Spencer Jordan
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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And you have to make sure in the way that you're acting that that radically different meaning is clear. Yeah.
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And it's funny you bring that up, because that's just bringing to mind, like, you see the difference in those attitudes, like when you're out there on the picket line, like interact, because, you know, our picket line, a really pivotal part of it, because there are so many managers in there that they're able to maintain this like skeleton crew.
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is the community outreach part is like talking to every single person who's coming up and being like, Hey, how's it going? I've been on strike such and such long. This is what's up. Please don't cross the picket line. And, you know, I've noticed you get this real funny situation where there are the people who are like, I've shopped here for 20 years.
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You don't know what the hell you're talking about. I don't know you. And I have to be like, well, I'm normally at the dump getting the merchandise you're buying. And who attribute the entire... Attribute everything they like about the business to the bosses. And then there's the other part of the community that... is coming by frequently and like hanging out with us on, on, on the picket line.
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You know, I pet the dog and we chat about what's going on. They're like, how's the strike going? They're like, you know, I know it's been rough on you guys for such and such. And like, these people are, are, are shoppers too. Right. But they like, yeah, they, it highlights that like sort of divide in like, what you think of as like community and your responsibility to your community.
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Cause like these people also love urban or come here all the time, but they recognize that like, it's the workers at urban or that create it every day, you know? And it is a company that was like founded by an individual. The individual still owns it. He did found it with his, with his labor and all that. He did the labor, you know, back when it was, you know, only a few people and stuff like that.
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But ultimately, a business, like any sort of social phenomenon, has to be constantly recreated in order to exist. And the people who do the work that makes it more than just a room full of garbage are us. And a lot of the regulars recognize that. And a lot of them flip me off as they cross the text line. Whatever.
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Yeah, where the place that you spend a third of your life is a place where you actually have dignity.
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Yeah. The demands are not that crazy. No. And that's like the thing that we've encountered over and over again is this constant push and pull of people saying that like the expectation of bettering our conditions, whether it be like us on the picket line, just trying to get like a stable wage and just cause employment and stuff like that.
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Or whether it be, you know, those larger societal changes that like you're talking about. You just butt up against these people who have such like a paucity of imagination about what's possible.
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and like about the legitimacy of trying to make something better the legitimacy of saying sure i can subsist on this but you know there's so much more that's possible yeah so i maintain that there's something more that's possible yeah i i i think it's possible too and that that's that's that's the thing about this world right is that our enemies have figured out that it actually can change
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that's why they have to fight so hard yeah but the thing is the fact that they can change for the worse also means that they can change for the better oh beautiful stuff okay where can people find your strike fund to also put it in the in the description oh yeah great so it's on gofundme i'll send you the link and it'll be down there um but also people can hit up our union instagram it's uh urban or workers with underscores between the words urban underscore or underscore worker
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that we've got the link to our strike fund. And also, hey, if you're in Berkeley, you can sign up for a picket shift and you get to enjoy listening to me discourse for nine hours instead of one.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, that's just about right. Yeah, it started on the 22nd of March. We held our strike vote like a solid 12 days before we actually went out on the picket line and... Won that strike vote with 14 yeses, a single no, and I think four abstentions. That's pretty good. Yeah, so 93% of those voting voted yes.
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Yeah, so the organization process... Started around like a year and a half before we actually had our unionization vote, which was actually, we had the vote in March and we got our win on April 7th, two years ago. So we actually just had our union two year birthday.
Behind the Bastards
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But yeah. So preceding that was like, like I said, about a year and a half of organizing that involved, um, You know, the typical thing of like one on one conversations with like all the staff making the, you know, color coded spreadsheet and everything, which all of this was not my my purview. I'm a lot more involved now than I was at the start of the process.
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And I was approached by like one of our lead organizers really shortly after being hired just to kind of. you know, read the dipstick as to, like, my sentiments about it and whatnot. I was pretty on board right away. I mean, you know, like, I'm from the Bay Area, so... There are only two types of people from the Bay Area.
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Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I'm of the latter type. So, you know, being pro-union isn't, like, a foreign thing to my background.
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Yeah, especially like my family's from the Midwest and everything. So there's, yeah, my aunt actually just learned that she was like a clerk working for the railroads back in the day when like railroad jobs were still like a big thing you could like have. Anyways, but yeah, so I had had my like own sort of like just observations of like, whoa, like what's going on in the workplace? Yeah.
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Aside from like my own just like predilection to thinking, you know, more worker power is better.
