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Biko Koenig, "Worker Centered: Allyship & Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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- [00:00]
Biko Koenig
I was groomed to become one of his wives.
- [00:03]
Podcast Host Tom Dicena
This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells
- [00:09]
Biko Koenig
me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk, you need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist.
- [00:26]
Podcast Host Tom Dicena
Search Disorder in your podcast app to
- [00:28]
Biko Koenig
listen right now welcome to the New Books Network
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Joe Zerilli
welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:37]
Podcast Host Tom Dicena
I'm your host Tom Disena from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. I'm joined today by Oakland University Communication graduate student Joe Zerilli. Our guest today is Biko Koenig, the author of Worker Allyship and Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement. Worker Centered provides an ethnographic study of a worker center campaign run at a primarily low wage immigrant workplace where a group of labor allies, activists and staffers who have devoted their lives to the importance of worker leadership run a campaign that is decidedly not led by workers and yet is continually framed as such. Written with an insider perspective, Worker Centered explores the complexities of member led movement work and illustrates the challenges that the staff faced in their work, both internal tensions of strategy and analysis as well as external hurdles of employer resistance and the strength of pro employer narratives among workers in the following the tenacious work of staff and allies to win the campaign. This book emphasizes the transformative nature of movement work where the aim is not to unveil some natural predisposition to collective action or justice, but defend, mentally alter how someone sees the world and acts within it. Our guest, Pico Koenig, is an Assistant professor in the Government and Public Policy Programs at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is also co founder of Research Action, a worker owned research and organizing firm that performs research and analysis for unions, solidarity economy organizations, community groups, and social justice campaigns. Trained as an ethnographer and qualitative specialist at the New School for Social Research, Koenig's research investigates questions of political behavior and mobilization that centers the experiences of everyday actors as they seek to challenge status quo power relationships.
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Joe Zerilli
Biko Koenig, welcome to the New Books Network.
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Biko Koenig
It is exciting to be here. Thanks for having me Tom. Thanks for having me at class.
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Joe Zerilli
So, before we get into the substance of your book, I'd like to know what brings you to this topic.
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Biko Koenig
It's kind of a long story. Let's see how short I can make it. But I you know, when I was an undergrad I got Involved in the labor movement. I was basically organized into the labor movement by a campaign that was happening on my campus. I went to Temple University in Philadelphia, which is a really big state school. Must have been in my junior year. There was some big push around. The janitors were having a contract fight and they wanted to try to get students involved. There's this organization called Jobs of Justice, which is kind of a community based organization that bridges community and labor. And I don't know if it's still active, but they had a thing called the Student Labor Action Project. And it was kind of a beautiful thing to experience because there. This isn't. This isn't their words. This is my words, their word. The kind of my words of this was we need students to be involved and you kind of don't know what you're doing. So we're going to train you up about how to actually participate in the labor movement and be good allies for working class folks. So that's where I kind of cut my teeth. And then I just did a lot of labor activism. I was in a union for a long time. I worked as a stagehand. So I was a theater carpenter and electrician. So I was in IATSI for many years. Did a little bit of organizing with them. Eventually moved to New York City, where I got deeply involved in this kind of food worker landscape is the intersection of immigrant justice questions, often questions of migrant justice specifically. Then these like food pathway questions about what does the supply chain look like, where does our food come from, and how are there labor issues sort of at every link in the chain from farm to table. I got involved in an organization called the Food Chain Workers alliance, which is based in the United States and tries to organize folks kind of across the board in all these different realms. And at the same time was getting involved with these organizations called worker centers, which I could talk about. Naomi, I'll come back to later, but just kind of new, innovative ways to approach the question of workplace justice. And through that work, as a volunteer, as an activist, as a participant living in New York City at the time, got involved in this topic as a practitioner, as an activist, and then as a student as I was finishing up my graduate education and was looking for projects to work on, and ended up coming to the Clara Lemlich Project to do a really embedded project, which eventually became this book.
- [05:19]
Joe Zerilli
All right, so we like long answers on the New Books Network. So that's pretty cool. Let's talk about this book. Let's talk about the sort of frame for our Listeners what this project is about.
