Hi everyone, I need some advice from those of you who have organized in the workplace before. Even in non-Union ways. Many details coming but I think they’re all mostly relevant.
My company is currently in a tumultuous time between lawsuits and other nonsense in the far upper echelons of management that we don’t see down here at all. Myself and 3-4 other make up the production crew that makes literally all of the product that our company sells. We’re not a huge company, but we’ve cleared multiple millions in a months sales in the past for an extended period of time. COVID and other factors have dampened that pretty significantly in the last few years, but we’re still profitable and in the process of turning things around as I understand it.
Nobody on the production team makes a living wage, most or all of us clearing under 30k last year. We live in a state with very high housing costs and inflation has gone crazy as we all know. One of my teammates has had his power shut off twice this year already, another is in his 40s and living at home. Myself, I’ve been unable to accrue even a meager amount of savings in the 4+ years I’ve worked here, and recently had to drop the company insurance because it was taking too big a bite out of my paycheck to consistently afford groceries. We generally finish all our work in less than 40 hours a week and are left scrounging for work. Even at a full 40 hours, we wouldn’t be making enough to live even kind of comfortably. Our boss makes more than twice what we make.
Yesterday, after an argument about these conditions with another underpaid worker (in a much higher position than me, I should say), our manager took all of us aside to ask “aside from money, how can the company make you happy. I promise I’m working on raises for everyone and trying to maintain the culture of our workplace”
We all felt ambushed by the conversation, no one answered honestly, so I took it upon myself to gather everyone to approach him this morning as a group.
We had no time to prepare, but I had my own notes and thoughts. I brought up living wages, past labor violations and those sorts of things, had math to back up my arguments, and tried to leave the floor open for my coworkers to speak up too. Coworkers unfortunately but understandably cowed to the pressure, my boss gave us some bullshit bootstrap speech as expected, and basically said in January we will find out if anything can be done. We were told to branch out in our duties to have better skills to leave the company some day, but not to expect to be paid fairly for it. We’re not very hopeful right now.
We decided that in January, in the very likely event that we’re all still fucked, we need to be better prepared for a conversation with him. We don’t know anything about organizing, only google level knowledge of our rights as workers, and we don’t want to be unprepared again so we can present a unified front. I need any and all advice to better advocate for ourselves, better pay and conditions, all of that.
My only caveat is that we’re marijuana workers. We don’t handle raw plants and therefore shouldn’t count as agricultural, but I’m not sure how that affects our rights otherwise. Please help. We’re all at the end of our ropes here, and too poor to quit.