To my research community,
Thank you for your excitement and exchange as I reflected on the beginnings of my thesis exploration in my last newsletter. Now, I’ll fast-forward to the present and share with you a project within the spectrum of tools I’m designing to support the early stages of union formation.
This project is a service design that I’m calling “1-800-ORGANIZE: Practice Makes Power.” It’s a hotline for budding organizers to practice the conversations they’re preparing to have with coworkers – upping their skills, building solidarity, lowering anxiety, and increasing their chances of success in forming a collective.
I’ll share more below, and I welcome your feedback! Tell me what you like (or don’t like) about it, wish about it, or wonder about it.
1-800-ORGANIZE: Practice Makes Power
Context: To form a union – you need to have many one-on-one, specific conversations with your coworkers. These labor organizing conversations require skill. If you want to build collective interest around your rights as workers and collective agreement in the actions to take in order to utilize your power – you need to practice these conversations. The ability to do so effectively needs to spread far and wide to any person wanting to form a union in their workplace (which, by the way, is over 60 million Americans as of 2023). Thankfully, it is a skill that can be learned, and professional union organizers have this organizing knowledge that can benefit everyday people.
David Cann explains this best on a recent Power At Work blogcast "What Could Happen Under Trump? The Future of Organizing”:
“There aren’t enough [union] staff people to make [the] change happen… Our jobs are like sports coaches, where we can’t be present on every field of play. Our job is to teach people the skills they need to have a voice at work, to teach people to have conversations. I can’t talk to a million people… but their coworkers can... The conversation with the worker is the same – regardless of the industry – and you know we work with 70 different agencies with people that do the most disparate types of work you can imagine. And the conversation is always, ‘You tell me what you care about and I’ll tell you how you can fix it.’ And the answer is always ‘ you getting involved.’ And if we can facilitate those conversations happening place after place after place, that’s the only way we’ll have the bandwidth to reach folks. It’s the only way we’ll be able to build power that makes any difference… You don’t get justice in the courts, you don’t get justice in the FLRA, the NLRB; you get justice on streets. You get justice when workers show up. You get justice when workers demand better. And that’s a result of them talking to each other and realizing that they’re the only ones that can make a difference.”
– David Cann, American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Organizing Director
Challenge: Though equipped with the conversational skills, union staff ultimately have limited capacity to train up others. And when they are able to coach workers on organizing, much of that support is designated to supporting existing union members in maintaining engagement among coworkers: a feat in its own right.
However, resources for supporting new union formation are even more limited. Organizer training needs greater scale – needs to be decentralized and widespread – to meet the demand.
With this in mind, I’m beginning to design a new service that I’d love your feedback on:
1-800-ORGANIZE is a hotline service for budding organizers to practice the conversations they’re preparing to have with coworkers. Whether you’re cold calling someone you’ve never met in another department to gauge their interest in a union or re-engaging a coworker after they’ve attended management-led union-busting training, it’s normal to feel nervous or tongue-tied.
We’re here for you to practice a conversation 24/7, as many times as you want. Organizing conversations are an art. This is a safe space to build the skill.
The service works like this:
Learn about the hotline at a labor training/event.
Call the hotline.
Using your dial-pad, answer a handful of questions about the conversation you’re looking to practice.
We’ll pair you with another person to role-play.
Volunteer as a receiver a few times, and you’ll gain credits to practice more.
Our vision is to help every person organizing in their workplace feel supported and confident in their ability to initiate meaningful conversations toward unionizing. Our “practice makes power” methodology can grow into additional hotlines for electoral organizing or issue-specific movements like practicing conversations about Palestine/Israel.
How’d I get there?
After a semester of research, at the precipice of ideating new possibilities, I spoke with Bill Cromie, professor and social-impact tech entrepreneur, who prompted me to look at what’s already working out there and explore how to amplify it. I deeply appreciated this advice. I’ve long been bothered by the common designer adage “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” a la Henry Ford – an implication that communities aren’t actively aware of or engaged in building meaningful solutions for their own needs.