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Biko Koenig
Sure. So this book is a deep ethnographic study of a worker center campaign to try to organize a workplace. Over the course of about a year and a half, the workplace is staffed by about 150 people, not exclusively, but mostly immigrant workers. And the attempt by this organization, the clp, the Clara Lemlich Project, is to try to help these workers create their own union. So a rank and file led union that embraces direct action tactics, that tries to really have bottom up grassroots leadership to be able to win a better life for people who, you know, are kind of dealing with some of the worst parts of our economy and aren't always treated even in, even an adherence to legal standards. So over the course of a year and a half, I worked at this place at the clp, first kind of as an intern, and then eventually they asked me to take a staff role. But I did it in an unpaid. I was a research project, so I decided to not get paid for it. While we were trying to win this campaign. And two things happened. One is we saw some pretty huge successes for a really hard fought campaign. We were able to get the employer to the table to have a conversation with us, the workers and them to talk about the issues, to see if we could come to some kind of agreement. And we were able to leverage a lot of ally outside support. We were able to get a lot of good press coverage. The campaign in a lot of ways looked really successful, but it ultimately was a failure because we really struggled to get any workers involved at all. So even though we achieved some surprising victories, the idea of a worker led union, well, really just an organization of workers, never came to fruition at all. And part of what made this so challenging for me to sort out and was really why it took me so long to write this book, is that this kind of outcome was happening at an organization where the notion of worker leadership was the most important concept, the heart of the mission, the core of what we did. The slogan that we had was at the clp, work workers come first and everything else follows. And all of the allies who supported the organization supported us. And not necessarily, you know, like you, you have only so much money, only so much time. Why are you volunteering with the clp? Why are you donating to us as opposed to another union or another worker center? Well, we know at the CLP it is bottom up, it is worker led, it is worker directed. And in that campaign we struggle to get workers to participate or let alone to lead. And there are some major Parts of the campaign, probably about five to six months, where we only had one person who was participating at all. And it was a part time worker who kind of came from an activist background, for lack of a better way to put it, and was really engaged in the campaign and really cared about it. But a workforce of 150 and a goal of having these workers organized to the degree where they would control and run their own union was so far and so distant and we were never able to fully realize it. It because our ideological commitment to the notion of worker leadership was just so strong, made it very difficult for us to sort of see the writing on the wall, but then enabled us to do a bunch of really cool, powerful things. So the book is my attempt to try to sort through what happened, why did it happen, and what are these commitments that we have to bottom up leadership to frontline leadership and other kinds of organizations. So this notion of grassroots power being really essential to our values, what does it enable? But then also what does it really complicate and how did it get in our own way strategically? And later, I can talk a little bit more about like the ethnographic process if you want, but it is a deep, rich case study. And if you read the book you saw it's kind of set up as a narrative, so you get the sort of story arc of my experience through it from the launch of the campaign until I leave, and then it's sort of slowly sputters out after that.
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Joe Zerilli
So I'm going to set up a little context for this talk. The students in this class right now are working through a book. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Eric LeBlanc's book on worker to worker organizing, and that tells a very particularly optimistic story about the idea of worker led unionization. So your book, I think, is less optimistic. Is that fair? I mean, you're actually pretty upfront about this in the introduction, right, that you're almost reticent to talk about some of the things that happened in this campaign.
- [10:41]
Biko Koenig
I think maybe the way I would put it is there's a. There's a version of optimism around all kinds of liberatory projects that come from our ideological commitment to our values and our belief in the goal. And that is distinct from a sober reflection on the evidence of not so much what works and what doesn't work, but how things go when we try them. Because I think it's never quite as crystal clear as this was a success and this was a failure. And the part about it that's very difficult. And I try to talk about this in the book, but it's still confusing to me is that when we're working on political projects like this, the. The beauty of our ideological vision, the promised land that we're trying to work towards, is something that we need to say out loud, even though it doesn't exist, and then try to create it at the same time. So part of what we're doing, when authors are trying to be really optimistic and it depends on the project and how they're trying to write it like that, actually I think is quite essential to be able to say we are working towards this thing. We need to be able to visualize it. We need to work, to call it into being. Even if it hasn't worked before, maybe this time it will be different if we understand it better. And part of what I'm trying to do in this book is not to say anything like worker to worker organizing doesn't work, or worker centers that want to take on a more direct union style approach wouldn't work, or that direct action unions don't work. It's more that in this particular instance, the problem was not the vision, the problem was not the ideology. The problem was not the future that we were trying to call into being. The real challenge was that in conversation with our strategy, how did we try to enact that stuff? And one of the things I talk about is I don't know if folks in the class have read anything by Hari Hahn, who's just this pretty amazing political scientist who her major question is, what is it that social movement organizations do? When are they successful and how are they successful? And she's written a bunch of books. I think she's one of MacArthur Grant. So she's a genius, a certified genius. And she's got this incredibly simple binary. And you know, we should always be aware, beware of binaries, right? It's a little simplified. She's like, sometimes we're mobilizing people. And mobilizing people is saying, all right, folks, we know you're on board. You're on our mailing list. You came to an event, you pay dues, like, whatever, and next week we're all taking the streets, or we're having a mutual aid event, or we have to go do a thing. I don't need to change you. You are already on board. I just gotta call you in to what's next. That is different from organizing. Organizing is going