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Also kind of seeing like some of the factors that precipitated it. Like, for instance, like when I was hired here, I was hired in my interview. It was the one of the owners. And the manager of my department, um, my department being salvage and recycling department of, uh, urban or, which is kind of like not super public facing.
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We go to the dump and like root around through the garbage, like, uh, you know, or whatever, get to get stuff for the store. But, uh, that manager, you know, he was there in the interview and we got to, uh, The portion where the owner explained what at-will employment is. Oh, boy. And she went, so, we're at-will here. So, Samuel, Samuel's my manager. Samuel, how long have you been here? 21 years?
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21 years. He's there, hands folded on the table. Yes. What at will means is it could be tomorrow. I could say, you know, Sam, well, it's been a great 21 years. I really appreciate all the work you've done. Today's your last day.
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And then she says, of course, likewise, tomorrow someone could come to me and say, hey, Mary Lou, it's been 21 years. I've enjoyed it. I'm quitting. So, you know, the sort of sword over his neck is being cast as somehow equal to him not being, like, indentured.
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Yeah, I mean, have you worked at like a sort of small like mom and pop quote unquote business before?
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Mm-hmm. Which I love. Well, hey, you know, that's... that's a traditional line in business, especially in, in, in small business. And it's, uh, it's no stranger here. Yeah. That question of like wanting to piss off your subordinates or whatever. It's, uh, I don't know if pissing off is necessarily like the concern, but man, ownership here. Definitely.
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I've gotten the impression that they enjoy showing their power and I've gotten the impression that, um, Sort of like uncertainty and like, yeah, my mom would call it jockeying for position that you have to do is a dynamic that they, I can't say, I really can't say they honestly, because the other owner, he hasn't been very active in the business since, since my hiring, but at least Mary Lou.
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tends to lean on that's kind of like the uh the special quality that you get with like a small business and organizing in a small workplace is that like you know you can see sort of in their public communications the way that like the zucks and the bezos's and the rest of them
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feel about their employees and you know you can get a sense of perhaps how they might act towards their employees if they like interacted with them on a daily basis but in a small business setting you really get a a keen view into how like the
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power of the employer mixes very readily with um a person's like predilection towards discipline predilection towards like personal what would you call it personal battling almost
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Like it's just like, yeah, it's just this weird. Yeah, no, exactly. It's like, it's actually an argument that she's deployed in her Reddit correspondence, which has been seemingly a pretty active part of her spare time that she's not spending at the bargaining table with us. you know, made this comparison of like, this isn't a question about oligarchs or whatever. And it's true.
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Like the small businessman is not an oligarch, but the small business is a microcosm of like the larger business.
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capitalist social order and while the small business man might not have the scope of power of the oligarch or like the actual capital resources of an oligarch the behavior certainly rhymes at least yeah and again it's like it's a lot of it is about it's just how much power you have access to right like lots of people can be like this but only the few the proud the small business get to do it
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, totally. And, you know, ultimately the employer, wherever they are, they're in this privileged position of being able to, you know, you spend most people more than like a third of your life at work.
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The employer has this unique power to dictate what that third of your life looks like. You know?
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We talk about, I mean, shit, we don't, people are not so much talking about democracy and writ large in the u.s uh in the same way now that they used to but um you know you talk about this idea of like living in a democracy but democracy ends at the shop door yeah yeah and and like the the kind of power that these people have is something that like
Behind the Bastards
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Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you said it very, very aptly there. Like the corporate structure mirrors the totalitarian structure. And, you know, not only does like fighting the corporate structure at the level of labor makes sense in that, right? Labor is what enables the flow of capital that sustains the totalitarian state.
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But also, like you said, you're addressing the structure in its... I don't know. I almost think of it as like Grendel's mother in The Fen or whatever. The authoritarian thing is like Grendel, maybe. And Grendel's mother is like...
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this capitalist hierarchical structure yeah you know you take it on with an insistence on workplace democracy as kind of libby as that sounds okay speaking speaking speaking of capitalist totalitarianism i here are the ads that we are required to run by our corporate beautiful beautiful let's hear them
Behind the Bastards
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Well, I think ultimately the easiest thing is a sort of ramping up degree of responsibility within the organization, right? So at the start, I would come to some of the meetings, I would miss some of them, I would be like, oh, I'm fucking so busy with whatever is going on in my life.
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And, you know, I was supportive and sort of involved, but, you know, I wasn't like, I mean, I certainly wasn't doing things like this. And, you know, eventually, one, we like kind of persisted as a union over a longer period of time. The necessity of involvement became more like obvious to me, right?
