Chapter Five
Community Organising and Blue Labour
Introduction
For over 40 years my public home has been the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). The IAF was founded by the late Saul Alinsky in 1940. For most, Alinksy is considered to be the father of community organising. The IAF is the oldest national and international network of community organising in existence today. I came to the IAF in 1971. Although I came to the IAF with some previous organising experience, almost all of what I have learned about organising has come from the IAF. Since the IAF builds local self-determining political but non-partisan organisations, all of my experience before 2011 has been in the civic sector.
In 2011 Lord Maurice Glasman asked me to come to the UK to meet Labour leaders and Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party. In my meeting with Ed, he asked me to undertake a root and branch analysis of local parties throughout the country. I agreed to do this and proceeded in the summer of 2011 to travel the country meeting with over 1,000 civic and Labour staff, members, and supporters either individually or in small groups. After completing my travels I came back to the US and wrote to Ed my assessment and recommendations. It was from that point on that I began my odyssey with the Labour Party and my relationship with Ed Miliband.
This essay will describe my understanding of some of the basic universals of good organising and why these universals resonate so vibrantly with Blue Labour. I have one caveat. In writing about the universals of organising, I am going to contrast different ideas for the sake of clarity; however, in doing so, I trust that everyone knows that most universals are not entirely one way or the other.
What is community organising?
To begin with, I am going to contrast mobilising with organising, even though there are aspects of mobilising in organising and vice versa. In a paper by Richard Rothstein, what is seemingly obvious is stated: ‘organizers organize organizations’. I wish that this was so. Unfortunately, the ‘organizer’ in many organisations has very little to do with organising or expanding the organisation. With some wonderful exceptions, this is true for many community groups, trade unions and political parties.
More often than not, the organiser’s role is either to service the members or to be the person who is in charge of mobilising members and supporters to do something, e.g. leaflet, door knock, find the venue for a meeting or rally, organise refreshments, make sure the agendas are prepared and printed, do ‘turnout’ (more and more by email), keep data, etc. All of these tasks have very little to do with organising an organisation through the development of local leadership.
For the most part, decisions are made by a relatively small core of people. It is the organiser’s role to implement their plan. This scenario requires the organiser to be a mobiliser. It is his/her role to bring people to an event, to train and educate people on how to build an organisation, how to develop a following, how to conduct effective actions aimed at a target, how to develop allies, how to think strategically, how to research an issue, or how to develop their own voice and gifts. This is why so many members of community groups, trade unions and political parties talk in the third person when referring to an organisation that they belong to.
Mobilisers work with members and volunteers to accomplish a particular task; organisers educate and train members to become leaders. The leaders become the co-creators of powerful, broadly based, culturally, economically and racially diverse democratically run organisations in the community and in the workplace. These organisations are multi-issued, action-oriented and are run by a broad collective leadership team.
While successful organisers must have the ability to mobilise large numbers of people at times, he/she is doing it well if 60–75 per cent of the turnout is produced by the leaders. If the organiser is responsible solely for 60–75 per cent of the turnout, then it is clear that the leaders have not been the co-creators of what is going on.
The role of the organiser is to recruit, educate and develop leaders. Nicholas von Hoffman, an organiser with the IAF in the early 1960s said, ‘Leaders are found by organizing and leaders are developed through organizations’. He stressed that leaders are not born, they are developed. Successful organisations that stand the test of time are developed and continue to grow through the work of a good organiser and a collective of strong leaders. These leaders, and by leader I mean a person who has a following that they can deliver, are always in search of new leaders to develop.
How does an organiser build and continually develop leaders? Many organisers organise around a task as opposed to a relationship. While this is necessary at times, it is for the most part a mistake. Building public relationships precedes power. Power is built on organising people in a way that can be delivered with a focus, constantly and persistently. Major issues are not won quickly. They are not won by mobilising for a few demonstrations.
To build and to sustain power over the long haul takes not only a pressing issue, but also a network of relationships that can sustain and grow the organisation until victory is realised. Organising around relationships first is a hard concept to digest; however, it is crucial to building power because people respond to relationships more than they do to tasks. Every human being responds to his or her self-interest and it is more in people’s self-interest to relate than it is to respond to a task. Most of us are not overly excited about going to another meeting or taking one more request outside of our work and family obligations.
People were born to relate. To paraphrase the well-known biblical scholar Martin Buber, all real meaning in life is in meeting (note he did not say ‘meetings’). It is through relationships that we find love, meaning, and the power to organise around common concerns that bring quality to our lives. Too often organising consists in telling people what needs to be done instead of listening to what people identify as their concerns. The successful organiser organises more with his/her ears than with his/her mouth.