to people who are not on board. And you have to somehow transform them. You have to Cajole them. You have to entice them, you have to excite them. Sometimes the language that we use in the labor movement is we have to agitate them. Like, what is it that you really want and are you willing to fight for it? Will you fight for a better life for you, for your family, for your kids, for your parents? Organizing work is transformative. It's saying that the way that people are in a given moment sometimes is not enough for them to take the kinds of actions that they, that we might need to get the world that we want. So part of the worker to worker organizing, the kind of, like, radical approach that's being used at the clp, thinks about workers like they just need to be mobilized. That was really the fundamental strategic flaw, is that we believed so strongly in the power of the workers that we thought giving them the opportunity to take action was enough. It was not enough. Giving the activists who have been with us for a decade, who are willing to go take the streets or willing to give money, all that they need is opportunities, right? They just need to know what's going down this weekend. Like, hell yeah, I'll fly her. Like, what's going on? You talk to a worker who has never engaged in a, in a campaign before in their life, who is working class, maybe working poor, who knows what the family situation is like? But in a lot of ways, it's just trying to get through the day. What we're asking them to do is not a, like, hell yeah, let's fly her. What we're asking them to do is, hey, do you want to put your livelihood at risk for something that's going to be really hard to fight for? I'm an organizer. I'm not putting my livelihood at risk in this campaign. I'm asking you to do it. That is a really challenging thing to do. This is why labor organizers, successful labor organizers, are brilliant in their strategy, are deeply understanding, and how relational it is to talk to people and to get them to connect to their dreams, are able to train people up and also able to bring people together. And in our, you know, just in the way that we worked, this very strong commitment to worker leadership, I think obscured that for us, obscured that it was gonna, that it was gonna be much harder than we thought. Because, and I know you like long answers, but this one has been pretty long. But because part of the way that the CLP had been so successful for so long, had never lost a campaign, had won millions of dollars for workers, is because it had never run a campaign like this before it had done a classic worker center thing which is saying, hey, fired workers, you have lost your job. Do you want to come and like fight? Very different context. Hey, workers who have been treated really poorly, oh hey, you've lost a bunch of money because the, your employer has been stealing your overtime pay or not paying you even minimum wage. So a different set of issues where it's actually, I don't want to say it's easier, but it's a really distinctly different way to call people in and take leadership because the stakes are different and the skin in the game is different from going to a place like the Fishtown condiment company and asking people to get involved in a campaign. It's just a different lift. So, and here I'll, I'll kick it back to you after this time. If I don't think that it's, I'm more or less optimistic. I am trying to diagnose why it went wrong in this instance and I remain pretty committed as someone who like, is not just a labor movement nerd, but like believes in the labor movement that like we need, we need like worker led unions. Right. We, we need workers to act actively, be involved, but we also need like good leadership and we need good institutions, we need good structures, we need everything but, but a kind of like non worker leader version that has sort of been the dominant framework not everywhere, but definitely in big parts of the American labor movement since the 90s. This kind of hasn't gotten us where we need to go.
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Joe Zerilli
So agree 100%. There's a couple of things just listening to you talk that occurred to me several years ago. I interviewed Ellen Cassidy who organized the 9 to 5 movement. And one of the things that she talked about was when this is in the 1970s and we're talking about women office workers who had no experience of being in a union and you know, none of that background, that one of the most important things that she had to do was to sort of meet them where they were.
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Biko Koenig
Right.
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Joe Zerilli
Like figure out where they were first without coming to them with a set of, you know, pre thought out ideas about where they were.
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Biko Koenig
Yeah, I mean that's the classic. We're going to like, organizers who aren't in the labor movement, I think usually know this rule, but this is like a labor movement rule. You got to meet people where they're at. And the other One is the 8020 rule. You should be listening 80% of the time when you're speaking with a worker. And you know, the best organizers do this and the organizers at the CLP tried to do this too. Like there's some. It's not that they didn't know what they, what they were doing or that they were bad organizers. It really just was this, this broader question. But ultimately you have to meet people where they're at so that you can deeply understand what their needs are and what their capabilities are to then help them transform themselves into people who feel a sense of agency with their colleagues or fellow workers or their community members such that they are enabled to take action.
- [19:20]
Joe Zerilli
So let's move on to the second chapter of the book here, if you would. I'd like you to read from page 42.
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Biko Koenig
Here we go. Just this paragraph. Yep.
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Podcast Host Tom Dicena
Please.
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Biko Koenig
While these strategic considerations played a role, the interest in this model stemmed primarily from the CLP staffers ideological critique of business unions. Viewing the worker center model as limited for mass mobilization, staff also saw traditional unions as complicit in weakening worker power and increasing economic precarity. They regarded the work site as the primary site of oppression and believed that any effective model must affirm workers collective power and prioritize their leadership. And while other approaches might secure union contracts, they overlooked the central aim of labor action, empowering workers to overcome oppression and exert control over their employers and the economy. Thus the emphasis on worker leadership in the CLP's approach should be understood as equally ideological and strategic as staffers were unwilling to make tactical decisions that could undermine workers leadership in the movement.
- [20:24]
Joe Zerilli
So in part this is a very sort of inside baseball discussion for people in the union movement. But I think it points to something really, really important. And this is a class that is about labor and unions to some degree. So let's talk about it. Let's explore that critique of business unionism.