So I looked at organizer trainings hosted by EWOC and by Labor Notes: both low-entry-point, fantastic resources for early organizers across industries. In almost every training that I attended, we were taught a skill (ex. the 80/20 rule — listen 80 percent of the time, talk 20 percent) and placed in 1:1 breakout rooms to practice through role-playing an organizing conversation.
I’ve pretended to be on the receiving end of a phone call from a teacher hoping to organize coworkers around the issue of mold in portable classrooms that management refuses to address. I’ve role-played as a new employee at a bakery who is being approached to talk about their workplace hopes and struggles for the first time. These peer-to-peer practice conversations helped me grow the muscle of organizing.
1-800-ORGANIZE is born from asking: how might we keep that momentum of practice up and amplify the power of peer-to-peer learning in low-stakes, consistently available ways?
Thank you to Kristine Mudd, professor and service designer, for your mentorship through this process.
Questions that remain
With this service design project, I’m striving to make the intangible (conversational skills) tangible (via process, tools, interactions).
I recently heard Lucas Vaqueiro, designer and researcher at 3x3, point to a religious service as a prime example of service design. There’s the invisible (God) made real through the design of rituals, objects, and interactions (a glass of wine, a prayer, a temple, a bow). I love how that example illuminates how even something so complex or abstract can be made approachable and accessible through design.
With that in mind, here are some abstract concepts that are still wriggling through as questions until I can find their home as tangible designed elements of this service:
How early in the “practice” stage should the service begin for users? Maybe there is a stage before practicing an organizing conversation with a peer. For instance, the user could be prompted to record voice memos first and listen back.
Would the use of AI be worthwhile or useful here? Ultimately, nothing beats overcoming nerves for conversation than practicing with another real life person. Still, Alexis Tyron – founder of AI chatbots at Dewey Labs – shared with me how people can feel unencumbered when talking to a bot and that might provide valuable, special room for trial-and-error that someone may still feel shy to do with a peer.
How can the “coaching” element or feedback mechanism be built into the service? Perhaps the receiver uses a rubric to rate the success of the caller and provide feedback in return. (Thank you to Saumya Narechania for talking this one through).
Should I focus on scaling the tool vertically or horizontally? To scale vertically may include a data strategy, much like other text hotlines, to inform other union programs. Scaling horizontally may include applying this “practice makes power” method to other organizing movements.
How can partnerships come into play? Where would unions and capacity-building labor orgs want the hotline to live and how would they shape how it functions?
In the coming weeks I’ll iterate on prototypes and share with others until these questions find their form.
What’s Next
Digital tools, physical tools, in-person experiences – I’m continuing to craft designs for various pain points in labor organizing. I plan to keep sharing the process, insights, and outcomes in the chance that they can inform your work too.
And thank you again for your feedback on my last newsletter! Suggestions to make the “hot spot analysis” more visual are noted. Coming soon.
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I'll close each newsletter with a recommendation per category:
A book: Fight like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor by Kim Kelly
A documentary: The Gig Is Up by Shannon Walsh (Thank you Kim Diehl for the rec!)
An article: Workers want unions, but the latest data point to obstacles in their path By Heidi Shierholz, Celine McNicholas, Margaret Poydock, and Jennifer Sherer
A social media account: Alt_USDS (a light in the midst of illegal public servant layoffs)
A podcast: Power At Work blogcast #79 "What Could Happen Under Trump? The Future of Organizing” (quoted above)
A training/offering: Workshop: What To Do When Your Union Breaks Your Heart (March) by Labor Notes
An org: The Workers Lab (day-in and day-out bringing worker-centered innovation to life)
Current organizing to support as a consumer: Alamo Drafthouse workers on strike in Colorado and NYC (sign a petition, financial strike support)
If you'd like to chat, share, or give feedback – reply and I’d love to hear from you!
With gratitude,
Erica Fink
PS This newsletter will reach its conclusion come May. Want me to skip your inbox? No problem – just click unsubscribe down below.