BRATTLEBORO — It wasn't a long haul to certification but it was a nail-biter.
Congratulations are in order. The workers at the Brattleboro Food Co-op have a union. The outcome was never less than uncertain, and no one would have guessed the wide margin of acceptance.
My own estimates were probably like those of most: one day thinking labor would be a winner and the next day not so sure.
I'm as peripheral to the core organizing group as any typical shopper. I had some brief conversations with a few workers, managers, and members of the store's board of directors during the organizing drive but have had none since the final vote.
I do, however, have some thoughts about this specific advance of labor at the Co-op, unions in general, and the picture of the greater Co-op community, with which an unusually large slice of Brattleboro is connected.
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Throughout the organizing period, the leadership of the union drive spoke often of the absence of the “co-op spirit” among management, if not the board as well.
There may be a vague kernel of truth in that, but not enough evidence to make the assertion stand. There are many perceptions and interpretations of what constitutes this concept.
It isn't an easy concept to pin down. The organized workers now face the same question and difficulty as has the board of directors for these many past years.
Where the directors have had to interpret and mesh the cooperative principles with store bylaws and operating protocols and manuals, the unionized workers must interpret and apply these same principles within their own bylaws and operations.
They must create a union shop that embodies these ideals and exudes the co-op spirit. This will be a hefty task and a good problem. If it is done and done well, the Co-op will be more unified and stronger than ever.
That is, if the workers discover and reflect in their union the ideals that comprise the co-op spirit, they will see that everyone involved in our store, no matter their position, has the same objective even if there are particular or different needs in different segments.
Whether one be a worker, manager, board member, or consumer, the litmus test for every decision must be: Does it reflect co-op ideals?
In the recent decades when these ideas and ideals have been wrestled with, formulated, and applied, the workers have been the missing voice at the table.
To be sure, there has been for years a worker or two on the board of directors, but they were sternly advised that it was impermissible to draw any direct connection between their function as board members and the issues pertinent to non-management staff.
Consequently, the seats reserved for staff had little interest to the workforce, and those who took the seat represented no one but themselves.
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I have no idea how much union experience exists among the organizers or workers as a whole, but a good guess, given the youthfulness of the Co-op's staff, is that it's minimal. Moreover, there might not be anyone with experience at the very birth of a local.
Birthing pains for a union effort are very particular, if for no other reason than it feels as if there is so much to do at once. Growing pains aren't much easier, because we learn so much by trial and error.
Development of the union will follow these predictable patterns. To be sure, if the local union leadership doesn't become well-educated on the history of unions, why and how they grew strong, and why and how they diminished to their weak state today, the local will not be durable.
Recall the oft-cited warning about not knowing history and being doomed to repeat it.
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There shouldn't be a rush to open negotiations. Preparation is very important.
Although there is a mandate to have a contract in place within a year, and failure to do so will send proposed contracts to arbitration (a culmination that both sides should work to avoid), there is still ample time to prepare.
A knowledgeable negotiating team will be better able to weigh advice and to balance needs, desires, and vision with practical progress.
It probably need not be said that leadership here in Brattleboro should be talking with informed leadership at other unionized co-ops.
Along the way, local union leaders must not neglect to keep the rest of the members well-informed. An informed rank and file will trust leadership and, with their support, provide the power needed by the negotiators. Support from the rank and file is, as it should be, the ultimate and only source of legitimacy.
The learning period is apt to be a trying time. Neither Brattleboro management nor workers have experienced the relationship that they now have with each other.
The Co-op's leadership has been steadily and determinedly working on its structure, goals, and procedures for 30 years. It required a long time to achieve its present level of effectiveness.
The union is going to follow the same path. It can't be otherwise.
We're all human. Thus, these early days, and years, are going to require a lot of patience, tolerance, and supreme listening skills. These skills do not arrive or become internalized automatically. They take a great deal of practice and commitment.
The negotiating process, at its best, is not so far from a consensus-building process, the most difficult of all. It is an agreement about what is acceptable to everyone.
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The union the co-op workers have allied themselves with - United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) - is not a cooperative. It does not wholly share the ideals that Brattleboro Food Co-op workers have in mind.
The parent union does strive to help their locals attain some local control and share some of the wealth. However, it subscribes to a form of capitalism that precludes the ideal of cooperation (an irony, given how one would perceive the ideals of a union).
Nevertheless, the Co-op shop should pay its dues and graciously accept the benefits and responsibilities of membership in the parent union. At the same time, it must understand the nature of conventional unions.
Most unions are strictly self-interested and view the unemployed and underemployed not as their ill-treated brethren but as competition and a threat to their own jobs.
