MY EXPERIENCE TRYING TO UNIONIZE

Being that I am a 23-year-old college student, like many others I expect most of us have worked a great deal of minimum wage jobs and know the inane processes that most of these hold for pay that might as well be equivalent to a spit in the face.

I have worked for multiple minimum-wage industries, from food service to megastores such as Target, and have learned to see the similar emotions in my co-workers’ faces as we confront the unending wave of consumers slowly picking away at whatever soul we have left.

Then March 2020 came and I, along with many other people, realized how much power we held by taking a job that was going to treat workers like dogs. While yes, there is one avenue to go down – by applying, re-applying, and quitting jobs continuously so that no store has a consistent amount of workers for very long – I turned to idealizing unions, and trying to form an actual team of my co-workers.

Often managers will try to use this “teamwork” sentiment to motivate their workers into complying with their orders, but I felt that teamwork should be held democratically among the faces I actually talk to of my own volition. Last year I used to work for a chain restaurant that had a team of around 24 consistent workers and from one conversation I had between myself and one of my trusted work friends, we both got caught up in the news about an Amazon warehouse trying to unionize and ended up thinking the idea would be beneficial to our own workplace.

I was instantly fixated on the subject, and turned to the internet to learn about unions, how to join one, and what we could get out of it; if we were going with this plan, I had no intentions to half-ass it.

TAKING THE INITIATIVE

It took a lot of courage and thought to get conversations going, but an opportunity presented itself. During early December, there was a bit of snow coming down and we were all still expected to come in and work through it. When I got there, it was a group of five people working for a restaurant that had only one customer that day. Later I learned it was supposed to be six people, but one of our co-workers got in a bad car crash. The next day, I clocked into work and saw him, after he had just gotten off the phone with his car insurance company. I could tell from his expression that he didn’t have any good news, and yet despite his clear distress and sadness, the manager didn’t offer any sympathy, she just saw another pair of hands to help make pizza.

My friend and I looked to each other with similar intentions, so he watched the door and I reached out and told our distressed colleague of our plan. He easily agreed to it, and was quite familiar with the thought himself. From there, the three of us felt more confident spreading the message of unionizing.

Since that incident, I never used the word “union” around those I didn’t trust, however. I learned the best way to get the conversation going was to just ask, “So, what do you think of this job?” From there I got to either hear valid grievances from observant eyes that created union discussion, or “It’s great, I like it,” in a tone of little expression.

It all came down to who I trusted, and I found that the best course of action when actually bringing up the word around those I didn’t know if I trusted was to initially say it off company grounds – that way, I couldn’t be in any trouble for it.

Flash forward to the end of my career in that restaurant: We had a little less than half the team pushing for the idea, and I had just started the discussion in our group chat of actually going to the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) with the intention to join, but then more than half the outlet employees submitted their two weeks’ notice, all for varying reasons.

LESSONS LEARNED

If I had stuck with that company, it would just be back to Square One with two-three people, and an entire team of new faces. Feeling down, I quit too – and I regret it. Although I am glad with where I am now, I feel as though my position of being able to communicate with all of the workers was a privilege that is not easy to gain anywhere else outside a small store or fast-food restaurant. Without the necessary formed relationships to get the thought spreading, it becomes hard to actually achieve this ideal collective of preferable working conditions.

Upon further reflection, I learned that the IWW wasn’t initially the best union to contact, either, since it didn’t cover food service. I should’ve instead looked online for other unions, such as the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Overall, I will say that joining a union is much easier said than done, but even then I still think there’s no lost time in putting effort into the idea, especially considering that most of the work already done in a minimum wage job is very pointless and unrewarding. Workers with these jobs deserve more than they’re given because they are the front line for each of these companies, and without the workers, these companies would be operating solely online or simply cease to exist.

In order to buy a median-priced home in Portland, most workers would have to be paid at a rate of $49 an hour or so, analysts report. Meanwhile we can’t even get $15 per hour which is still not beneficial for living here unless you go down the path that so many others like myself have, of living with multiple roommates.

Poverty is seemingly encompassing my generation as we succumb to working for corporations whose CEOs could easily pay a living wage to all their workers, and yet most of us are stuck not knowing the answer. Even a union is not everyone’s cup of tea, because conformity doesn’t involve any change, and a lot of us are afraid of change – even if it could be beneficial to our survival.

So, to the reader, I ask you to give change a chance. Branch out to your co-workers and not only form something that will help you, but also bring you closer to the person you work with. You work as a team already – why not get paid like one?