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What Your Boss Doesn’t Want You to Know, and Where to Find It

Posted on May 24, 2021May 24, 2021 by Tom Juravich

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Tom Juravich | Labor Center | UMass Amherst

Given the wealth of information available online, conducting research on your employer is more possible than ever—and more important than ever, as firms become more complex and globalized.

There’s no reason we should ever begin bargaining or start an organizing campaign without a strong sense of who the employer is, how it generates its profit, where it is growing, who its decision-makers are, and where it is most vulnerable. This information is much easier to find than most people think.

More information is available on companies that trade on one of the stock exchanges, but there is still plenty of information on privately held firms and nonprofits. And this approach is relevant for firms both large and small, across a wide variety of sectors.

General Internet searching is not enough.

The mistake that many first-time researchers make is to jump onto Google and start looking for information about the company.

While general Internet searching can be helpful, it’s not a very efficient way to do corporate research. It’s easy to drown in all the information that’s out there, and what you’re finding is what the search engine has indexed for you. Plus, companies manipulate what shows up first on a general Internet search. Often you have to weed through hundreds of pages of marginal information before you get to real substantive information on your company.

You need a framework to direct your research.

To avoid getting overwhelmed and quitting, you need to know what questions you are trying to answer. And rather than hunting around, you also need to know the best places to find those answers.

That’s why we built the Strategic Corporate Research website (strategiccorporateresearch.org), a free resource to help labor, community, and environmental activists take a look inside the corporate world. It starts by providing a framework to direct your research.

The site lays out 24 questions to guide your investigation into the command and control of a firm, its operations, and its outside stakeholders. These include: Who are the stockholders? Who is on the board of directors? Who are their major suppliers and customers? What is their health and safety and environmental record?

Focus on primary documents.

For each of these questions we provide the key websites where you can find answers. Whenever possible, we focus on primary documents.

It might be tempting to rely on a website that gathers the information for you, for instance on CEO salary, but you are going to find the most accurate and up-to-date information in the primary documents that the company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). We provide a number of videos with screenshots that help first-timers navigate through websites including the SEC, OSHA, OpenSecrets (which provides information on the political donations of your employer), and many more.

Build a diverse research team.

Build a diverse team in your local or your workplace to conduct research on your employer. Include people from different shifts and different jobs; make sure women and people of color are represented. You want to demonstrate that the research team represents the whole union, not just a select few. This is critical for other members to see the information you gather as credible and actionable.

If one or more individuals have some prior research training, it’s great for them to step up—but they should take a mentoring approach so that everyone on the team is learning new skills. The more people we can bring along with us, the more capacity we have. This is a great way for rank-and-file members to become more involved in the union.

Adopt a brainstorming attitude.

It is critical to adopt an inclusive brainstorming attitude when conducting your research. We provide a Google document on the website (bit.ly/SCR24questions) which allows you to create your own copy of the 24 questions to guide your research. Break up the questions, work in small teams, and put all the information up there.

You never know how what you find out might connect with other pieces of information or how it can be used in the future. There will be time later to sort out contradictory information.
This process encourages everyone on the committee to participate and is critical in building your capacity as a team.

Analyze as you go along.

Don’t just gather information, but analyze it as you go along. Look for connections and for information that confirms what you’ve found.

For example, you may have found that two new board members come from a sector which you have already identified as a growth area for the company. This confirms that your research is correct and that the company is moving in this direction.

Work through what might be inconsistent or contradictory. This often comes up when looking at financials that get reported over several years. Make sure you are using the most up-to-date numbers.

Keep your campaign in mind.

It is easy to get excited about all the information you are gathering. You may have discovered that the company was fined by the Environmental Protection Agency or a key board member has been named in a number of lawsuits and judgments.

But the goal of strategic corporate research is not just to gather information, but to use this information to build a strong campaign and win. Be careful not to get sidetracked. You may have found some juicy information on the CEO, for example, but remember campaigns are rarely won by focusing on one issue. Keep researching and develop multiple points of leverage.