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And that's, that's a hard ask, you know, like you're organizing, you want momentum and you want, yeah, you want to be able to change your conditions for the better as soon as possible.
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And with, with Urban Orr, you know lots of workplaces that need unionization have high turnover right and urban or is no different and so i saw you know like some of the more committed elements of the bargaining unit be fired or quit or whatever yeah and you know they would be replaced with
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other people, and you have to begin the work of organizing over again, and with some of them you succeed, with some of them you don't. You know, you have different dynamics. I feel like the hiring procedures may have changed a little bit after we won our election. But, you know, I can't say that for certain. So, the sort of, like...
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necessity of like keeping that like flame going especially after we had won the election we were in contract bargaining for a long period of time made me feel like a certain sense of like i need to be more active in this because like this is an important struggle and like yeah i see our like main organizers taking on like a fuckload of work yep and like
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needing more voices at the table, needing more, more, uh, needing more people to be more involved. And so like, I, you know, volunteered to like run for treasurer. I was the only candidate. Um, but theoretically I could have been voted down. They could have been like, I don't know about Spencer. Um, And, you know, like ended up having like a little bit more direct responsibilities.
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Like I was like receiving some of the donations to our strike fund. Once we started fundraising for the strike, I had to keep track of those and, you know, put them in a special bank account and then eventually take that money, get it to like the, the IWW branch, uh, hand it, hand a big check to Dino, um, that kind of stuff.
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And just like having like little things to be doing, like Spurs involvement, other people, you know, became responsible for like parts of social media outreach, making graphics, stuff like that. And, um, also like sort of, I guess, um,
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giving people the opportunity to leverage their individual connections within the workplace because every workplace is like clicks and groups and subgroups and all that to leverage those connections in like service of bettering everyone's conditions.
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So to a certain degree, I've been important as an envoy to my particular department because our job takes us away from the job site or from the main work site often and stuff like that. So there's less of a direct avenue for communication there. So I can say that's my experience. Yeah. As far as organizing goes, I'm easy. I was already... I was already believing in it. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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And, like, there are others that it's been harder. I will say, though, that the strike itself is, I mean, a strike is a conflict. And when you're in conflict together, it's an extremely cohering force.
Behind the Bastards
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Which isn't to say that necessarily you want your unionization to come to a strike, but perhaps raising a sort of consciousness of the fact that you are ultimately in conflict with the boss. The boss doesn't want you to unionize. The boss doesn't want you to force concessions out of them. And that as a union, we are taking on this responsibility to look after each other's interests.
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And to like support each other like tangibly in terms of like what we do and also intangibly in terms of like the kind of conversations we have around like morale planning and stuff like that, you know, to succeed together. I think those are like really potent, coherent forces. And, you know, it helps to have a good opponent. You know, the boss is the best organizer.
Behind the Bastards
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And at Urbanor, you don't go along without coming head to head with conflict with ownership. or with ownership through the mediator of management. Although support for the union might be divided a bit at the workplace, one thing that's pretty universal is frustration with ownership.
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Strike, strike, strike. Just after this message.
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So the strike itself is a result, specifically, like, this is a ULP strike. So it's in response to something that falls under the category of unfair labor practice, according to the National Labor Relations Act.
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And it's, you know, backed up by charges filed with the board, as opposed to, like, what's called an economic strike, which is a strike that is specifically about, you know, economic issues of the workplace. So the specific ULP that's being cited for our strike is bad faith bargaining.
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And for us, what that's looked like is two years of completely stalled negotiations where we are basically being faced with a take it or leave it offer of the status quo in the vast majority of our proposals.
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bargaining is very, very slow and, uh, ownership has held tightly to the, to the offense at us having unionized at all, which to my understanding is pretty typical of small workplaces. Ownership takes it very personally. And, uh, That personal feeling of betrayal or whatever becomes like a stumbling block in the negotiation process.
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I know that was the case with Moe's, another bookshop in Berkeley that also unionized with the IWW. So, you know, we've had our whole proposal on ownership's table for a year and a half now. We had started with... bargaining proposal by proposal. They said, well, how can we possibly agree to any of this without understanding the full context, especially the economic context?
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And so we gave them the full proposal and they said, oh my God, how do you expect us to read all of this in time to bargain? This is way too much. How are we going to evaluate this all? We got to do a proposal by proposal. So... It's been really unclear to us if ownership has even actually read the entirety of our collective bargaining agreement that we put on their desk.
