular societal concern could be the construction or strengthening of a union, the struggle for the rights of populations formally excluded from political representation (e.g., undocumented immigrants), the struggle for rights that have been curtailed across the population as a whole (e.g., abortion access in many red states), or other concerns. But the strategy is always to identify natural leaders from the workplace or community affected, to equip them with the tools to lead, and to help develop their capacity to mobilize their peers.
While I am a full-time union organizer, anybody can organize around whatever issue is affecting them. Here, I would like to share a set of tools for the would-be organizer. I should caution that although organizing tools can be universal, they evolve over time and must adapt to local conditions. Finally, I am a strong believer that taking small actions in the face of big problems can help you see the path to resolution or transformation. So, if you have a big problem at work, home, or in your state, consider the following, and place each in your tool-box for action.
Once you have found the leaders, the next step is to build an organizing committee of leaders on the issue. This committee/working group should maintain the same membership for the most part, attend regular meetings, engage in trust building, and move on the principles of consensus building. Every public comment or action must be created and approved by the regularly attending committee and no members shall speak on behalf of the issue without an agreement from the team. It is also crucially important to make sure that the committee is engaged with, and responsive to, the affected group, who should ideally be participating in supporting activities and calls to action.
CLAUDIA GISSEL URIBE is an organizer and anti-racism facilitator in the US labor movement with the American Federation of Teachers Washington, AFL-CIO. She has been organizing communities for over 14 years. She is also a collaborator with the feminist organization Casa Gaviota in Mexico City.
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