Our website provides a number of charts and resources to help you make your research actionable and plan an escalating campaign to bring pressure on the strategic targets you identify.

For example, you may have discovered that one division of your employer is the most profitable, so you shift the focus of your campaign to that part of the firm. Or you may have identified a highly vulnerable board member, so you design tactics to escalate against him. Take the time and work collaboratively to shape a multifaceted campaign building on all that you have learned.

Build new muscles.

If this kind of research is new to your local, it will take some time to build the skills and integrate them into the life of your union. But with some careful attention and teamwork you will be surprised how fast rank-and-file members and leadership can gather and use basic corporate information in both bargaining and organizing.

It’s not enough just to put this research team together as you prepare for contract expiration. Once it’s operating, the team should continue to grow and build its capacity between contracts to put the local in an even stronger position for the next round of bargaining or your next organizing campaign.

This blog originally appeared at Labor Notes on May 24, 2021. Reprinted with permission.

About the author: Tom Juravich is a professor of labor studies and sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Bernie Sanders staffers approve first-ever union contract for presidential campaign workers

Posted on May 9, 2019May 9, 2019 by Alan Pyke

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The people who power Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) White House bid will enjoy labor rights and quality of life protections unprecedented in the grueling, fast-paced world of presidential campaigns, thanks to a union contract ratified by campaign staff in early May.

Sanders’ campaign will be the first in U.S. presidential election history with a unionized staff, though a handful of down-ballot races in 2018 featured successful union drives through the new Campaign Workers Guild.

The contract secures overtime pay for campaign team members paid by the hour and 20 paid vacation days per year for hourly and salaried staff alike – plus four monthly “blackout days” where staffers can’t be called in to work on their day off. The pact establishes transparency about pay within the campaign and sets a process for appeals should anyone feel they’re being underpaid for the work they’re doing. But the detailed attention to pay equity doesn’t stop with those sunlight provisions.

The contract also sets a cap on managers’ pay. As United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400’s Jonathan Williams explained to ThinkProgress, no executive on the team can be paid more than three times the compensation of the highest paid category of rank-and-file campaign staffers in the bargaining unit. If the campaign wants to bump an executive past that point, they’d have to make commensurate raises in pay for the unionized campaign workers.

“This is an effort for us to live up to the values of the campaign and address income equality,” Williams said in an interview. “They can’t grant lavish salaries to their top executives, as it were, without first ensuring they’ve raised the compensation for all the unionized workers.”

The pay transparency clause requires management to share outside consultants’ compensation with the union in addition to compensation within management, but large consultant payouts would not necessarily trigger the automatic staff pay hikes built into the manager pay cap, Williams said.

Interns like Reg Ledesma, who served on the union’s bargaining committee, will be paid no less than $20 an hour. In addition, full-time volunteers will get first crack at staff positions when the campaign hires to expand, and all staff will receive “broad coverage for mental health care services,” a union press release characterizing the deal said.

“You feel more at ease knowing you’re backed up by the strength of the union,” Ledesma said in the release.

That holistic support goes far beyond pay. For instance, the blackout days policy epitomizes the way this contract uniquely confronts the notoriously endless scutwork of professional electoral politics. Days off are rare in the campaign world, and staffers are almost always “on call” even when not actively working. But under this policy, managers are required to accommodate the staffers’ blackout days requests or provide an alternative blackout day within three calendar days of the request — provided the staffer gives 24 hours notice prior to the request.

Figuring out how to structure a policy to provide truly restorative time off on a flexible basis proved challenging, Williams said, but both sides wanted to balance campaign employees’ enthusiasm for their work with the campaign’s need to have someone on call at all hours – without succumbing to the sleep-when-it’s-over burnout common to campaign staffers.

“You have highly motivated employees who want to see a campaign win and are willing to put in long hours, but we don’t want them to be disincentivized to take time off when they need it,” he said.

