You need a union, even if you love your job.
A healthy work environment is often the best place to start a union campaign.
While this might seem like common sense, there are folks out there who feel like their job is the exception. If your management is great, your organization’s policies are sensible, and the overall mood of your workplace is positive, you might feel like adding a union to the equation could destabilize the great thing you’ve got going on. We hear you, and we’re happy for you!
But just because you love your job doesn’t mean you don’t deserve a union. In fact, your situation doesn’t need to be bad to unionize. It’s a common misconception that only unhappy workers unionize, and while that may be the impetus behind many union campaigns, it’s definitely not a requirement (or the strongest starting-point for organizing). Read on to learn why you need a union even if you love your job, and listen to the audio clips to hear OYO colleagues Caitlin, Danny, and Isabel chat about it.
There are a multitude of reasons why you might want to unionize while your work situation is good. For one, it can be a great way to make sure that things stay good. Oftentimes, the great policies or practices that make your workplace so wonderful aren’t actually written down anywhere, which leaves them vulnerable to being dismissed without any warning, applied unequally, or slowly forgotten about over time. By getting those policies cemented in a union contract, you’re able to ensure that they’ll stay consistent and be utilized even if there’s 100% turnover.
Unionizing also gives you an opportunity to sit down with management and tackle more difficult topics as equals, in a space made specifically for that type of discussion. Maybe you’ve just never felt the need to bring up pay rates and your PTO policy, or maybe you’ve been worried that doing so would rock the boat too much. Maybe your Executive Director makes decisions that are often good, but still deprive you and your coworkers of a democratic opportunity to decide whether or not to implement certain changes.
No matter what the case is, when you are bargaining a contract with your employer, you sit at the negotiation table as equals. That means you have just as much of a final say over policies as your employer does, and given that contracts are famously the places where you discuss your working conditions, it’s a place where conversations over money and benefits are supposed to happen. The conversation doesn’t have to stay limited to those more contentious subjects, either; you can bargain over much more.
Beyond the win of increasing workplace democracy, bargaining a contract with a friendly management team - one equally committed to maintaining a good work environment - means you can bargain over more progressive ideals. That could look like expanding the traditional definition of ‘family’ to include chosen family, and make you eligible for medical or bereavement leave if the need arises for someone you’re not biologically related to. That’s just one example, but when your bargaining team is able to propose more of these permissive subjects of bargaining, you have more opportunities to make your organization a champion for good workplace values.
On the other hand, there’s a possibility that things aren’t actually as great as they seem. While you may think everything is working wonderfully and your supervisor is the best boss you’ve ever had, is that true for all of your coworkers across your organization? By beginning the process of unionizing and talking to everyone to see how things are for them, you’ll learn if your experience is shared or not. If it is, that’s good news - and now you’ve built stronger connections with your coworkers and can leverage that into a democratic process that gives you more say over your workplace. If it’s not, now you’ll be able to unite with your coworkers to improve conditions across the board.
The truth is, while some workplaces are undeniably better than others, they are all exploiting workers for their labor to some extent. By choosing to unionize, you’re getting closer to equalizing the power differential between you and your management. As mentioned earlier, you are legally their equal when bargaining, so you have just as much of a say over the final agreement as management does. Decisions about you shouldn’t be made without you at the table – nothing about us without us!
Happy workers deserve unions. We’d even argue that happy workers should unionize because they’re happy. By unionizing while your organization is in a good place, you’re setting the example that unionizing isn’t inherently antagonistic for other workers in your community. You’re choosing to undertake a time-consuming process while you and your coworkers aren’t struggling with burnout and the emotional exhaustion that comes from a toxic workplace. And, of course, if you have a job, you need a union.
Graphic by Melbourne-based artist Sam Wallman! | @ourmembersbeunlimited
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