A union is a group of workers acting together to improve conditions on the job. It can be three people or 300 people. When we get together to discuss problems and solutions in the workplace, this is acting as a union, and is the basis for all of the other tools that effective unions use to enforce our rights. Collective action – everything from simply meeting to holding management accountable for their actions – is the main tool we use to increase our power as workers. While contracts and the legal process are often ways to preserve the high water mark for some gains, these are only a few of the tools used to create democracy on the job.
When was the last time you and your co-workers had a say and a real vote in company policy on wages, benefits, and working conditions? A union provides an avenue for those kinds of things, but it doesn't come with just taking out a union card. We have to work for it, together.
We join a union organization and sustain it with dues in order to preserve our institution of knowledge and our pool of experience, to organize our resources, and network with other workers who are struggling for the same things we are. The IWW is a place to share experience, get support for organizing, and make decisions on our own terms without management.
A common belief is that a union needs many paid organizers and professional administrators in order to win. In the IWW, we are very careful with our dues money; we want to keep administrative costs low so we can focus on making the IWW economically accessible and put money directly into organizing and education. None of our dues go to political parties or to political action committees, though many of our members are deeply involved in political activism in addition to economic struggle on the job.
Other people in the IWW will not do the work for you; rather, we empower and encourage members to take the initiative to lead campaigns, with help and advice from the rest of the IWW. What the workers decide and demand on the job is the strength behind our union. We do this through democratic discussions and decision-making processes.
While the IWW stresses the continual task of building our power on the job as our ultimate goal, some workers feel the necessity to use the legal collective bargaining process to get a contract to solidify bread and butter issues. We have contracts in Seattle, Portland, Berkeley, and in other places. At the same time, we have won gains without contracts by organizing short haul truckers in Stockton and even Starbucks stores in New York City.
Organizing a union at work is worth the time, and it is our long-term solution to the recessions, benefit cutbacks by both employers and the government, and the health care crisis. Heath care, pensions, livable wages, safe jobs, and respect as working people are the things our grandparents and parents struggled for, and slowly these necessities are being whittled away or outright eliminated. We can reverse this by organizing with our co-workers, and demanding what we are entitled to, one workplace at a time, industry by industry.