Campaign manager Faiz Shakir concurred: “These aren’t machines, these are humans. On the management side it’s important for us to respect that people are going to need time off, an opportunity to recharge, and disconnect for a moment if they can.”

The contract is “an opportunity to find those moments,” Shakir said in an interview. “They’re hard to come by in a campaign. But I think we can find them.”

The May 2 ratification vote among bargaining unit members was not unanimous, Williams said, but the proposed contract was approved with a majority of the 100 currently covered employees. The contract, like all steps of the unionization process, was accomplished in brisk fashion. Williams attributed the efficient bargaining process to the Sanders management team’s own enthusiasm for seeing its workforce organize.

Williams described the Sanders managerial team more as allies than adversaries in the unit-defining process as well.

“Where a hostile employer might only meet with you once a week or once a month… so that negotiations drag on forever, we were meeting multiple days a week for long days, and we were given all the time we needed with the bargaining committee to formulate proposals and solicit feedback from staff and all that. It was productive, thorough, and quick.”

“They were amicable to [our proposed unit structure]. It wasn’t contentious,” the union staffer said. “It was a model campaign.”

Shakir says the management team was driven by a sense of higher purpose. “It’s an opportunity not just for ourselves but to show and teach others that the process can be peaceful and productive.”

The deal also reflects an ongoing shift within the broader community of progressive institutions, which have traditionally relied on young and ideologically motivated people to accept relatively light entry-level pay and intensive schedules, with the promise of moving to jobs with better pay and greater influence dangled as the payoff for paying one’s dues. Unionization drives at major progressive nonprofits have altered the landscape – and Sanders’ embrace of a unionized campaign staff may raise labor standards for everyone who plies their trade in political campaigns.

“We’re hopeful that the Sanders campaign and so many other new entities that are unionizing will be educational to a new generation,” said Shakir. “Hopefully they’ll think, hey, that’s something we can repeat over and over again.”

This article was originally published at In These Times on May 2, 2019. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Alan Pyke covers poverty and the social safety net. Alan is also a film and music critic for fun. Send him tips at: apyke@thinkprogress.org or @PYKEA PYKEA

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Ohio Democratic campaign staffers fight the state party for a fair contract

Posted on September 11, 2018September 12, 2018 by ThinkProgress Staff

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Democratic field organizers in Ohio working roughly 60-84 hours hours a week are fighting their own state party as they attempt to negotiate a fair union contract.

More than a month ago, the Ohio Democratic Party, with 90 percent support, recognized a union of coordinated campaign staff that collectively bargained with the help of the Campaign Workers Guild. Now, however, staffers say the party isn’t holding up its end of the bargain.

“After several day-long bargaining sessions, the ODP has made it clear to us that they are not serious about negotiating a fair contract that lives up to our Democratic values,” union leaders wrote last week in a letter to Ohio county party chairs across the state.

“We were so excited to see our party stand for working people by ultimately recognizing our union,” they continued. “Unfortunately, this excitement has not held at the bargaining table, where we’ve been continually disappointed and angered as the ODP has refused to present proposals that ensure us the union protections and provide us the working conditions we need and deserve.”

While the negotiations are still ongoing and a bit rough at the moment, it is still extremely early in the negotiation process. The party only recognized the union five weeks ago and most contract negotiations take months.

In a statement emailed to ThinkProgress, Ohio Democratic Party leaders are generally optimistic that the state will become the first to unionize a political party.

“Consistent with our long record of fighting for workers’ rights, the Ohio Democratic Party is proud to be the first state party in the nation to recognize the Campaign Workers Guild representing our campaign field organizers.

We believe their representation is an important step nationally. Because this is the first contract of its type in the nation, there are many details to work through. But in only four weeks, negotiations over the contract itself have led to agreement on half the points of negotiation, and we’ve made progress on many others.

