What I mean when I say "my union"

These are statements from the last couple of months that are true:

• Represented my union in bargaining our second contract.
• Visited my union’s offices to help the staff with some outreach software.
• Went to my union’s education conference and learned from staff and organizers about the realities we’re facing during the current administration.

You wouldn’t be wrong to assume that these are all the same group of people, they aren’t and they are at the same time. There’s a lot of structures in unions and they’re there for a reason, some of them are informal and some of them are defined incredibly formally, but generally they exist for the purpose of helping a union function day-to-day for their members at different scales. This is how these structures apply to the union I’m in.

Let’s start with the basics:

Your bargaining unit

Officially, at the time of the formation of your union (whether by NLRB election or by card check), you come to an agreement with your employer about which of your coworkers are included or excluded from being a part of your bargaining unit. As many are painfully aware, this can be a contentious process, but the result is the same: you have coworkers who are included in the same bargaining unit as you (and are therefore affected by the same Collective Bargaining Agreement or CBA). These are the people who work every day alongside you for the same employer. These are the people you should be having active discussions about your work conditions with.

In my case, we had around 80 people at the formation of our union, and still hover around that number. It turns out we’re a small workplace by comparison to many bargaining units in our local but we’re very active and continue to build on the values we established during our organizing drive: solidarity, transparency, distributed power, and joy. We elected stewards to represent our coworkers in disciplinary meetings and investigating grievances, but we try to share the load of running our union when we can (more on that later in this post). We hold monthly meetings even when we’re not actively bargaining a contract and we keep an active conversation about our working conditions in a shared digital space. This is no small feat and requires an active effort from many members, but we are stronger for it.

Your bargaining unit, like mine, is likely affiliated with a local. It’s rare that you have the financial, legal, or even labor specific expertise contained already within your bargaining unit to do the administrative work of running your union. That’s where the local comes in: many bargaining units pooling their resources together to be able to hire experts who can help you with the things your union can’t do.

Your union local

I’m reminded of a very New York City piece of smalltalk I witnessed way before I was as involved as I am today with labor and organizing: I was running late to work and came across two workers just meeting outside of a closed jobsite, one guy went “You guys union?”, “Yeah, local 3”, “Nice, we’re local 79”. I assumed, at the time, that these numbers meant something to them, maybe some recognition in their respective fields, but couldn’t tell you for sure, I was late for work. After looking their locals up way later, I now understand that they were talking about NY local trade unions for construction workers and electricians.

Practically, a union local is a grouping of workers and workplaces who pool their resources in order to secure the ability to hire staff who can help them run their union, organize new groups of workers, and collectively acquire benefits for their members. Locals will show up with banners to marches and events and represent their shared political interests, often endorsing pro-labor candidates in the geographic districts that they operate in.

As I continue to learn, the focuses of each local, even within the same national, can vary significantly.

Many locals form a national organization (or international organization, depending on your union) such as OPEIU, CWA, UAW, UFW, etc. The larger organization can dictate rules for individual locals to follow or provide recommendations that save the local time and consolidate resources. Conversely, when a local continuously ignores the recommendations of it’s larger organization, they can find themselves in hot water with that organization.

Your national (or international) union

At this point, you wouldn’t be wrong to feel that this level of union might not qualify as “your union”, it feels distant from what you do every day as a worker, it feels conceptual and organizational like any organization comprised of thousands of people. While I might use national and international union interchangeably, I want it to be clear that I am talking about the same level of a union. It is only by matter of historical oddity or happenstance that a national union in the United States ends up covering a local outside of the United States.

Are other members of the same national my union siblings or comrades?

Of course they are! It’s important that we see our siblings in labor, any one of them (with notable exceptions), as allies in furthering our cause. Doubly so when they’re under the same organizational umbrella of an national. It doesn’t matter if you’re a software engineer and they’re a nuclear submarine mechanic, nail salon technician, paralegal, or nurse. If they’re a member of your national, the hope is that they will stand with you and that you will stand with them when the time comes.

And that’s it, right? Unions end at the national/international level?

