Setting some context

Over the next $nearTermTimeframe (let’s say month, hopefully) or so, I’m going to write some posts about what things mean in the US labor movement, at least as I’ve come to understand them. I hope you read them, whether you’re a comrade in labor, a peer in the industry (tech), a friend who hasn’t checked in with me for a while (real ones know it’s been a couple of years of me not being able to shut up about labor), or even a curious stranger.

I think it’s important that you, the reader, know where I’m coming from, what my history is with unions, and what my goal is. I’ll try to lay that out as best I can.

Were your parents in a union? What was your union experience before this?

To my knowledge, no. Neither of my parents were union members, they were working professionals, but for a myriad of reasons they didn’t find themselves in unions. I was born and raised in Peru, in South America, my experience as a child with workers unions (sindicatos laborales) was seeing the teachers or truckers (transportistas) go on strike, shut down roads, to get improvements for their working conditions or pay. A lot of my childhood experience with unions wasn’t negative, they were just organizations that kind of went unexplained in their societal role. I would learn about their impact on a national scale much later, I’m still probably learning about it.

I also wasn’t in a union before this job. Like most of my peers in the software industry, they seemed like a good idea, and they felt like they would be a lot of work (they are!), but I doubted it would ever happen to me.

So you’re in a union, which one?

That’s a complicated question with a simple answer. To give you the quickest answer possible I’ll say I’m a dues-paying member of OPEIU Local 153 (if the picture of us at the May Day march is still on the frontpage, that’s me in the pizza shirt). My workplace, Kickstarter, is unionized under Local 153 for our US employees. You can listen to a podcast on the origin of our union, it’s pretty great.

How did you get involved in your union?

I started in March of 2019. On my first day in the office after a full day of onboarding and getting my development environment set up (shout out to knifing a databag), one of my coworkers asked if I had a moment to talk. I had heard the scuttlebutt before I joined, but I was still excited to get to work with my team on an area of development that I had always been passionate about (System Integrity). My coworker and I go into one of the conference rooms as the office was clearing out for the day and they told me they were in the process of forming a union. I don’t remember hesitating, I do remember being excited, a union! at a tech company! That’s pretty cool. “How can I help?” was probably somewhere in my excited sea of questions.

By my second week I was already attending our organizing meetings and had a better glimpse of just what we had to do thanks to some comprehensive organizing committee onboarding that my predecessors put together.

Why are you talking about unions? Why now?

Easy, I’m a union member. Unfortunately, that is much rarer than I would like it to be in today’s society in the United States of America. Even moreso for a software engineer like myself to be in a union. So I figured I should start talking about unions from the perspective I’ve acquired.

Mainly because my ultimate goal is to see a United States that doesn’t let itself descend into fascism, but to do that one of the things we’ll need is labor militancy, but to do that, we first need some amount of labor education.

The past year has shown me a lot more about the structures and intra-union politics of my own union, so I figured I would at least write them down with an aim to educate.

What union roles have you been in?

I’m not expecting this to mean much to most people, but for the union-savvy, let’s quickly go over them:

• I’ve been an organizer before our union was formed (I didn’t get the ball rolling, but I came in somewhat early)
• I was elected a bargaining committee member after our union was formed. Me and several others would represent our coworkers in contract negotiations with our employer.
• I was elected to be a steward for my workplace alongside others. This means that I would be in charge of enforcing our Collective Bargaining Agreement as well as investigating grievances and representing bargaining unit members in meetings that may lead to discipline. I also served as an interim steward way before the ink was dry on our CBA.
• I was nominated and chosen to be a member of my local’s executive board.

What are you not going to talk about?

This isn’t a how-to for organizing a union in your workplace. I think there are far better people suited to explain that. I’m here to explain jargon and concepts that I’ve learned that aren’t as useful in the organizing phase of your union (but may help contextualize ideas/goals you may have)

Well, what are you going to talk about?

I’m going to start by talking about things like “What I mean when I say My Union” and I will inevitably get into the structures I’ve been exposed to, how they’re governed, and why I understand them to be the way they are.

Eventually I need to talk about organizers, staff, and stewards. Because those are the types of individuals who keep our unions going, across all unions. Somewhere in there I will have to mention things like working groups at our union, because they’re the set of people who help us get important, focused things done.

For now, I’ve started filling out a list of terms that I think people should know.