The good news is that while negotiations are ongoing, we and our growing team of organizers are out knocking on the doors and making the phone calls that will elect our strong ticket of candidates up and down the ballot.”

Members of the union, however, claim that instead of meeting with the union face-to-face, as is customary in any contract negotiation, party officials hired lawyers from a law firm that specializes in “union-avoidance” to represent management in the negotiation process. The lawyers work at Taft Stettinius & Hollister, a firm named in part by the Taft-Hartley Act, a federal law that significantly diminished the power of unions.

According to ODP party officials, however, the Ohio Democratic Party Operations Director has been in attendance and at every negotiation session, and ODP Executive Director Greg Beswick attended the full first session of negotiations.

Among the union’s requests are basic items, such as guaranteed water and stationary supplies in the office. They’ve also requested bigger-picture things, like a living wage.

According to the party, they have agreed to half of the union’s demands, including smaller requests like water, rest and meal periods, paid leave, and even health insurance for field organizers, the ODP has refused to meet the union’s expectations when it comes to issues like compensation and mileage reimbursement.

That last point is critical for McClelland, who over the course of the campaign has put in some 10,000 miles on his car, driving around the state for work. Currently, organizers get a $150 gas card to help offset the cost, but McClelland says that is nowhere near enough.

“Over the course of the campaign…I’ve used about $500 dollars worth of gas cards. If I got a true reimbursement, that number would be more like $5,000, which would help immensely with things like the three oil changes I had to pay for or new tires and brake lines,” he said.

When the union raised this issue to management in a survey, the ODP dismissed it, according to organizers.

“We showed them the survey about cars and everything and their response was ‘yes we got your survey and we weren’t moved by it,’” they said.

ODP instead countered with a $125 car stipend, which is lower than what staffers currently receive with the gas card.

As far as compensation goes, the union requested a salary floor of $4,000/month for field organizers and $4,500/month for regional field directors, which is what the union claims staffers at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) are paid. Ohio DCCC field organizers, however, only make roughly $2,700/month, according to party leaders.

Instead, according to the union, the state party has offered a salary schedule of $12.25 per hour, less than the $15 minimum wage on which most Democrats, including Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, have campaigned for.

The Ohio Democratic Party currently provides their workers with a salary floor of $3,000 including benefits, which is what the Campaign Workers Guild has negotiated at other campaigns.

“Right now, half of our money money goes towards bills and the other half goes to gas or eating fast food because we cant afford anything else,” McClelland said. “We’re not asking for the world here. We’re asking to be treated fairly as workers and to not have to pay to work.”

Some staffers are concerned that some of Ohio’s most ardent pro-labor Democrats including Brown and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Richard Cordray, haven’t involved themselves personally in the issue.

“The candidates are nonexistent,” McClelland told ThinkProgress. “We as workers feel they are complicit in this […]. Our candidates are supposed to be labor-friendly.”

When reached for comment, Sen. Brown voiced his support for the campaign workers and their efforts to unionize, urging the party to resolve negotiations soon.

“All workers have the right to organize and bargain for their wages and benefits. I admire these young staffers for unionizing and speaking up, and I hope the negotiations are resolved soon,” Brown told ThinkProgress.

Several Democratic campaigns across the nation have decided to unionize since December 2017, when the workers for Randy Bryce, the Democrat vying for House Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) open seat, became the first bargaining unit to join the Campaign Workers Guild. Since then, workers from 22 campaigns have unionized.

This article was originally published at ThinkProgress on September 11, 2018. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Rebekah Entralgo is a reporter at ThinkProgress. Previously she was a news assistant on the NPR Business Desk. She has also worked for NPR member stations WFSU in Tallahassee and WLRN in Miami.

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9 campaigns and 1 major political firm have unionized ahead of the 2018 midterm elections

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Addy Baird

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Nine political campaigns have unionized ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, and one major political firm, Revolution Messaging, joined them this week, according to a BuzzFeed report Tuesday.