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I know that in the past, the lawyers have said things like, oh, my... My eyes glazed over when I read your email, so I missed such and such part of it.
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Yeah, you would think a lawyer would have a little bit more than... Jesus Christ. ...beyond a tweet-sized reading capacity, but... Well, they give anyone law degrees. Yeah. Or ownership saying... Well, I just thought it was so ridiculous I didn't feel the need to read all of it. Stuff like that.
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Like, good Lord. Usually, in those long contract negotiations, by two years, at least there's, like, been some progress. Yeah.
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Yeah. In fact, in the sort of company propaganda where they're claiming that this like bad faith bargaining charge has no grounds, they're like, ownership has come to like 25 to 30 bargaining sessions. Neglecting to mention there have been somewhere in the range of like 50 to 60. And of course. Maybe they've shown up to more than half. I don't want to be libelous.
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Hey, you know, they've been talking about worker co-op for 20 years.
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But yeah, so those kind of things. And then finally, one of the bigger precipitating factors is we've been trying to bargain over economics. Ownership has implied a lot of times that they cannot afford to pay what we're asking. They say it'll ruin the company. They say a company will go bankrupt. They say it's unsustainable. They say this and that.
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And then when they get to the table, they say we have never and will never argue inability to pay. Because the thing is, is that to say inability to pay, right? It obligates you to furnish information and prove that. And they, for whatever reason, do not want to furnish financial information. So these have been some of the sticking points.
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And that's why we've been out on the picket line for about three weeks now. Still waiting for them to come to the table.
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Well, I guess the process towards, like, deciding that it needed to come to a strike was, like, you know, that is a sort of thing that builds over a long period of time. You know, you see ownership doing bad faith bargaining, you go, what more conciliatory approaches can we take first? you know, can we try this? Can we try offering this to make, you know, can we try this display of good faith?
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Can we offer this compromise? One of the things that was a big part was of some of the not exactly contract related discussions, but like I should have been talking for a long time about a co-op transition, but it's never happened. You know, it's been 20 years.
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And, you know, now that we've unionized, they're like, our people who we were talking to about doing the co-op thing, they don't work with unions. And so the only way that there were going to be a co-op is if the union goes away. And so in response to that, we said, well, we're totally open to a transition to a co-op that involves the union. And here is such and such organization.
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It was our lead negotiator who actually provided me information somewhere, the name of the organization. But, you know, here's such and such organization that actually specifically deals with union co-op workplace transitions was not received with interest. So it's like, you mass this catalog of bad faith bargaining.
Behind the Bastards
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And you end up in your strategy discussions with the whole unit, testing the wires of like, when is too much? What's our red line that we need to take more direct action? And what that began with for us was first, well, if we're going to have a strike, we need funds for it. The IWW is an organization that affords its unions a lot of freedom and a lot of
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mutual support and solidarity is not an organization with a huge amount of money. Um, and so we did start with trying to get like a sense of like what we could get from, you know, the, the, the branches reserve. And we moved on from that to how we were going to fundraise and stuff like that. So we held informational pickets that had donations and, We sold shirts, posters, stuff like that.
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We held like a big strike fundraiser. Hell yeah. I think something around like a month in advance of our, or it was maybe like a month and a half in advance of our, of our strike. We also gave management like a courtesy notice about this so they could pass it on to ownership saying, Hey, we've started fundraising for a strike in the hopes that like
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being aware that we're taking active preparations to go on strike would facilitate bargaining.
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Yeah. And sometimes, you know, sometimes you end up on a podcast talking about how it didn't.
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Yeah, you never know. But we did. Yeah, we did give them that sort of early warning. And our readiness to strike kind of like depended then on like. where we were at in the fundraising process. So we continue soliciting donations, reaching out to various organizations in the area that are pro-labor. We've talked to DSA and whatever, because they have their workplace organizing committee.
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EWOC. Yeah. And various other organizations that are pro-labor. And once we got to a point where we felt like we were reasonably prepared to sustain a open-ended strike, because that's what we're doing. This is a strike with no set end date. Then we announced our intention to hold a strike vote. We held our strike vote. Strike vote passes.
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The ownership was made aware at the bargaining session before the strike vote. So it was like the Monday before the strike vote, which is on, I think, I guess, Saturday. So in total, it was like around maybe like two weeks and change that they knew like definite possibility. Pass the strike vote. 12 days later, the strike begins with unfortunately no bargaining in between.
