“I think he wants to be able to go to the party and say he’s a union organiser, but when it comes down to it he doesn’t really want to do the work”, said a friend of mine back in 2013. I remember understanding exactly what he meant. After all the evidence was clear, the patterns well established, the work avoidance obvious and repetitive. It reminded me of a saying I heard early in life, that ‘everyone wants to be an author but very few people actually want to write a book’. This post is about one of the hard yards of organising – mapping.
My first venture into mapping occurred in 2001 while ‘salting’ for the then Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees in the United States. Late one night in a New York pool-hall a massive gentle giant of an organiser with a southern twang said to me, “now that you’re looking, you’re going to see things you haven’t seen before, so be careful how you go about your business”. Earlier that night we had discussed what I would be looking for – building layouts, business routines, worker patterns, groupings, relationships, etc… He was right, I started seeing things I hadn’t seen before, and I’ve never really looked at a workplace the same way since.
Regardless of where you work, there is an incredible amount of information sitting out there in the open, however, not everyone can identify or pull that data. You will need to know what you’re looking for, where it’s located, how to access it and most importantly – who can access it? This sometimes requires risk taking, and depending on where you work those risks will vary in consequence. This post explores two key tools of organising workers – the profile & relationship map. Used together, they can be incredibly effective when organising workers.
Profile Maps:
Profile maps are essentially spreadsheets, they are great because you can sort them anyway you want. I’ve used Google Docs and Microsoft Word Tables but many people like Excel for sorting purposes – I’m sure there are more templates as well. These days it’s pretty hip to be paperless, however for organising you need paper as adults don’t learn very well huddling over smartphones and it’s much easier to just hand someone a A4 coloured sheet of paper to review. Plus, in many circumstances you might not be able to work out in the open, so you may want to hand off the map so the person can analyse it later on in a safe environment.
Colour coding works very well for profile maps because from a distance someone can see the obvious gaps. For example, once during a campaign this woman I never met before saw my wall charts (enlarged profile maps) from across the room and said “hey that’s a lot of red over there”. When she looked closer she knew two workers we had down as anti-union, and she ended up flipping one of them, this person later became a union contact. Without an enlarged, coloured profile map on the wall – this never happens. Colour coding also works great with worker development and tasking people as well because you can break it down by dept, then colour, than just ask “do you know any of the people in blue”? It’s simple and effective. Unfortunately this does require a lot of paper and re-doing maps / charts fairly often, which is why it’s not a bad idea to make your colours the same as post-it notes so you can just place them over the old ratings rather than re-doing the whole chart when you have changes. Depending on the nature of the campaign, you may need to update this information frequently, perhaps daily.
Relationship Maps:
Relationship mapping is really critical for reaching people you’re otherwise struggling to reach. All of us have a natural routine that we follow each day and people we see while we go about our business. These are generally people that we see regardless of effort. So by identifying who those people are, then working backwards and seeing if they are members, supporters, etc…you can more or less reach everyone in a particular area if you start with a decent pool of people. This is especially important when the organiser and/or activist has a strained relationship with someone you’re trying to reach. In these situations you should consider finding someone who already has a good relationship with them to speak with them about a challenging topic such as organising. We’ve all heard the saying ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ however in organising it’s all about the messenger, if the wrong person delivers the correct message – it will not land.
Relationship mapping works by tapping into existing relationships, eliminating the need to build rapport. You might be surprised how far this tool alone can take a campaign. When I reflect on the massive campaign I worked on in 2015 where we organised 1100 healthcare workers with no right of access – the entire campaign was built and grown through profile and relationship maps. We found some leaders early, built up that group, then developed them to the standards the campaign required. Essentially, we taught those 50 leaders to organise their remaining 1000 co-workers. That cannot be done without systematic, robust and relentless mapping.
Reliability
Mapping is only as good as the age and quality of the information. In order for maps to be accurate they need be based on robust, measurable questions and skilled, reliable organisers and/or activists having those conversations. It’s really important to be as specific as possible and rely on evidence, rather than intuition or our gut. The skill of the person mapping is just as critical as getting the work done, a flaw in either creates significant issues in our ability to organise effectively. Mapping always sounds easy, but in practice is can be very challenging at times.
Data is benign
Organisers should not fear data. I suspect that a lot of organisers and activists think it’s their job to turn workers into unionists on the spot, rather than to organise who they find. The first job of any organiser is to understand the playing field, to map and analyse a number of fields and start to paint a picture so they understand what they are dealing with. The problem with organisers or activists who think they’re supposed to shift people or departments instantly is that they will inevitably avoid targets they perceive as challenging for more favourable targets – this reinforces poor organising habits and leaves large gaps in our workplace organisation. Anti-union and aggressive workers are entitled to their views and should not be avoided, we need to make sure this information is accurate and not just hearsay. This is all part of comprehensive organising. It really doesn’t matter where people stand today, what matters is working out their attitudes, experiences, issues, job role and relationships.
Remember, good organising isn’t necessarily having 70% union support in a workplace. Good organising is knowing you have 7 leaders, 42 supporters, 38 undecided, 19 anti, and 12 you haven’t reached yet – with plans to reach those 12.