This is why the most radical tool in building an organisation is the individual 30–45 minutes face-to-face meeting. This meeting is not a chinwag, it is not prying into a person’s life, it is not learning a person’s résumé and it is not an interview. It is a focused conversation aimed at the other person’s self-interest. The important question is not ‘what’ or ‘how’, but ‘why’ does he/she think the way they do, why do they act or not act, and what is the story behind their action, passion or apathy.
While every person’s self-interest is driven by those things that they do for survival, e.g. provide for food, shelter, safety, etc., we are also driven by our need to relate, to be recognised, and to experience meaning in our lives. Every place that I have ever worked or lived in – whether it was in a rural village in Sierra Leone or in urban Baltimore, Maryland – I have found this to be universally true.
The story of Ms Marian Dixon
Who are you looking for in an individual meeting? You are looking for Ms Marian Dixon. Ms Dixon was most certainly not an activist. She was not involved in community organisations or any other form of politics; however, she was a leader in her Roman Catholic parish. She was a public-school teacher and a teacher of religious education at her parish. I met Ms Dixon in 1980 when I was hired as the lead organiser of BUILD, the IAF affiliate in Baltimore, Maryland. Ms Dixon’s sister, who was active in BUILD through a different parish, suggested that I conduct an individual meeting with her sister. Ms Dixon met with me only because her sister asked her to do so. When I met with Ms Dixon, she told me that she had no interest in politics of any kind. She just wanted to work at her school and her parish. I knew that she was a leader in her parish, so I persisted in setting up follow-up meetings with her. Around our fourth individual meeting, as we began to build some trust, she told me a story.
Ms Dixon was a black Roman Catholic devoted to her faith. She grew up on the eastern shore of Maryland when racial segregation was in full bloom. As a child, when she went to her church for Mass, she was required to sit in the back of the church. One day, without telling her parents, she walked into the church and sat on the front pew. The congregation was abuzz with disapproval. Some of the leaders went to the pastor who was preparing to enter the church to begin the service. They told him that a black girl was sitting in the first pew and that he had to remove her. The pastor came out and asked this 14-year-old girl to please go to the back of the church where she belonged. When she quietly refused, the pastor had some of the male leaders of the parish pick her up and place her on the last pew. By the time Ms Dixon arrived at her home, the pastor had called her parents. Her parents asked her what had happened. To her surprise, her parents listened to her and said nothing.
From then on Ms Dixon repeated her behaviour of walking down the aisle to sit on the first pew only to be lifted by some leaders and carried back to the last pew. This went on for three months. Finally the pastor and the leaders gave up. They did not bother her any more. Ms Dixon at 14 years old had integrated the seating in her parish. If BUILD was a mobilising effort, I would never have met with Ms Dixon. If I was looking for an activist, I would never have found her. She had never participated in a demonstration. She had never been involved in anything outside of her family, her parish, and the school where she taught, but her story told me all that I needed to know about her. As I met other members of her parish I learned of the high esteem she was held in. She had taught religious education to many of the members’ children. She had a huge network of people who admired her commitment to their children and to the parish.
After a number of meetings with Ms Dixon she began to come to some actions that BUILD was engaged in. Two years later Ms Dixon became the second president of BUILD. She led the organisation with the same dignity and grit that she had shown as a 14-year-old girl. After she died, the organisation got the city to name a street in her honour in a distressed community where BUILD had constructed 600 new affordable homes. If you go there today, you will see a street named Marian Dixon Way. Ms Dixon was a leader. Through her network of relationships she developed a core team of ten leaders who could turn out 300 people to an action. If you recruit, train and develop 15 Ms Dixons, you can have a powerful organisation that can move mountains.
Community organising and the ‘living wage’
I want to tell one more story that shows the power of the individual meeting. It is the story of how the living wage came about. When I met Ed Miliband for the first time, he told me that he ran his leaders’ campaign on the support of the concept of the living wage. It was the BUILD organisation that had developed the idea and was the first organisation to get the city of Baltimore to pass a living wage law in 1994. This came after a year-long fight with the mayor and the city council. The law required all private companies who contracted to do city work to pay the living wage. This wage was far above the national minimum wage. The law was set to remain a certain percentage above the poverty level for a family of four, a figure that was set by the national government. Unfortunately, a person working full time at the minimum wage in Baltimore fell far below the poverty level.
BUILD’s premise was simple. No one should have to work for their poverty. Ed was curious as to how the idea of a living wage came about. He wondered if the idea came from a think tank or from a university professor. I told Ed that the idea came from organising low-wage workers. By doing this we had accumulated a great deal of social knowledge that can only be learned through the lived experience of relating and acting in the public arena.