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The whole way, you hope that they'll come to the table. You hope that they will... Come to their senses. Yeah, take the risk seriously. Take the risk seriously. And unfortunately, this is not what's happened here. And I think part of that is maybe an age thing here. Ownership is...
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It was in their 80s, and they pretty consistently held the view that the union is a bunch of young people who don't know what the hell they're talking about. Even though the age range of our union span is the age range of the workplace. We've got people...
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in their fifties and forties and thirties and twenties, you know, which is, which is of course the problematic group, but yeah, the young radicals. Yeah. So there's, there's been this sort of patronizing attitude that I think has resulted in like a real strategic failure on their part to seriously prepare for the strike or, you know, bargain to avoid it.
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Yeah, the people I knew didn't get quite the response I was hoping from the community.
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That is totally a good option. What we did, we ended up doing, there was music, but it was also like, one of our organizers is really into cooking. He did a barbecue thing, sold food, stuff like that, and had a raffle. A raffle is a great way to fundraise. For us, we raffled off stuff we have. Yeah.
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But honestly, you can even do like a straight monetary raffle is still a great fundraising tool, you know, where everyone puts in money, the winner, the top three winners or whatever, get like a certain percentage of like the total pool and the rest of the pool is to the cause. It's really simple, really effective.
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Yeah, I mean, definitely when you go into a strike, you want to go in with a militant core group. You want to basically be sure that everyone is committed to holding the line until a collective decision is made. Otherwise, you don't want people like peeling off. That's really bad PR for your strike.
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And like the bosses will grab on that. So like, for instance, like, you know, we have some people who are respecting our picket line, but chose not to pick it with us, which is fine as far as I'm concerned. But the issue with that PR wise is that now the bosses are saying in their like tallying up of who's working and who's not working. They're counting them as working.
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You know, they're like, oh, there's only. Yeah. Whatever. They've been saying eight people. I think it's more like nine or 10 were on the picket line. But the rest of the employees are working. They count themselves as employees in that count, of course.
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And they count these people who are not crossing the picket line but not on it also as among that count of the rest of the employees that are working. What? And they've had the opportunity to really inflate that count because in a sort of, you know, classic move, really all the moves are classic. You know, you read your organizing books and you're like, can it happen here? And it does.
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So like we got a lot of new assistant managers after we won our election. So right now, like the composition of the workplace, right? Got 34 people, 15 managers.
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Well, we're leading the charge here. We have a department that's two people, a manager and assistant manager. Who's the assistant manager managing?
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So, yeah, you know, they've had these particular angles to, you know, sort of do their propaganda from. And I mean, honestly, I think a big part of, again, the boss is the best organizer. And like a thing that keeps you committed on the line is like reading all this bullshit they say about you and knowing otherwise and being able to talk to each other and be like, have you seen this?
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Isn't this crazy? Like, what the hell? yeah um also you know is uh this is where the sort of like seeds of organizing all the way that you start all the way back at the beginning of your union campaign become, you know, they show themselves as like really important again. Cause like the start, right.
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Anyone will tell you is just like getting to know people, like being like, you know, being on like a, Hey, how's it going? Kind of level, you know, and having like a personal rapport with the people you're on the line with is vital. Just in the sense that, you know, obviously like, you know, each other, you're sort of friends, you're going to be more likely to stick up for each other.
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but also like you're out there nine hours walking in a circle with these people.
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You know, you gotta, you gotta have positive, strong relationships with them. You want to be able to have the kind of rapport where like you can talk to people about like what they're feeling anxious about, you know, like where they're worried in like the strike strategy.
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Like, you know, you need to have that like trust between each other that you can have like an open dialogue about how it feels to be on the picket line. Cause yeah, you're not going to maintain morale if ever, if like everyone feels like they've got things they got to hold in about it. Like there's room to be like, shit, like, are they going to close the business? Like, what are we going to do?
Behind the Bastards
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And like, sort of like talk through that from a, from a place beyond like, you know, like what you're not letting speak into a crowd of a million people or whatever. You're just like two people and going through a stressful experience together.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, exactly. Having these authentic conversations with people. Yeah, that's a totally great point you bring up there. The HR speak, that's the boss's tool. And it's the boss's tool to divide and create disunity. So you can't lean on that model for morale within your union. It just creates distrust.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Yeah. Like ideally, you know, the union is a community and it's a community of interest, right? It's a community of work interest, but it is ideally a community. It's not a family, right? And it's certainly not a family in the way that the bosses will tell you the workplace is, but it is a community.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 178
And it's a community in the way that an employer's idea of a community is fundamentally incompatible with.