Richard Balzer: Kris, I am glad to have the chance to talk to you about organizing. Almost everything you read or hear about unions has to do either with declining membership or about how hard it is for unions to win elections. Given AFSCME’s recent success at organizing—Harvard, the University of Minnesota, the University of Illinois, and UOO nurses in Connecticut—I wonder what you think about this situation and the prospects for successful organizing in the future. [AFSCME is the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees-ED.]

Kris Rondeau: Organizing is really hard. It goes without saying that under Reagan and Bush the rules of the game were altered. The National Labor Relations Board’s decisions definitely hurt. Worse still is the increasingly smug attitude of employers. Over the last five or ten years employers have been given carte blanche to conduct any kind of vicious anti-union campaign they want and, disturbingly, they do it with great gusto. They seem willing to use any tactic to mislead, scare, and intimidate workers not to join a union. They employ subtle psychological tricks, destroying workers’ self-confidence and belief that they have the democratic right to decide whether to be represented or not. It’s pretty frightening. As you can imagine, these campaigns are extremely hard to beat, especially if you use old fashioned organizing techniques. But there are new ways, effective ways, to organize. We’ve developed a model of how to organize.

Balzer: Could you say something about the model?

Rondeau: Sure. First, you have to ask what the union’s advantages are—because the employer has so many advantages of power, resources, influence, access. There is only one answer, and that is our ability to develop honest relationships with each other, where people are equal. All sorts of possibilities come out of building that kind of relationship.

Balzer: Where does this model come from?

Rondeau: It comes out of the experience of working women. This is not taking anything away from men. In fact, the labor movement was built by men mostly for male workers, and its traditions, its way of doing things, and its structures all come out of masculine culture. The model worked extremely well while unions were winning by organizing mostly men, working full time, supporting families. Now the workforce has changed; how and where people work has changed. So the task is different. I think if the labor movement would listen to what women organizers are saying we could be more successful in the years ahead.

Balzer: Will the model you have developed work at places other than Harvard?

Rondeau: I’m sure it will. It already has. But it does need time and support. In this connection, we are very fortunate to be part of AFSCME. Our international union supports the model we have developed and does not try to dilute it.

Organizing One-to-One

Balzer: Could we talk about some of the elements of this model?

Rondeau: The key is organizing one-to-one, or one person at a time. It’s a type of organizing based on building deep personal relationships by connecting workers to each other in important ways. It’s not the kind of organizing that relies on market techniques or advertising. It’s not about selling some body something. You build a strong organization by connecting people to each other. The union grows out of this network of relationships. Without this all you ever have are superficial connections which will never withstand the hot breath of management’s anti-unionism.

Balzer: How do you build these relationships?

Rondeau: It’s really simple. Three ways: the most important is listening. When you listen you find out important things. The second is talking. I don’t mean just talking about the union, but telling your story. You can’t ask someone to cell their story without telling yours. Third, you need to make sure that the relationships are ongoing—that they last. Organizing a union is not a one-shot deal or even a one year deal.

Balzer: So listening sounds like it’s pretty critical. Do you train people to listen? Do you just tell them to listen?

Rondeau: Some people are just good listeners. One of the reasons that women of ten make terrific organizers is that they’re interested in other people and they know how to listen to them. Others struggle with listening and—especially at first—think that organizing is selling something, and it isn’t. While the other person is talking the listener is composing his/her response in her head. That’s not listening. Listening requires that you be interested in someone else’s life, in their experience. Also, employees are initially scared of going up to strangers, introducing them selves, and just talking about the union. It’s a fear that almost all organizers have.

Balzer: What’s the fear about?

Rondeau: It’s a fear of talking to mangers. Also a fear of rejection, because you’re asking someone else to care about something that you care about. But there’s also just the fear that you would have walking up to anybody and talking to them. One of the first things that we teach people is that when they’re going to talk to people about the union, they should not talk about the union; find other ways to get to know the person, to listen to their story.

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