Revolution Messaging workers join a number of unionized campaign staffs, all of whom work for progressive Democratic candidates whose campaigns run the gamut from local county council races to congressional and gubernatorial races.

Staffers on Chris Wilhelm’s campaign for county council in Maryland have unionized, as have workers on Renato Mariotti’s campaign for attorney general in Illinois. Erin Murphy, who is running for governor in Minnesota, saw her staff unionize recently, as did Randy Bryce in Wisconsin, Jess King in Pennsylvania, Andy Thorburn in California, Brian Flynn in New York, Dan Haberman in Michigan, and Marie Newman in Illinois, all of whom are running for Congress.

The recent campaign unionization push has been led largely by the Campaign Workers Guild (CWG), which was formed about a year ago, and CWG is now facilitating negotiations with as many as 25 more campaigns, CWG vice president Meg Reilly told BuzzFeed Tuesday.

“It doesn’t show any sign of stopping,” Reilly said, adding that it is the first “really serious concerted effort” by political staffers to collectively bargain.

The trend is notable not only in that it reflects a commitment to labor, but also because campaigns are often staffed by young people who work long hours with low pay and few benefits.

“Campaign work is characterized by 80 to 100-hour weeks — making much less than minimum wage, even when candidates pay well like Bernie [Sanders] does — and immediately burning out,” Reilly told HuffPost. “We don’t get to talk to our family. We get exhausted.”

“That leads to a lot of talented, well-trained organizers leaving the field,” she added.

Unions can help prevent that.

“The more folks we can help stay in the field, the better off the Democratic Party and the progressive movement will be,” Reilly said.

Bryce, who is challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), is the most high-profile of the unionized bunch. Bryce, who has been a union ironworker for years before running for Congress, said in an interview with ThinkProgress last month that he was very supportive of the union.

“‘Yeah let’s do it. Why not?’” Bryce said he told the staffers. “That’s what I’ve been pushing for everybody else to do!”

“These are the people that are responsible for winning this election for me,” Bryce added. “It’s the very least I could do.”

In a letter to senior staff earlier this week, Revolution Messaging staffers reportedly said they felt it was time to “illustrate our pro-labor values” by organizing themselves.

“As progressives who care deeply about the work that we do, we feel that it’s time to illustrate our pro-labor values by organizing ourselves,” the letter said. “Our union will allow everyone at Rev to have a voice on the job and a seat at the table, which will undoubtedly help retain current and future employees, bolster our recruitment efforts moving forward, and attract business from clients who seek out unionized firms.”

Leadership at Revolution Messaging, which is known for helping drive Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) 2016 presidential campaign, was, like Bryce, quick to support its newly unionized staffers.

Founder and CEO Scott Goodstein recognized the union the same day, reportedly writing, “This is great news! … As most of you know, we fought on behalf of dozens of labor unions since our inception, and it is part of our DNA. We believe in workers’ rights, labor rights, women’s rights and human rights.”

“We are excited to work with our workers and their chosen representatives,” the company tweeted Monday.

Revolution Messaging was the subject of a recent HuffPost report in which workers outlined a number of workplace complaints, including the handling of an incident in 2015 when an employee said she was physically assaulted by one of the company’s partners. The partner was fired, but the woman soon left her job, too, which some employees said they believed may have been an act of retaliation.

This article was originally published at ThinkProgress on March 20, 2018. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Addy Baird is a reporter for ThinkProgress on the news cycle team. Previously, she covered local politics and health policy at POLITICO New York and worked for The Charlie Rose Show digital team.

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Workplace Fairness

Tag: campaign

What Your Boss Doesn’t Want You to Know, and Where to Find It

Bernie Sanders staffers approve first-ever union contract for presidential campaign workers

Ohio Democratic campaign staffers fight the state party for a fair contract

9 campaigns and 1 major political firm have unionized ahead of the 2018 midterm elections

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