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Biko Koenig
Yeah, so the, the, the way that business union was described to me that has always stuck with me is the UN, you know, business unionism. The union is kind of acting like a business. I always think of this as the metaphor of you are a union worker and you are paying your dues and you're part of a union and that relationship to you is like having insurance. The union is an insurance company. You pay your dues to it, you get stuff from it. It's not part of your identity in any meaningful way. It doesn't feel like a group that you're a part of or that people who you are collaborating with. It doesn't feel like a vehicle for power and you aren't really asked to do anything except pay your dues and then you know Maybe if there's a picket line or something to participate in. So the, the critique of business unionism, sometimes this is a caricature, right? It can be a powerful caricature. It can be quite descriptive. But it's the notion that, you know, I think the history points to that some major parts of the mainstream labor union in the United States are maybe more interested in labor peace, are less interested in the broader political agenda that unions might have. And you could imagine, you know, the, the other framework sometimes is social movement unionism. What if unions are embedded in movements for racial justice, for environmental justice? But there's stuff in the middle which is just to say, what if a union is more geared directly towards the economic justice of its members in a way that tries to expand that power? Now, I'll say then one of the kind of like funky, moving pieces is should a union only care about its members or should it care about all workers? And you could say, maybe not all workers, but if it's a car manufacturing union, how much should they care about people working in car manufacturing who are not yet their members? And this is where you might imagine, like on a level spectrum, the. Are they going to be really conservative? The only thing we want to do is keep our members. We want to make sure that they're happy. We don't want to take any risks, or do we want to put money into growing our membership base? And it's. This is where, you know, the, these strategic decisions that happen on a super high level. This at least is my read of it kind of flow from an ideological position. If you are, if you're a union that is concerned about risk, then you're much like you're. You're going to look at organizing new members as like, oh, what if it goes wrong? Or what do we do if we lose a campaign? Or what do we do if we lose members? We don't want to ask too much of our members. But a more aggressive union might say, well, what we need to do is get our membership on board with having more elections, with trying to expand the number of people who are in this union and try to do things like political education to help them understand why a bigger, stronger labor movement might actually help lots of people, including themselves. So there's some, like, political ideology, or maybe ideology is even too strong of a word, but a political lens about how a given organization, union organization, thinks about its own work. And I don't know how much you have all talked about the, with the kind of bureaucratic structures of unions, but you Know, in the United States, you've got your local usually, and the local might itself be quite conservative and not want to do much. And then it might be part of a regional council or an international, and there might be different desires and different capacities at these different levels that could really be in conflict with each other, or they might all line up and maybe none of them want to do anything, or they all want to do a lot. But all that is to say that the folks in the CLP and other parts of. Not like, crazy about the phrase radical labor movement, but the more kind of worker centric folks are saying that there's a. There's a huge strategic misstep in thinking that the point of the labor movement is anything but widespread economic justice for all workers, full stop. And if we're not bringing more people in and getting them empowered and having them be able to go to the work site and to be able to fight for better wages, treatment, benefits, life, then we're not doing the thing that the labor movement's supposed to be.
- [25:14]
Joe Zerilli
Yeah, sometimes I, I worry that we almost function as like a second HR department. And another piece to this is, and
- [25:24]
Podcast Host Tom Dicena
I think you're absolutely right, there are
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Joe Zerilli
tremendous differences in different locals of the same union. I just recently negotiated for my union our contract with the university administration. And as I was doing it, I was in discussions with a neighboring university. They're less than 30 miles away from us who were doing the same thing. And the differences between how we approach those negotiations and they do, even though we're in the same union, it was like night and day. We were much more. They talked about going out for dinner with the administration's team during the negotiations. And I said, there's no way that we're doing that. You know, like, we're not that close.
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Biko Koenig
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that would not have flown at the clp, I can tell you that. Yeah, yeah. And. And maybe just one other kind of layer to this I'll add, and how it kind of plays into some of the discussions in the book, is that there's a. There's a version of this radical critique which I think is something that we should really consider is yes, it's about intention and yes, it's about ideology or it's about politics or your sort of approach to this, but it's also about the rules of the game and the institutional structure and that those things matter. So the radical. Maybe just stop saying that. The sort of worker centric or the left critique of the mainstream labor movement is that the rules that we have set up soup to nuts from the federal government down to most state level regulations are not designed to empower unions to the extent that they provide space for unions to exist. It's in order to have labor peace rather than it is to have how can we empower workers to take on more and bigger actions to expand economic justice and does a lot of neutering of the, the politics simply by setting up what's allowed and what isn't allowed. And so one of the ways this comes out in the critique and how it comes out in the CLP is that there's this real concern, it's almost like a purity for making sure that we are an organization that believes in this model of extremely sharp bottom up worker leadership. And anything that doesn't do this is a problem. And it's a problem because it doesn't align with our ideology. And it's a problem therefore because we do not think strategically it's going to work. And just as one tiny example, the union model that we were really trying to help the workers organize into was one where dues would not be taken out of paychecks, dues would be voluntarily assessed. And we had a very strong reason for this, about how it makes the employer sort of have to work with the union and, and how it feels for the employees to sort of have that dues experience. And we often presented that to workers in a way that was like, let me tell you about why our model is so incredible. And it's talk about inside baseball. If you don't know anything about unions and somebody is getting into the nuances of how the do structure is going to work, it only makes sense if you already have the perspective. Right. And this is where we really kept stepping in. It was that we often struggled to have the capacity and to get the buy in from the workers to be able to walk them to the place where the things that we were really excited about because we thought that they were what was going to help us not just win here, but win broadly didn't land because it wasn't that, that wasn't what was motivating for them. And this, this is another part of the mismatch.
- [29:22]
Joe Zerilli
So in the third chapter you get into the specifics of the Fishtown Condiment company campaign. Let's talk a little bit about how an employee's sense of ownership of the job plays into wanting to the sort
- [29:41]
Podcast Host Tom Dicena
of worker to worker buy in.
