What Do We Do Now? First, Gather to Talk

I don’t have new words for the dizzying abuses of unions, immigrants, and all working people emanating from the White House in the last three months. Like many people, I’ve been cycling through anger, despair, and dismay.

The dismay is less about Trump than about the weak and ineffective union response. Between overreliance on lawsuits and calls to “fight back” or even strike with no clear plan, unions have not shown up. I keep wondering, where are the leaders?

I get that it’s overwhelming. Trump’s actions are designed to knock us off balance, to keep us hopeless, divided, confused, and afraid. But as organizers we also know what to do when bosses and the billionaires do this.

We bring workers together to name the problem, assess what concrete power we have, and make a plan to build the power we need through collective action.

FIRST SPROUTS

When I took office as president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association in 2014, the union had for years ceded any power it might have had to backroom deals and soft handshakes.

Our public schools were under attack by Wall Street billionaires, right-wing zealots, and Democratic wolves in sheep’s clothing who were signing off on abusive testing regimes, canned curriculum, privatization via charter schools, and state takeovers of elected school boards.

We were facing a crisis and unprepared to organize a response. We needed to help our fellow members understand what the attacks were about, and invite them into organizing to resist.

We held 37 regional gatherings over five months. These were gatherings, not meetings—not a place to make motions or vote on what to do, not yet. Instead we broke into groups to discuss what we cared about in our work and what we wanted to change.

Members talked about how their jobs were micromanaged, how they weren’t able to teach in the ways students needed—that is, by developing relationships and building on strengths.

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They educated each other. Someone explained the relationship between Wall Street and charter schools; someone explained the profits made from standardized testing and curriculum. They got angry about the funding crisis and debunked the lie that “there is no money.”

And they imagined the classrooms they wanted: small classes, science and art and libraries, freedom to choose a curriculum.

These gatherings laid the groundwork for our campaigns to block the expansion of charter schools, tax the rich, and end the testing requirement for graduation. They were the first sprouts that would later bloom into bold illegal strikes.

EMERGENCY BLITZ

Today’s emergency is much bigger, but the process is the same. We just need to scale up, and fast.

Many workers are looking for a place to figure out what needs to be done. They don’t need vague calls for action. Even rallies, which can stir us with beautiful solidarity and remind us we’re not alone, must be part of a larger plan of actions generated by workers.

National and international unions should initiate a blitz of member planning. The steps can be pretty simple: Develop some discussion questions. Hold assemblies—first locally, then expand them to connect workers regionally or across unions.

Even if some members voted for Trump, bring them into conversation about what is being done to federal workers, to Social Security, to our public schools. Almost everyone knows an elder anxious about retirement and a young person who wants to go to college. You can start with a question: what are some of the challenges you and your family are facing?

Unions have the resources to organize worker assemblies. This is how we educate each other, and how we generate collective action that will shift the balance of power. If this is the emergency we know it is, let’s get on it.