How is it going so far?

I’m simultaneously more empowered/excited than I’ve ever been at work and also scared shitless. So pretty good. Incompetence by management has made a lot of the startup easy

From your username, I’m assuming you were able to access some support from the IWW? If so, how has that been? If not, why do you think they’ve been unable to help you?

Yes! They’ve been awesome. Real quick response, very supportive, and my contact seems decently radical. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my chapter has a decent fund in case we get retaliated against. And I’m also coordinating with an industry-specific union. My IWW rep said it’s common for us to dual-card and that, if the business unions fall through in terms of supporting their workers, the IWW will fill in the gaps. Business unions will sometimes tend to be less radical and more open to making concessions. My rep said, “it may take decades, but if what you want is to buy the company and make it into a worker coop, we can set up a campaign for that”.

One thing I remember being told that was important for unionizing was getting a list of employees, phone numbers/addresses, and figuring out if people are cool with unionizing, neutral, or outright hostile.

The whole “incompetent management” thing has made getting the employee list real easy. Still working on getting the sentiment analysis done.

If you’ve been doing that, how has covid and the pandemic affected that effort? I’m assuming not a lot because all the restrictions being more or less lifted, but I was still curious if that’s been hard to do.

Our office is all remote, so the big challenge is setting up pretenses for us to speak on less formal platforms where management doesn’t have admin access to monitor everything we say. Luckily, people have been down for an informal happy hour so far and I had one group join a local gaming Discord. It may be silly, but I think a lot of silly things have the potential to become serious as time goes on