- [29:43]
Biko Koenig
You mean like how their experience at the workplace. Yeah, yeah. And so one of the things that was really Interesting about the, the campaign at FCC is that in this, broadly in food work, like this was in a place that we usually would put as food production and distribution, but really across all the food system, it is mostly low paid. You know, you've got your, your fancy steakhouse waiter here, you've got your boutique, whatever there. But most of the jobs are like very low paid. And the fcc, just because of its particular history and that it had been around for 20 or 30 years, was not the lowest paid. Now it was still not. I mean we're talking like $5 above minimum wage for people who've been there for 15 years. So not, not like astronomically high, but enough that people really had to think about, you know, do I want to lose this job, Do I want to leave this job? So you have a real sort of structural thing happening around how people consider the material benefits they're getting at work alongside a classic model that we often see repeated where you don't need a union because here we're a small company and we're all family. If you have a problem, you can come talk to us. Now I think people who are on the pro union side hear that and they're usually like, that is a load, right? Like these people do not have your best interests in mind. These people are just corporate hacks. They're in the HR department and all they want to do is like squeeze you for every dime. It is slightly different in smaller companies when you have the owner of FCC who like is an owner and is wealthy and makes a lot of money and also like works at the factory and like makes products. And I, you know, in some of the negotiations we had, it was like, oh yeah, it's really clear that this person like is not selling a line when they don't understand why their workers would want to do something like this. And this translates into the workers who in a lot of instances offered really, you know, they really respected the owner, that they built it from the ground up. They really respected that they had a place to work for 15 years. And one of the biggest tensions in what we were trying to offer them is the sense that they, who knows what all the workers thought. But there was really a sense that we have some problems at this workplace and we want to have a meeting to bring it to you, the owner, and then you will clear it up and then everything's going to be better. That is really different from a direct action model of unionization, which is like, you are in control of this place now and you get to decide what's going on. And if you don't like how things are done, you make the changes. So sort of massive mind shift from folks who are, you know, have just lived every day as a worker in a traditional capitalist system and have jobs that they think are really hard but are happy to do on some level. Right there. There is a lot to overcome there from a particular vision. Um, and this gets back to the. The optimism question you were asking before, which is like, people who grow up in a capitalist system and never encounter any kind of alternative, whether it's a union or socialism or like what, whatever kind of ideology or structure they might going to have, they don't have the opportunity to think about or experience something different. So they are in a particular truth, they are in a discourse, they're in a narrative of what is right and wrong, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, what's good or bad. And the fundamental work of organizers is to change that terrain for them is to give them a sense that there's a possibility for something else. And it's really hard to do when people are feeling even just the thinnest amount of comfort. And one last bit I'll add on this, which is something that we did not do a good. We tried to, but we weren't able to leverage it. One of the. I think one of the most powerful findings that comes out of like, quantitative research on union drives is that people need to get angry in order to want to get involved in a workplace justice campaign. And the thing that makes them angriest is actually not the amount of money that they make, it's the way that they're treated. People are far less likely to want to take action to fix the circumstance of their life if they just think they're not being paid enough. Which I think for me is like, there's a. There's a kind of narrative that we all learn about. Oh, well, maybe it's, you know, I want more, but maybe this is how much I deserve. Or if people feel like they're treated poorly, they're really willing to get on board. Yeah, I'll stop there.
- [34:30]
Joe Zerilli
Okay, so let's talk about the. In the fourth chapter, I think you said something like, we're getting clobbered. Or. Or how do you manage the balance between developing worker leadership, providing ally support, and achieving the goals of your campaign?
- [34:50]
Biko Koenig
I think this is a good one. Yeah. What happens in chapter four is that we have. It's detailing how we had this really big public launch of the campaign and we had just had this huge blitz of trying to organize as many workers as we can to get them to sign the letter. And then we're going to have this big march with allies, and there's going to be a. I can know the word, A press conference where we talk about everything that happens and it happens. And it has a public facing sense of success because so many allies turn out. And it's like a big fun event. But the internal numbers are actually quite sad. Like most, we only get like a handful of workers to show up. A bunch of people who signed the letter asked to take their names off of it. And what that illustrates, I think, pretty clearly, and there's a discussion in this chapter of this debrief from it, and how like, everybody, the staff is just like, what just happened? Like, how could this have gone so wrong? Is that there is a mismatch between how we thought things were going and what was happening on the ground. And I know your question was like, how do we get this? But before I get to that, I just want to make this point about. And this is maybe inside baseball, but I also think it's really fundamental to one of the challenges, which is this net going to get into Philosophy 101. How do we know what we know right when we want to say, oh, yeah, I've got 40 workers who are leaders. I've got 30 workers now who, on my scale of really on board to against us, like, they're really on board. There's like this data metric thing that has to happen where people are making judgments about the relationships they have with workers, about what the workers are committed to do, and then translating that, like, into documents that then go into spreadsheets that then measure in really tangible ways, how much power do we have? And what's detailed in this book is not idiosyncratic to the clp. Like, this is pretty much what every labor union does. Different models and languages. But how do we know what our levels of support are? How do we do this? And this is another place where the ideological commitments of worker leadership and the kind of blind spot around what it meant to try to build someone into a leader, I think really hindered us. Because people who were just like, yeah, I'll sign it. Suddenly we're like, that is a leader. They are a worker leader because they have articulated that. They'll sign our letter because all we could understand was worker leadership. Because workers were leaders, right? Organically. So how do you not do that? Is maybe the question that could be asked. Like, what's like the different way around that. And the place that I would point to is Jane McAlevy's work. And I don't know if you've read no Shortcuts. And I talk about. I think I have this just. I'll give this one example because I think it's really powerful. And I talk about it in the conclusion where she talks about structure tests. And for Jane, the rest, in peace. Very hard to lose her. The way that she lays it out is you hold a meeting, you ask people to come to something, and some people show up. How do we know what of those