If you’re reading this website, odds are very good that you had a bad week. It’s likely that you’re feeling dejected, perhaps even hopeless, in the face of a country that has gone fully mask-off for fascism. But! There are things that you can do! Right now! For example, you can organize your workplace. It’s not a silver bullet for all of society’s ills, but the skills you’ll pick up will help you in a variety of situations – and will likely only appreciate in value these next several years. On the latest episode of Aftermath Hours, we talk about that.
This time around, we’re joined by labor reporter Mel Buer of The Real News Network, a very good nonprofit newsroom, to discuss what we, as normal people, can do in the wake of Trump’s reelection. The short version? Organize! Not just your workplace, but also your local community. Meet your neighbors. Start a community garden. Put together a game night. The government isn’t going to save us, so we’ve got to.
We also touch on the recent New York Times Tech Guild strike and the callous cynicism that led bosses to refuse reasonable demands even with a massively consequential election bearing down on their news organization. Oh, and we talk about eating our feelings, which all of us coincidentally did recently, for some reason.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can become the liberal Joe Rogan, whatever the hell that means.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nathan: There’s often a lot of talk about this notion that, especially in a country like the United States, there’s only so much you can do through traditional electoral means, and the way for the working class to amass actual power is through labor organizing. So let’s say there’s a hypothetical person. Seeing the election results, they decide “I want to get involved today. I want to start down the road to organizing a workplace I’m part of or organizing generally.” Where do they begin? Where are the resources? How do they embark down that path?
Mel: There’s a number of different ways to organize beyond just union organizing, because the fact of the matter is, union density – which is to say, the number of people, the number of workers unionized – is still struggling to get about 12 percent. There’s close to 60 percent of workers that would love to organize a union, and there are a variety of reasons why they can’t, or they’re being blocked from doing so, or the organizing frankly takes a long time.
We need only look at Trump’s campaign promises to get a glimpse of what a Trump administration is gonna look like this time around. I think we kind of got some of that glimpse in the last months of his presidency. The chaos kind of crystallized into what is sort of this MAGA ideology. And that’s only entrenched itself further in the past four years. So you’re allowed to feel that: anger, despair, fear. You’re OK. It’s OK for you to sit with that for a while.
When you’re ready to begin to think of ways to not only organize but to thrive under this incoming administration and the ideology it’s pushing forward, the best place to start is in your own neighborhood. Get to know your neighbors. It’s a cliche, but legitimately, begin to build community outside your online circles, outside of the people you talk to on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, outside of the sort of book clubs you’re in or socialist organizations. Talk to your neighbors. Get to know the people you live next to. Get to know who they are – purely for the fact that fascism in general and capitalism writ large is that it is designed to alienate people from themselves and the people around them.
The more alone you are, the harder it’s going to be to push your way through the next four years of nonsense. Because that’s what we’re looking at: four-plus years. Potentially a couple decades depending on the judges Trump appoints in the coming years. So get to know the people you live next to. Start there.
Get to know your coworkers. This is how you start a union. You have to know who you’re working with – not just on a clock in, clock out basis. I come from the service industry. A lot of those relationships are easy when you’re clocked in. You kind of trauma bond your way through working a shift in a bar or a restaurant or what have you. But do you know who their family members are? Do you see them outside of work? Are you interested in creating relationships with them outside of work? Friendships that lead you to dinner together or a movie or some kind of other thing. Get to know them in their lives. Open yourself up to be somebody who can also be gotten to know. It’s only at the point that you can start building that relationship that you start to plant the seeds of solidarity.
That’s how you move into potentially organizing a union in your workplace. Reminder: a union only needs to start with two people. Just two. Start with two, start with someone that you trust. And work slowly.
Riley: [Nathan and I] both worked together at Kotaku, which was Gawker, which was the first digital union. I was our site rep and on our bargaining committee, and one of my favorite parts of that was that it helped me get to know other people at other sites – and not just “They work at such-and-such place,” but the things that were important to them.
I think a lot about how we were bargaining for parental leave, which wasn’t important for me, but by talking to them the people it was important to and learning more about their lives and their plans and fighting for them, getting to know my colleagues in that way gave us power in the workplace beyond “We’re having a union meeting.” Those relationships and that solidarity let you take on the bosses and fight for everybody.
Mel: Yeah, one thing that a lot of people don’t realize about union organizing or being in a union is that there’s a lot of bureaucracy involved. A lot of long meetings. A lot of establishing processes to establish processes. Votes and so on that are just part of the practice of working with and upholding the union as an institution. It can seem kind of clunky, and it’s fucking boring sometimes. One, it’s good to be involved in that process and understand how it works when you finally organize and win your union. It prepares you to be more involved in the running of the union.
Often, it’s a democratic process, especially in unions with one member, one vote. What that means is, it’s a direct democracy – not only how you run your own shop, but how you can also influence policy and decision making at a higher level within the union itself. It’s really empowering to be able to understand that, but it is boring. So in a lot of ways, building that solidarity with coworkers and starting there and then meeting other people in your union local [is especially beneficial].
For example, I’m in News Guild 32035; it’s the Washington-Baltimore News Guild. I think there are dozens of units that exist in this local that are nonprofits, nonprofit newsrooms, places like The Washington Post, various other social justice nonprofits, [and so on]. I think the ACLU is there. Without participating, it’s difficult to meet those people. If you participate, you can. Suddenly, it’s not just about my unit of seven people – which is how small we are – it’s about the local of 1,000 who are all making decisions.
Nathan: In the context of the election going the way it did this week, and with people being scared and concerned and feeling helpless, if we’re talking about labor organizing and unions in workplaces, how does that coalesce into broader power in or around politics? Because earlier you were talking about how we’re in a situation where 12 percent of workers are unionized. That’s obviously not a very big number, at least relative to how things were at other points in this country’s history. How can we build on that? How does it manifest even right now as a means of wielding political power?
Mel: One good example, in terms of wielding political power, one only needs to look at the Labor For Palestine movement to see how you can employ the skills you learn when you participate in union democracy and when you organize within unions. Whether that means you’re a staff member getting paid to organize or whether you’re just a shop steward, those folks took that work ethic, that discipline, that formula for convincing and changing minds and getting people on board, and they walked it into the pro-Palestine movement. There is a large contingent of labor organizers who are both agitating within and without to build that sort of momentum, [to] lend that sort of experience to the BDS movement writ large, for example.
And again, it’s a long process. But that’s just one piece. You also see them doing the same sort of thing with door knocking for get out the vote. We saw a lot of union members doing that in states like California, Pennsylvania, and so on. So you can take those skills and apply them to a broader sort of coalition-building process. Really, it’s about what’s transferable. And when you’re building solidarity with your coworkers in your community, that’s also power building. That’s the kind of thing you need to create the bulwark against this no longer fascist creep, this fascist sprint.
