Organizing Is Not Passive: Why Union Building Means Reaching Out, Not Waiting Around

When people think about union organizing, many might imagine a moment of inspiration, maybe a spark or some event that sets off a wave of collective action. But the truth is, organizing requires a lot of consistent and demanding work, and long-term commitments. Organizing requires setting goals and putting together needed steps to achieve those goals. Union organizing requires action, and if you are sitting around waiting for people to come to you, you are not organizing — you are hoping.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with hoping the non-members will come to you and ask how to join. Hope has its place, but not when it comes to organizing our non-members. Organizing our non-members cannot be about wishful thinking, but about each one of us taking action to build worker power. Organizing is about talking to people and building relationships. It is about having hard conversations and asking others to stand with you. Most importantly, it is about taking the initiative to build our union and worker power in our installations and communities.

For those who make the decision to stand with us, we have made joining very easy with the ability to join online. While the “online join” process does bring in thousands of our coworkers into the APWU, most people will not automatically join simply because they stumbled across the ability to join online. Most often, our coworkers will join because someone they trust and relate to asked them to and they felt invited to be a part of something. They might join because someone listened to their concerns and then asked them to take a stand.

That someone must be you!

If you care about changes in your workplace, if you are tired of being disrespected by management, if you are tired of management violating our collective bargaining agreement every day, then you have to be reaching out to non-members. You must make the first move, because most non-members… they will not be coming to you.

We all must have conversations with the non-members and ask them to stand with us and be a part of something bigger. We need to stop letting our nonmember coworkers come to work and feel like they work in a non-union environment. We need to be persistent about standing with APWU and being bold about it.

Organizing is a skill, and like everything we do, it gets easier the more we do it. The core principles of organizing never change; it is about having conversations, building trust, giving our coworkers a sense of solidarity, and moving together in the same direction, with similar goals – I do not know of anyone who does not want to secure livable wages, reasonable work hours and better working conditions.

As an organizer, you will have setbacks, there will be some coworkers who, no matter how many times you ask them to stand with you, will refuse, but that does not mean you stop asking. Be brave enough to ask someone to stand with you — and strong enough to keep asking until they do. No matter what, do not let any setback discourage you, because as an organizer you will have victories too, and those victories, the ones who say "yes" to standing with you, will be empowering.

So do not wait for the perfect moment to ask that nonmember coworker to stand with you. Do not wait for them to come to you. Start organizing now. Talk to your coworkers. Ask questions, listen, build trust, and ask them if they are ready to stand with you. When we stand together, we win. ■