people are just, like, happy to be there? What you would call a union activist versus someone who's a leader. And her notion is, you know, if someone's a leader, if they pass a structure test. And the structure test is, okay, leader, okay, Tom, I want you to go to your bargaining unit, and I want you to get them all to wear pins the next time the board of trustees is on campus and to line the hallway when they're all walking to lunch. Can Tom do that? If Tom can do that. Tom is like, we have discovered a leader. And, you know, not that you need to somehow know how to do that naturally. Maybe you need some help with your leadership development, but if you can't do that, then you need to be made into a leader, or we need to find something else for you to do. So there has to be a much, like, more nuanced approach to thinking about how people develop and what we, as the folks who maybe have those skills, have those perspectives. How do we kind of engage in a way with integrity, with folks that we're going to have privilege over? That's about trying to center their experiences and empower them, but understanding that, like, there is a power differential here. I know more things than you, and I'm trying to get you to do stuff that might be hard, and that's just the way it is. It's very complicated, and it takes some thoughtfulness to it. But I don't know. I think some of the evidence shows that that's the way to do it if you want to get it done.
- [39:29]
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- [39:58]
Biko Koenig
Yeah.
- [39:59]
Joe Zerilli
No. It is extraordinarily complicated and it does take a tremendous amount of work to make those distinctions and basically find, and I think you said we can send Tom and he can distribute pins or he can get people to wear them, but it's also finding like a role for the. Someone who's not comfortable with that kind of thing and still have them included in. Right. That they still have a voice and a role to play within the, within the structure.
- [40:27]
Biko Koenig
100% right. And this is, I mean, this notion about structure of tests and leaders, like we're talking about it in a, in a labor context, but this applies to all kinds of organizing. If you're trying to do community organizing, electoral organizing, you know, trying to organize a dog show, we do need, I mean, if we're going to have something that is intended to be a diverse society with a movement for collective freedom, we gotta have roles for everybody. Right? Now, I was talking about this with some friends doing electoral work where, you know, the, the thing you need in electoral work is go knock on doors and talk to people. Some people do not like that, and some people are not good at it. Luckily, there's lots of other stuff to do. Right. We can cut turf, you can set up the thing, you can answer the phones. But the, the, the, the ultimate challenge is we also need people to knock doors. We have to find people. If we're running a, a labor campaign, you might not be a natural leader. We will find something for you to do. But if we cannot find leaders, if we cannot find folks who are workers who can reach out to the rank and file that they work with and bring them on board, we're never going to have a strong union. We might win an election depending on the context of the campaign. And this is like one of Jane's points because Jane doesn't live in the world of the clp. Like she lives in a much more traditional union that I think, like really believes in it and very convincing in her belief. And even for her, you got to have worker leadership. I think she says something like, the organizers lead the leadership committee and the leadership committee lead the workers.
- [42:03]
Joe Zerilli
So let's talk a little bit about that. So how do you construct political identities in the world of worker leadership?
- [42:11]
Biko Koenig
Yeah, I mean, this is the question of our Day, right? How do we go out and talk to people who are not activated about the politics that we're engaged in and ask them to think differently, see differently, and act differently? And for me, when I talk about this, as I'm gonna in a second, this is drawing on, like, my experience in movement spaces, my experience with movement practitioners and strategists, and because of who I am, a lot of social movement theory, because I think it's the cool stuff, because I think it comes down to me about identity, collective identity. This is getting a little more into the theoretical language, but it's just how my brain works. What an organizer is trying to do is to look at somebody and say, okay, Tom, I need you to understand that you are not alone, that you have a shared experience with other people. So it's not just a you, it's a. It's a we. In this shared experience, there's stuff that you should be pissed off about. I want to agitate you. I want to get you mad. I'm going to bring some emotional framing into this. So we've got a collectivized identity that has been filled with emotional content. And now I have to give you a way to fix it. I have to actually convince you that there's a path that you can take that you can imagine will deliver the goods that you want. Otherwise, you could be as if. If you're super angry and you like, yeah, we. We have experienced this for years, but nothing's gonna. Nothing's ever going to work. Then you're not going to take action. So, you know, sociologists call this, like, collective action. Frames is kind of the classic one. Getting the we together, filling it with some kind of content, building grievances, attributing those grievances to a common enemy, and then laying out a Runway for action to be taking that people think will have an effect that will be an effective way to go through it. So if that's the sort of broad framing, the nuts and bolts. I mean, the. The model that I like to use is that. Have you all talked about the AEIOU model of organizing? I have to write it down because I always forget some of the letters. But the classic organizing conversation begins with A, which is agitate, right? Like, what are you upset about and what do you want to get? E. Educate. Okay, you are angry. I want to talk you through how your anger is helpful. And the only way that you're going to actually get the things that you want that you feel like you can't have is together. We're going to educate you about the power of collective action. Then I one of my favorites, Inoculate, which sometimes I think we don't do enough in non labor places, which is basically saying, I'm going to tell you a thing and then you're going to go and hear on the news or your boss is going to say, or someone who you talk to is going to be like, I don't know about all that. Aren't unions just like stealing your money out of your wallet? So I'm going to tell you beforehand, like hey, now you might hear that all the union does is take your money. These dues are very small and here's what they go towards and ultimately it's your money and it's your organization. So we agitate, agitate, sorry, agitate, educate, inoculate, A, E, I, O. And the only way that we're going to get this is organizing. We have to come together. We have to come together and take action. And how do we take action? You baby? In the union, we actually have an organization that exists that is a vehicle. You do not have to make this stuff up, my man. Right. Like we've got playbooks. We've been doing this for over a century. We know things that work better, we know things that work worse. And that is having a conversation like this is, I don't know, it's like an art form, it's like a craft. You have to be highly social. You have to be very in tuned to people's emotional states. You have to be very trustworthy. Often you have to be able to connect with a person demographically. Right. Like they have to see you as somebody who like they can think of as like my people. Right. Whether that's about class, whether that's about race or religion or even neighborhood. And that kind of, that translates into all kinds of organizing contexts about trying to help people see the world that could happen and give them a pathway forward.
