Today is May Day, an international celebration of organized labor and the working class. Today, labor unions at UCSF went on strike, and unions led rallies across California. During my “100 days of democracy” I plan to participate in more rallies, protests, and other forms of pro-democracy organizing, but unfortunately today I was in clinic so couldn’t make it to the SF May Day rally. So, instead, I’ll take some time to write.
Coincidentally, I co-facilitated a session this week about workplace organizing, which reignited my appreciation for the democratic principles underpinning labor organizing. One of the core values that I was taught as a leader in my union was the power of majorities. The goal was always to engage a majority of our colleagues, because there is nothing more democratic (and more threatening to management) than majority participation in action.
When this is done right, it can be truly democratic. I helped lead a few campaigns that engaged a majority of our bargaining unit. It is a powerful feeling to know that you have a true, democratic majority on your side.
I also participated in smaller efforts that didn’t feel as democratic — where I felt that our leaders were farther to the left than our rank-and-file, and maybe those members who disagreed just didn’t feel strongly enough to push back on it. In the practical day-to-day, it’s very easy for leaders to slide out of step with the “people’s will” — something that is ever-changing, hard to measure, and won’t always come back to get you if you defy it. This isn’t true just in unions but in all sorts of organizations and levels of government.
As a organization fundamentally committed to democracy, our union had a lot of conversations about how to represent the people’s will. In bargaining a contract, how do we assess the interests of 1,500 members? One might initially reach for a survey — surely a questonnaire that everyone has an equal chance to answer is a fundamentally democratic choice? But what about those who inevitably don’t fill out the survey, either because they don’t have time or don’t feel strongly enough? Are they no longer counted in the people’s will? And what about those who might answer one way on a survey, but if you talk to them individually and explain the arguments in more detail, they might change their minds?
We ultimately chose a hybrid model — we did give everyone a chance to respond to a survey, but we also had extensive 1:1 conversations with members across different disciplines in order to better understand the values underpinning their responses. Because, in the midst of a negotiation, it’s much more helpful to know what people value, rather than to know what specific policies they wanted at a single point in time before the negotiation. Democracy is messy; there’s no single perfect methodology.
As I’ve recently learned more about deliberative democracy, I wonder if this paradigm might have been another approach that could have helped us in our union organizing. What if we pulled a random sample of members and led them through a deliberative process prior to (or concurrent with) bargaining to get a more representative sample of members’ values and preferences? This might have helped us more accurately assess the people’s will, but it would have missed out on opportunities for power-building through 1:1 conversations.
Any organization can operate more like a union — to commit to understanding, representing, and advancing the people’s will, and to engaging a majority of members in action. This week, my clinic decided to democratize planning for breast cancer screening by involving all our staff in the brainstorming. It resulted in an explosion of creative ideas! Now, the real challenge is to keep it democratic. It’s easy to involve everyone in brainstorming, but much harder to maintain democracy in implementation. To succeed, we’ll need to borrow strategies from the union — 1:1 conversations with a representative group of staff to understand their values and preferences, and maintaining those relationships through implementation. Alternatively, we could try a deliberative strategy, pulling a random sample of clinic staff to help guide the implementation. Just as with the union example, this might give a similar set of ideas but misses out on a lot of potential relationship-building.
My takeaway here is that union organizing captures a democratic principle that is missed in deliberative democracy, and which I haven’t seen articulated in the (limited) amount of democratic theory I’ve read recently. The power of a network of 1:1 relationships is not just to capture the people’s will (which it can do quite effectively), but also to empower the people in implementation.
Concluding question(s): How could an organizing approach to democracy be applied to uplifting the people’s will at a national level? Union density is too low, and party polarization is too high (also, political parties are not particularly strong at organizing), so it’s not clear that any single organization or network of orgs is poised to do this. Could a “Dems for Democracy” approach push the Democratic party to organize even among Republicans to uplift the will of all the American people?
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