Much as the owners, they focus on self-interest. They rarely support one another. They give lip service to democracy but fail to embrace it.
Undermining unions from the other side have been the owners. Facing unions that are self-serving and thus weak, the owners have been able to further increase and consolidate their wealth.
By taking control of the political process with the influence of money, business owners have gutted most union power through legislation.
Remarkably and ironically, the workers have lacked union and political education that would have enabled them to see the situation for what it was and fight against it. So not only have workers blithely stood by but, in the name of supporting the “American” way (fostered not only by ownership but by their own union leaders), they have actually cheered on the owners with their votes and flag-waving demonstrations.
Now the unions are, for the most part, just a shell of what they were 50 years ago.
I believe that an important goal should be, ultimately, the establishment of a union by and for workers in cooperatives of all types. A regional union could be part of a national union. This is a subject to ponder on another day.
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For the time being, the UFCW provides a structure and a great deal of experience in certain critical areas. Nevertheless, if the store local is truly concerned about incorporating and enhancing the co-op spirit into its own essence, it is going to have to become very clear about the differences in political positions and aspirations that exist between a traditional (competitive) union and what ought to be a union with a cooperative underpinning.
By and large, the Co-op membership, in the co-op spirit, supported the workers' desire to organize. The membership will continue to support the organizing success so as long as the workers see themselves as an integral part of the whole and share the same ideals.
In the capitalist world, unions and management/owners are enemies. In the cooperative world management, workers and consumers are just different legs supporting the same table.
Failure to understand these crucial differences will ultimately unravel the whole thing. Truly knowing that in the end, in the big picture, everyone's interests are the same is to have also truly recognized and absorbed the co-op spirit.
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The Co-op local will need to establish an internal structure. To the consternation of many, no doubt, it will bear some resemblance to that of management and the board.
This is OK. The wheel need not be reinvented. For most of the same reasons, the union will need to choose and empower selected members to complete the work that will keep the group functioning effectively.
The board might have overlooked (most likely from inexperience rather than negligence) an important element when it deliberately chose to view management as a solid wall between itself and the rest of the staff.
But the board has generally developed a reasonable, sophisticated, and effective structure for its purposes. The local shop will also require a set of bylaws to state precisely what positions it will need to get all its work done and the powers those people will have.
The most important part of this document will be the statement of purpose or the equivalent.
This section is where the ideals, or co-op spirit, will be articulated and enumerated. It is where the workers define who they are and why they have banded together. There also needs to be a place to declare goals, principles and aspirations.
These are the touchstones from which all else follows. The mere creation of these statements is the jumping-off point of self-education.
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Education is critical. It was the lack of continuing quality cooperative education and renewal that set management and non-management workers on their slow and inevitable drift apart. It was a drift that went on for so long and became a gulf so wide that unionization became, from the workers standpoint, the only apparent remedy.
This drift is inevitable and unavoidable when education falls by the wayside, for at least two reasons.
First, without frequently discussing the what and why of cooperatives, one slowly loses an awareness of the connectedness between what happens and why it happens, between action and principle.
Second, there is constant turnover in staff. This is especially important for the rank and file to recognize, because turnover is greater at that level.
In several years, a third or half the union workers will be too new to remember the organizing drive and the reasons it came to be. Without education, their commitment will be weaker, perhaps much weaker, than that of “old-timers.”
Loyalty will diminish, leadership will lose real support (despite the new workers paying dues), and the local itself will weaken. This union member drift is just another version of the aforementioned management/worker drift.
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From the beginning of our local drive, it has seemed to me that the single basic issue was simply to enable the non-management staff to have a seat at the table.
This parity could not be achieved unless there was roughly equal power on both sides. Only then could there be true negotiations.
Until now, management could demand anything of workers. Workers could demand nothing of management.
Management could unilaterally choose to talk or not talk. It might or might not choose to explain an action to the workers' satisfaction. It could end a conversation if it tired. It could evaluate a worker and demand compliance; but workers could not evaluate managers, let alone expect change.
It might be pointed out that the workers had advocates. The advocates had no power. Advocates might have occasionally been effective in helping to resolve an individual's problem or minor grievance, but they had no ability or power to deal with a systemic problem such as language in the employee manual, processes, policies, allocation of resources, or widespread dissatisfaction of any sort.
The members of the Co-op staff need representatives. They need people who clearly speak for the whole. In the absence of a union, there was no whole.
The Directors have a board with a chair. Management has a team with a general manager. Now the workers have a union with a steward.
It sounds right.
It sounds better balanced.
Potentially. I'm rooting for everyone.