- [46:35]
Joe Zerilli
So I'm going to turn my next question over to Joe. Go ahead.
- [46:41]
Biko Koenig
All right. Hey Joe.
- [46:42]
Joe Zerilli
Hey.
- [46:44]
So you had mentioned a little bit and what you just said about that kind of collective framing. And in chapter six you talk about that process of truth construction. You know, I just want to know how important is like the framing of that truth in getting people more involved, whether it be the workers themselves, other allies or even the company. And in what ways does it differ or maybe kind of reinforce what we see in like the media today and like how news like frames like what we hear about unions.
- [47:12]
Biko Koenig
Yeah. I mean part of the Part of the challenge is that, like, and maybe not everybody's on board with this, but I'm kind of like, we're being framed all the time, right? Everybody's offering us frameworks from which to understand the world. And like, yes, there are facts. Water is wet. You know, the. It is cold outside. But once we start getting into the mud of interpersonal relationships, structural power, our. Our experiences at work, the things that are facts end up getting really messy because it's more about social truths. Is this a good situation or is this a bad situation? Am I being paid fairly or am I being paid unfairly? I know if I'm making less money than the minimum wage is required, that's sort of a fact. But if I'm making $2 more than minimum wage, what is that, Right? On some level, that has to be interpreted the way that, you know, kind of coming from the tradition that I come from, we have to make meaning around it. And that meaning is made socially, it's made between us. We talk about it. You talk to your co workers about how you're treated, about, is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. Is it appropriate to do anything about. And part of this, like, truth construction is that what an organizer, what a labor union is trying to do, is to sort of offer a truth that is based on people's experiences but is empowering. Does this whole AI AEIOU thing that I just laid out, right, which is taking the experiences of your life and framing them in a way that hopefully lets you see that there's a different way that you could live that is one with more dignity, more integrity, and also is based on, like, a mutual pathway to freedom. So, yes, the media does the same thing, but it's kind of like, because there's no freedom frame free place to be. And this is part of the reason why the work is so hard is because many of the frames that we get. I feel like I'm getting, like, really cosmic here for a second. Many of the frames that we get from society and from the media do kind of all fit together generally in a way that's saying, like, you're good, and if you're not good, you can't really do anything about it. So, like, just roll with it or just enjoy your entertainment or keep things really close. Another version of it that's like, hey, it's all about you. You are an individual. If you haven't found success in your life, it's kind of your fault, right? If you have found success in your Life. It is 100% because of your effort and nothing else. And part of what any organizer is trying to do. And this could be conservative organizers, could be organizers in the MAGA movement are trying to, like, take this stuff of our lives and turn it into a compelling narrative that then spurs you to think differently, act differently, and do it together.
- [50:17]
Joe Zerilli
So as we come to the end, let's talk about the conclusion to your book. And can you expand a little bit on your three goals for the labor movement?
