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Three Lessons for Winning in November and Beyond - The New York Times [1]

['Jane Mcalevey']

Date: 2018-10-10

Prognosticators are wildly confused about which “side” will benefit from the highly contentious process around Brett Kavanaugh. Whose anger will prevail? they ask. On the left, some ask, what’s the point? Nothing matters, it is all stacked against us now and forever.

Unions are deeply familiar with this reality. Workers who have managed to win National Labor Relations Board elections are up against seriously rigged rules that strongly favor management. They face highly motivated, well-resourced “union avoidance firms” that deploy any means possible to prevent workers from organizing. This same billionaire class, including some of the very same funders behind the Federalist Society’s list of judges handed to their populist front — the president — first perfected warfare against workplace democracy, i.e., unions. Billionaires unleashed these methods and machinery against American democracy in the midterms of 2010 and 2014, culminating in the 2016 national election.

Because the very tactics long used against workers in workplace elections have now been exported to the broader electoral arena, it’s important to understand three lessons about how to win by those of us who continue to achieve victory even when faced with a ruthless, break-all-the-rules, determined opposition.

First, even though one side needs only a simple majority of those who vote, workers who want to succeed must try to build supermajority participation and support (75 percent) to stand a chance on Election Day. Rather than approaching a unionization election that assumes we need only a 1 to 3 percent edge to win, experienced union organizers know that in the final weeks leading up to the election, union avoidance consultants will unleash a blitzkrieg to drastically reduce the numbers of pro-union voters by persuading them to vote against their interests or, even more effectively, to simply stay home on voting day. They have a name for this: “futility.”

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/opinion/unions-democrats-organizers-midterms.html

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