These groups are hilarious. Four Our Future, In Union, Democracy for All, and now this new one I just joined with a name I forget.
They keep popping up with new names, but I am starting to get the feeling they are just the same entities laundering money or some shit. Even funnier, they are all anti union while canvassing (without saying so usually) for pro union candidates. In Union, of course, was the most aggressively anti union one I have been a part of. For Our Future had a union, but the hiring managers lied about the union and hoped people wouldn't find out. This new one I joined I swear is just Democracy for All with a different name.
I suspect these groups notice their employees trying to unionize. They realize it is a bad look when they fight a union while supporting a(n allegedly) pro union lib on the ballot. Then the next time they need to start canvassing they decide to have a new name so they can fight off the union again before shit gets real.
Thanks for reading my rant. This shit is infuriating and hard to track.
These sort of organizations seem to have an approach with a handful of “political professionals” on the top with a bunch of underpaid canvassers, often short term, on the bottom that they’re banking on being more motivated by “fighting the good fight” maybe a few resume builders, rather than earning a fair paycheck. And yeah, I get the impression it’s a handful of politicos rebranding every few years, although that’s probably more to do with obfuscating the astroturfing than union avoidance. If they stick around too long then someone might go go sniffing and piece together who’s behind the curtain. Especially as a lot of entities exist to skirt campaign finance laws.
We've noticed that here after a few campaigns trying to unionize canvassers. As soon as they catch a whiff of organizing, they close up shop and an identical group pops up the next week doing the same shit.
It would probably be more effective to organize canvassers in a sort of industry or guild system instead of trying to organize each company's workers. If you've done any amount of canvassing, you know where all of the hot spots are and could find other canvassers to organize with pretty easily. The problem, like all union drives, is that people just want to get paid and go home, which I get, especially with how poorly they're paid.
I worked for an environmentalist canvassing org in Texas for about a month but I didn't stay long enough to find out their stance on unions. I'm not cut out to spend all day getting yelled at by people threatening to call the cops on me for knocking on their door. Also I just kind of got a weird vibe from them overall.
