``...no matter what one does, the proles won't allow themselves to see until they themselves reach an existential crisis of major proportions--like that woman from Flint in F-911...'' Mike Ballard
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Yeah. I don't know how to evoke that existential turn. I've tried on a one to one basis with work buddies in shops. Some see, and think, then let it go. Others have turned against it. Others agree and do nothing. Part of the problem is that working guys tend to identify with the bosses. If the bosses are personally friendly, not overtly assholes, then most guys consider them like their big brother-friend or something. Their paycheck handed to them by their foreman or manager is their candy favor for being good boys.
(Being good! Hell it's a job, man. You worked for it, and this is what you get---and all you get. This stupid piece of paper! You bust your ass, put yourself out there, maybe get hurt, start breaking down your body and this crappy check is all you get?)
Can't talk like that too often. To organize against the system, or to talk against it at work is like a personal betrayal or treason (for many workers), a form of implicit violence---even when it is somewhat allowed. In many shops you are not allowed to discuss your paycheck and pay rates! You can be formally reprimanded. With a enough reprimands you can be fired. The firing issue can be made the number of reprimands, not their content--under the pretext that these are `confidential' to `protect' employees!
I also have to say my limited experience with organized unions hasn't been too good. (This is ancient history for me now, so maybe times have changed.)
But once, I was very lucky to have one guy in AfSCME who really did support my efforts, and trained me a little to organize a shop. What he did was teach me about the personnel dept and gave me the outlines for job descriptions, status changes, and which categories were the best tracks, reasons for reprimand and dismissal, etc---along with the history of those tracks and how they were originally put in place. This background support was critical in negotiations with the administration manager and the Personnel people. I needed to know their system and job description histories better than they did---and thanks to AFSCME, I did. In addition to the union, there was help in the shop with another guy who was a Marxist and eventually took over shop steward and union rep job when I left. I also had a project director above me who was being forced out himself, so he helped a lot in a deliberate passive-aggressive ploy of not communicating the effort or its details to his bosses in administration. They had to hear about it and keep updated by the Personnel dept memos.
The somewhat sour note about unions is that they have to be able to give people something, particularly support when organizing gets nasty. The workers need to feel protected, and that is very tough to do. I think there are all kinds of legal barriers that can be pulled in to stop it. And I think unions are very reluctant to support people who are just considering organizing or have just started, but haven't gotten enough internal worker-level support to become a power to contend with on the job. (a lot of this and other issues were very well portrayed in Norma Rae, 1979---if you ignore the film sentimentality)
On the HomeDepot effort---which is right down this ally:
``...If you're a UFCW leader, what's going through your head when you try to do something like this? What do you do if you organize ONE Home Depot out of what, thousands across the country? Home Depot probably just told people that they'd shut down the store..'' John Lacny
What's going through your head is essentially this: ``if not here, then where, if not now, then when, if not us then who...?''
So, you just start in and try.
Personally, I think protection is the key. Somehow you have to creat a climate of union protection, before there is any, in order to gain worker support.
In my case (I was very, very lucky), I was the oldest and longest on the job in that shop, in a large public institution (UCB), where the firing process was difficult enough so upper management had to think about whether they wanted to start the firing process going. They didn't. What they did was start de-funding the program, firing the director, hiring a management stooge in his place, and continue the funding pressure. It worked but it took almost ten years...
In the meantime, part of the protection screen was to make retaliation and intimidation difficult. So, face to face confrontations with management personnel were always with me, rather than the other guys (eventually women too--but that is another story). What I did was get everybody's approval to become fake shop steward and pretend that employee problems in the shop should go through me. This was facilitated by getting myself presumed-to-be the shop manager. The project director helped here by appointing me as the representative to the personnel dept. The personnel dept could always demand the Director okay in writing for every meeting, and stall. So the PD wrote a blanket memo appointing me as his chosen representative.
This helped a great deal to keep the threat level down and make it hard to lure people out of the union mind set with individual favors and minor personal rewards: employee of the month with a small check and ribbon. Or alternatively, force individual meetings and then intimidate individuals behind closed doors. Divide and conquer. Buy them off or kill them off one by one.
Anyway, back to the corporate version. A former list member who was part of the USWA (steelworkers) union wrote offlist about Invacare (a wheelchair manufacturer) and efforts to get or re-new contracts (I forget which). He was worried about management resistance and anti-union tactics, since management seemed intractable. He was looking for how Invacare was seen in the health care field, the world outside his context. They might have been considering a strike.
I said Invacare was seen as a brutal competitor who would do anything---his worst nightmare. The CEO was a hard core industrial capitalist from the old school. This pretty much confirmed what he thought. I don't know what happened to the USWA effort after that... But within the next year Invacare opened a factory complex in Mexico, just across the border in Texas. So I assume that's how they solved their USWA problem. Part of the reason for the Mexico move was environmental regulation, since the low end equipment is often chrome plated and chrome plating produces a lot of toxic liquid waste, which in Cleveland, OH (their main factory and corp HQ) goes straight into Lake Erie (I think).
The upper management of Invacare was (and still is) tied directly into the Republican party in Ohio and Washington DC. And at one time one of the major share holders had direct access to the first Bush administration through the President's Committee for something or other (Handicapped?)---in addition of course to a multi-tiered lobby system that worked Congress and the federal agencies who theoretically regulate domains important to both industrial production and the healtcare industry (HCFA, FDA, etc). In other words USWA efforts in that one corporate factory line were essentially up against the entire weight of the US government executive branch---if they wanted to push a big fight.
(In contrast, I was working in a state system under a Democrat controlled state, in which I had personal friends in appointed positions of state government. I never used them or talked to them about it, but they were there and might have helped in some indirect way if needed...and the administration knew it.)
So, Home Depot is based in Atlanta and I would guess this is deep, deep anti-union territory. I was probably that, that made the store in Harper Woods, Michigan look like a much easier target. Maybe there were enough core people in Harper Woods to make the idea change from just a thought to a possible action... If you were part of the drive, and then lost, that's got to be tough to live with. What is often forgotten is you have to work and organize at the same time, and your work has to be good so your work performance isn't made into an excuse to fire or demote you.
CG