- [50:27]
Biko Koenig
Yeah. So one of the things we didn't talk about is part of the book details this activist group that I spent time with. And the activist group was focused mainly on food labor and food justice. And they came in like a sledgehammer. They were ultimately the power that drove the. That drove the company to have meetings with us, to put a letter in every single paycheck saying that they were allowed to associate with the CLP and join a union if they want. Like. Like, this was all communicated because of the. The ability of this activist group to be able to say, hey, if you don't kind of act better about this campaign, we're going to. We're going to really go public and, like, talk about how we have major problems with how you work. The reason this activist group was able to do this is because they already existed. And I think one of the things for folks who are labor movement curious or. Or labor movement passionate, but are not members of unions, like, what am I supposed to do? Right? Maybe I work in a field where unions don't really exist, or I'm kind of like a precariat, or I'm in the service economy or the knowledge economy. I'm not, like, working in a factory. Not that most union workers work in factories, but I'm not in a place where there's, like, high union density, so how am I supposed to participate? And often it feels like I'm outside of this. This group was able to throw down because they had decided, we are going to build an organization that can leverage moral power against bad employers. And we're going to do it in a lot of ways by having community events. They would throw really big conferences. Sometimes they would do, like, academic stuff. They would get involved in, like, and this is kind of a cool part about the food aspect of this, where there's a lot of, like, fun, exciting things around food, like organic food, farm trips. So they had a pretty big membership of people who were interested in lots of different ways. And when something went down, they were Able to step up really hard. So one of the things I offer in the book is to say we all want to support labor movements, we all want to support worker centers. We're all really interested in being allies. And it's often quite passive. We are waiting to be told what to do. And one of the big lessons from this book is you do not have to wait. And by actually, by not waiting and by being really assertive about this, you could be, you could be the thing that tips the scale in a really important campaign because you've already got membership, you've already got media contacts, you already know how to leverage power in your community and in your neighborhood. So that's like big number one. That then this is my. One of my other points becomes the vehicle for having more deep relationships with organizations that are trying to be worker centric, to sort of increase the amount of transparency and also to help everybody rework what this notion of worker leadership is, because it's like, it's really sticky, right? Like, I lay this out really, like, really in the beginning, like, often people who come from a justice oriented mindset in this, in this era, we say, yeah, the people who are really suffering the most, like, I don't want to tell them what to do, they should be in charge. Like, how it's, how messed up is it for me to come in and be like, well, now let me tell you, poor worker, what it is you should do with your time. Or I'm, I'm the one who's the, the head of operations at this fancy nonprofit and I make, you know, $85,000 a year while I'm trying to organize workers who make $20,000 a year. There are real concerns about that, but we swing it too far in the direction if we then think that we somehow escape the idea of trying to help people transform, right? It is a, it is a relational, mutual project that requires all of us to be on the same page around what it is we're trying to ask so that the asks can be really clear and so that we can hold our privilege with integrity. And there's this brief point in the book with this qualitative study of a union campaign that Theresa Sharpe does where she's like, if you want union democracy, you actually need a lot of authority. You need organizers who come in and say, this is how you do it, right? This is how, you know, if you do it this way, it's not going to go well. That is telling people what to do, but it is building the democratic capacity of people who have not had the opportunity to do this before, to then be able to participate at high levels. And part of what we can do as people who are not staffers in unions or any kind of organization and are also not the frontline communities that we're talking about is we can hold that space and ask for it. We can say that it's important and encourage people to do it. And the last point is, like, I don't know, Taking the streets is really sexy. You know, you want to go and you want to, like, shake your fist and you want to maybe throw a brick. I don't know, you want to hand out pamphlets. You want to kind of get in the streets and get dirty and get messy. And the boring work of policy will make such a bigger impact than any of that. In one fell swoop, you increase the minimum wage in a state by a dollar. Like, it's tiny and it is massive. You change policy around how people can unionize or what the rules are. That would be a huge, huge upswing. And we kind of have to balance. You know, we don't have time for everything. But I think this is like a theme that came up in the field where a lot of people were like, ugh, boring policy work. And then a bunch of stuff happened in Pennsylvania where it was like, man, all the stuff we were struggling for, it kind like, it doesn't matter anymore, like, because the minimum wage increase has blown out of the water. All of the wage increases we were asking for, and we didn't, like, do anything. Everyone needs to work on a. Like, let me rephrase. All of these endeavors are worth our time. Not everybody can do all of them. But even back to your earlier point about not, you know, maybe not everybody can be an organizer. We need people doing policy, and we probably need the policy people to be more connected to the folks who are doing things on the ground, because those. Those conversations can be really generative. Those are my three things in the conclusion.
- [56:39]
Joe Zerilli
Well, Biko Koenig, thank you so much for taking the time to talk tonight and for your work on the book. So before I let you go, what's next?
- [56:48]
Biko Koenig
Oh, man. Well, you like long answers. So back in 2020, during the presidential election, I went and in a kind of same ethnographic vein, went and joined the Trump reelection campaign and got into the MAGA movement and became a deep participant and a really active member of that whole moment because I was really curious to understand, like, how are working class people mainly, but not exclusively white, with some really important exceptions, how is it that they see the world in this way and make these political decisions that, that seem to folks who are not pro Trump to be so foreign and so out of left field. So I'm trying to finish up the book that walks us through. Like why, like what kind of in some of these same themes, like what is the collective identity of somebody who's, who is like a real committed MAGA activist. How did they end up there and what does it say for what we might do to try to like move through this moment?
- [58:01]
Joe Zerilli
Well, I hope you will share that with me once, once it comes out.
- [58:05]
Biko Koenig
I will.
- [58:05]
Joe Zerilli
And we will do this again.
- [58:06]
Biko Koenig
Yeah.
- [58:07]
Joe Zerilli
Biko Koenig, once again, thank you very much. Our guest today has been Biko Koenig, the author of Worker Centered Allyship and Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement from Oxford University Press. My name is Tom Dicena here with Joe Zerilli and you are listening to the New Books Network.