In this case, it came via a brilliant organiser, Jonathan Lange. I had met Jonathan in the 1980s when he was the associate director for the clothing workers in the south. In 1991, I recruited Jonathan to come to Baltimore to help us understand why so many families were coming to the many church feeding programmes that were being established. Jonathan and a group of leaders from BUILD began where we always begin. We started conducting individual meetings with the people and families who were dining in the church basements of the congregations that belonged to BUILD.
After hundreds of individual meetings, Jonathan and the team had heard numerous stories and began to get a picture of what was going on. While there were multiple dimensions to the causes of the problem, one thing stood out. In the city’s drive to save money, they decided to contract out much of the work done by city employees to private companies. While the city was proud of the savings this brought them, they did so by impoverishing thousands of workers and their families.
These workers, once released by the city, lost their union membership in AFSCME, the US union akin to UNISON. This meant that in 1992 a former city employee and union member went from earning US $9.00 an hour with health benefits and a pension to US $4.25, the minimum wage at the time, with no benefits. No wonder many of their families were now forced to seek free meals at the church. In conducting hundreds of individual meetings with the former city employees, our team not only got lists of names of other workers, but we were also able to spot leaders and potential leaders.
This process led Jonathan and his team to ask those who showed the most drive to call together fellow workers to meet in small groups. We did this for three reasons. First, we wanted to see who had a following that he/she could deliver; second, we wanted the workers to get to know each other and to share their stories; and third, we wanted to hear their ideas about what they thought should be done.
One suggestion that came from some of the workers was to push for the state of Maryland to raise the state’s minimum wage. After a good deal of discussion, the realisation came that a small increase to the minimum wage would have a negligible effect. Out of these discussions and a lot of organising came the idea of the living wage. This made absolute sense and after a long fight, the first Living Wage Law in the US was passed and signed by the mayor into law.
It is important to note that through this entire organising effort, BUILD’s partnership with AFSCME was crucial to our success. This was a partnership based on the self-interest of both organisations. For BUILD, it was to restore the wages and benefits to many of its members and to the neighbours where their congregations were located. For AFSCME, it was a drive to stop the privatisation of the work done by AFSCME members. In fact, as the living wage rose each year as well as the power of BUILD, hundreds of privatised workers returned to city employment and therefore to AFSCME.
Community organising and Blue Labour
These two stories have summarised the importance of organising as opposed to mobilising, the power of the individual meeting, the power in understanding all facets of a person’s self-interest, the development of leaders and a bias toward action.
What does the above have to do with Blue Labour? At the heart of Blue Labour are two very important ideas. The first is the belief that the centralised power that resides in the market and state sectors is fundamentally destructive to creating a healthy democratic society. Picture a three-legged stool. If all three legs are sturdy, you can sit on the stool with no worries; however, if one of the legs is weak, the stool will collapse. If one leg of the stool represents the market sector and one leg of the stool represents the state, unless the third leg of the stool, which represents the civic sector and its voluntary institutions and organisations, is strong, the stool will collapse. Unfortunately, time and time again, the stool collapses on a majority of the people.
People on the right generally believe that to fix the stool you must break up the power of the state. You must leave the market alone so that it can work its magic and you must stop encouraging people to shirk their responsibilities by relying on the state for assistance. People on the left generally believe to balance the stool, you must break up the power of the market sector. They believe that only through a powerful state will you be able to tame the power of market forces. They also believe that it is the state’s role to provide assistance to people who have multiple needs. The market views people as customers, the state views people as clients, Blue Labour views people as citizens. Blue Labour knows that people have a powerful drive to relate, to love and to be co-creators of their own destiny.
Secondly, Blue Labour believes in the concept of subsidiarity, a concept that it borrows from Catholic Social Teaching. Subsidiarity is the belief that the best and most effective decisions are made at the most local level. When asked what his ideology was, Alinsky said it was his belief that given the right circumstances and information, most people will make the right decision. He believed that to realise democratic ideals you had to build mass organisations that are broadly based and leader led. To create a balanced society, Blue Labour stands for a sturdy balanced stool. As fewer and fewer people belong to political parties, as fewer and fewer people trust the state or the market, a large space opens for the dangerous populist movements on the Right or the Left that tap into people’s anger and mistrust. Blue Labour believes in the universals of organising because it seeks the politics of the balanced stool.
Through mass participation of people on regional bank boards and workers on corporate boards, and by the state devolving power to local authorities, and finally by calling on people to take responsibility for citizenship, Blue Labour is leading the way to building a healthy democratic society.