What the heck is the AFL-CIO? That’s not “my union”

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations is a mouthful. I won’t regurtitate the Wikipedia article at you, but the important thing is at the top: the AFL-CIO engages in large scale political activism. The overall weakening of the labor movement in my lifetime (all my homies hate Ronald Reagan, but all my real homies hate Lewis Powell and his dang memo) has lead to a significant weakening of the AFL-CIO’s political influence in the United States political sphere.

That’s the structure of US unions in a nutshell, with some specificity to my own union. It’s a bit dry, but I keep coming back to how unions represent political units, and I think that remains a good analogue for a nuanced idea of organizations of people, it’s just hard to tell how much we really all grasp the different political units and organizations in society and how we can effect change within them.

More: How do we make decisions

Now that we’ve discussed what levels your union can exist at, it’s also important to be aware of how decisions are made at each level. While some concepts like working groups or committees may be shared across different levels, each level has a structure that helps them make decisions that represent its members.

Bargaining unit governance

A very smart organizer I’ve worked with for years once gave me the incredibly insightful observation: “in a way, your bargaining unit is the smallest unit of political power”.

Who makes decisions? How do you make big decisions?

Here is where you (🫵🏼), individually, have the ability to influence your union the most. We do onboarding when members join our union (because many people in tech have never been in a union) and one of our onboarding slides reads:

This is true of any real participatory democracy and felt like a strong model for our workplace. We have the advantage of being small enough where getting a majority amount of input into a big decision isn’t cumbersome and can turn over a decision really quickly. Additionally, we hold monthly meetings open to anyone in our unit for people to talk and contribute to the process (we did this originally because we formed right before the COVID-19 lockdown, but then continued it online because of our now fully-remote workplace).

How do you make small decisions?

As established in our CBA, we have stewards who are elected by our bargaining unit to help us enforce the CBA. When the employer sends over something related to the terms of the contract, they are checking amongst themselves, with our union rep, and with our members to make sure that the terms are agreeable. Past stewards, we found it useful to establish working groups for specific tasks like member outreach, managing the various mechanisms/infrastructure of our union, social media/press (when needed, it’s rare that we actively speak to the press). There’s no election for these groups, they work on a volunteer basis, but it empowers members of our unit to help distribute the decision-making that we need to do on a daily basis. A massive, MASSIVE shoutout to anyone who steps up to keep these working groups going, they don’t often get enough recognition for the work they contribute (which is on top of the work they do at work!).

Your local union’s governance

How does a local make decisions?

pushes up glasses As required by the constitution of the national/international, the local should vote to elect an executive board and form a constitution for their own governan— This all happened way before I joined, this probably happened sometime in the 80s for all I know, possibly before I was born. A local has an executive board and a constitution that past or present members of the executive board revise from time-to-time (I just participated in a revision of our constitution this past week). If it’s not covered directly in the constitution of our local, then it falls to a vote by the executive board. A member of the board represents both the interests of their workplace as well as the interests of the members of the local. It’s a bit of a strange line to walk but the executive board and the officers of the local are responsible for the business decisions that the local conducts (e.g. whether to allocate funds, represent the local at large labor events, or to speak as a local as might be the case for a political endorsement).

For other decisions or actions, similar to the working groups described above, our local has formed committees in order to get focused tasks done (e.g. organizing a conference or suggesting edits to the constitution)

Your national union

Who leads a national? Who makes decisions?

The officers and board of our national have a similar charge to the officers and board of a local: to keep the union running so that it may benefit its members in the years to come. This means that decisions that they make may feel opaque because as a member it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. This isn’t to say that members don’t have influence on their national, just that they need to exercise their collective muscle effectively to move their national. National don’t have to move slow, it is a demonstration of the care that they make for their decision-making and members that may be perceived as slowness.

An national has a constitution as well, it is revised at a congress/conference of its locals with a whole process. It will cover things like the consolidation of locals, the distribution of funds and the makeup of bodies like the executive board of the national. It can even make a recommendation for a model constitution that its locals can adopt on the next revision of their constitutions. Basically trying to save locals time by gathering the collective knowledge of what has worked and what hasn’t worked across the national.