I just had to sit through an hour long presentation at my workplace by a top manager at a privatized public utility. This Boston Consulting-bred mf who probably makes six figures was talking about “reshaping the cost base” as a euphemism for major job cuts, while in the same breath bragging about being acquired by a Private Equity firm. He literally had a fucking bullet point about a highly unionized workforce being one of the main challenges facing the company.
I was struggling to even sit still, it was maddening. I made an effort to contain the rage, but even the few angry comments I made about it afterwards with my colleagues seemed to fall on deaf ears. I might have already jeopardized my job if rumor of them reaches the wrong people. Unfortunately my rent doesn’t pay itself, and this is a relatively good job as far as they go.
How do you deal with the rage? How do you manage the anger internally when expressing it might genuinely lead to losing your job? I really tried to keep my mouth shut today, and I still kinda failed.
By constantly reminding myself that I’m looking to shape outcomes, not express myself. Not that it’s easy but for me at least it becomes more natural with practice.
As another commenter mentioned, you can think of it like a hostile space you’re infiltrating. I also think of it in comparison to how I act at actions when there are people telling heinous things at left crowds, trying to disrupt, or with cops present. I want to yell things back and insult the cops. But I instead try to adopt a role that improves outcomes for the action and those participating, which means deescalation and avoiding talking to cops at all. If someone is being made uncomfortable, try to get attention on me instead but via distraction and conversation, not being aggro but smiling.
Your power in workplace organizing comes from people liking and trusting you and being able to see the necessity of organizing. This is why the best first steps are often small and popular things like a little petition to keep coffee free or let people park in some lot or something. When management accedes, you are trusted as an organizer. When management balks, they start to see the necessity of organizing. Obviously there are ways this can be derailed and there’s more to it in terms of organizing conversations but this is what success ends up looking like.
You’re right, the shaping outcomes part is especially well put. The dispiriting thing is that as long as we’re not the ones being fucked over I don’t see my colleagues giving much of a shit about organizing. They’re generally happy about the company. The problem here is the effect our work has on other people.
That is probably true, yeah. Most people don’t intrinsically see the value in organizing because they don’t understand the oppositional attitude of the employer and/or they are afraid of retribution (and retribution will happen if they organize, that part is true).
You can agitate using those small actions I mentioned, though of course there are no guarantees. Asking some open-ended organizing questions (“if you could change something about this place, what would it be?”) over a few weeks’ time and taking notes might reveal that people are not hapoy about some things but just don’t think of them as things to complain about yet. If you take notes and some topics come up a lot, you can turn this into an (anonymous at first?) petition and watch it produce results. Also, try to make a list of who seems most receptive to this kind of discussion and allow the subject to change if a person doesn’t seem that interested. That list us a first draft for making an organizing committee and would identify those most likely to be agitated by the petition either working or failing.
Basically, you can carefully do a test balloon and make an initial list to get a better sense for where people are at. It’s important to ask the kind of question I suggested. If you ask a workplace of seemingly happy coworkers if there is anything about the workplace that is bothering them, most will say no. Ask them to name something they would change and most of the time they will suddenly they have tons of complaints and are willing to go off about them. And taking notes of responses will let you chart out the workplace to ask yourself questions about how to proceed.
Oh, and if you spread out the conversations and ask the question(s) casually from receptive-seeming people then they may not even know it is you who then compiles the survey. They may not even realize their own answers to your questions had anything to do with it! Also this is all much easier if you can identify one other person that would be ride-or-die by your side, as you can then distribute the tasks and therefore make them diffuse and harder to recognize.