Solidarity Sunday: Thanksgiving Giblets
We're super grateful to serve local unions and look forward to serving more in 2024! Hope everyone has a happy and healthy Thanksgiving. Throughout the year, we collect truths and thoughts on organizing, recruiting, leadership, and labor that might not fit into a Solidarity Sunday article. Here are some of those "Thanksgiving giblets":
- Organizing IS selling. Make no mistake about it. The quicker we realize that the more successful we'll be.
- Win their heart and their minds will follow. People make decisions on emotion and justify with reasons.
- Focus on making an impact rather than making an impression. Handing out handbills and hot-boxing a guy with questions makes an impression. Handing a cold bottle of water with your contact info and saying, "We take care of each other. If you're ever looking for a better way, call me." makes an impact.
- If you don't think you can help them, be honest. We are not a $100 bill, not everyone is going to need us.
- Compete on values and culture, not just wages. If they come to us for wages alone, they will leave us for wages alone.
- Culture change does not happen from the top down, it always comes from the bottom up. Members change your culture; leaders only facilitate it.
- People don't change their minds. They make new decisions based on new information. If you want to bring someone to your way of thinking, instead of arguing, calmly give them new information.
- Working for "pride in your work" always leaves you wanting. Working for "service to my fellow man" always leaves you with a feeling of gratitude and good energy.
- If you believe a union culture is important and will improve the lives of those you seek to recruit, you will be successful. If it is out of obligation to your job, obligation to your boss, or to avoid going back into the field, etc. you will not be able to sustain it.
- A 5th grader should be able to understand what you're selling. If what you're selling is confusing, nobody will buy. Keep your organizing pitch as short and powerful as possible.
- People don't care about what you do. They only care about what it can do for them.
- Moses himself never got to see the Promised Land. He led a group of people on principle, without ever benefitting personally. This is true in effective local union leadership as well. If you're life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.
Speaking of Unions leading and making an impact...
This week the Union Up crew joined the Georgia Building Academy's YouthBuild Program. Other organizations talk about teaching young people the power of giving back, but YouthBuild delivers! On this November day in Atlanta, YouthBuild kids go all-hands-on-deck to help revitalize and restore one the most historic and important buildings in Atlanta...The SCLC Women's Center. Founded by Dr. Evelyn G. Lowery, the SCLC Women's Center was founded to help teach women and children leadership skills, and job training. It is an iconic building in the history of the civil rights movement in the United States.
