The increased flexibility to work remotely has been liberating in many ways for workers however it also poses challenges when it comes to organizing.
I’ve found that the primary means of communication between remote workers is owned by the company, for example slack and teams. This leads to a reluctance to discuss unionization due to the perceived threat of the company eavesdropping and taking action against them.
There are also less opportunities for the kinds of informal conversations that lead to solidarity and organizing that would usually happen over lunch or after work at the bar or pub.
What challenges have you faced in organising remote workers and what solutions have you found?
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My union uses our personal email addresses for broadcast info, and won the right to use the employer’s video comms for meetings.
My day job is unionized 100%-remote IT in the unionized arm of a cruel global company, contracting to an organization so massive that it used to have the largest single-owner intranet in the world (so it’s not a mom-and-pop).
Other Work from Home-Office points:
- generally not a ‘work from starbucks’ gig, as we do some ‘private possum’ stuff, but there’s occasional flexibilty to request working from grandma’s spare room - or a campsite with a gennie and a starlink! - and it was successful.
- our worksite must be approved by regional work standards, so it’s usually an office and a desk and not a couch or counter.
- we’ve ‘won’ the right to not be on camera - I’ve seen my boss twice in 3 years and not seen the rest.
- days-off and evenings are generally sacred, but if we hear of disasters we anticipate a call.
- work-weeks are 35- or 40 hours, on the employee’s choice, with the choice for a ‘9x9’ (or 9x8) schedule for an extra day of rest with no pay loss
- pay is 1% higher than (union) people working for the place we’re contracted to but union’s always a little less than dot-coms.
- we do have a damoclean-sword ‘RTO’ clause, but they have to call us all back, they have no desks anymore, and they know we’ll strike over constructive dismissal
It’s generally a great job where people don’t bail - openings are created generally through retirement - and my peers have all worked there 20+ years; if they’re not filling vacancies from advancement or retirees.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Interesting that you use company infrastructure for meetings. I guess it’s assumed that somebody will feed info back to the company regardless of platform anyway.
Do you know how the initial bargaining unit was formed and recognised?
I have no idea really, but my idea would be to create an excuse to get people on another chat. Host a party, movie night, or something, and tell anyone who wants to go to join this other server. Even better might be a game night, and you can add them on Discord or something. Basically, your first goal probably shouldn’t be the union. Your first goal should be getting them into a casual chat group that isn’t owned by the company. Then you can create smaller groups for people who are vetted and start pushing for a union.
Maybe create a separate chat server for the workers to organize on?
What do you think would be a good way to get people to join?
Use unofficial emails that are for personal social matters.
Also while Corporate may own Slack or Teams they wouldn’t have ownership of a discord server where the employees just hang out to talk about off topic memes.
Simply put have a digital space that is outside the corporate infrastructure.
I think getting people on to a neutral platform is definitely the goal. In my experience though many remote workers just do their jobs and keep to themselves so enticing them to these spaces is difficult. The ones I’ve had best luck building solidarity with are those that have attended at least one in-person event and built rapport.
What tactics do you think would work to win the others over in this environment?
I’ve been in my office twice and I’ve been employed there over a year now, but I still joined a union. I’m in Germany though, so this might not be very helpful for you. Unions are quite strong here. And the union already existed before.
I don’t have any tips but I’m also in this situation and would like to know. I asked a union organizer once and all he said was “that’s a tough situation” and internally I was like “gee thanks I already knew that”.
I think one option is to seize on a galvanizing moment like a round of redundancies, contract change or merger and use this to get people in to a private group where they can express their opinions with less fear of reprisals.
Of course you would still have to initially communicate via some company owned channel. For this I’ve found people are more willing to talk one on one via voice/webcam than text. Make sure any transcription feature is disabled.
Obviously a big problem here is that you are already on the backfoot since you are relying on the the company’s actions to create the right conditions. You can try instead be proactive with these chats but the momentum is much weaker.
Email.
The challenge is getting people to stay loyal to each other despite the fear of losing the little they have.
