Making the movement better

By Fabrizio Sasso
Executive Director, Sacramento CLC

Over the past few months, the Sacramento Central Labor Council has been doing something that organized labor doesn’t always make enough time for: We stopped to take a hard look at ourselves.

We examined not just at what we’re doing well, but at where we’re falling short and what we need to change if we’re going to build a stronger labor movement here in the Sacramento region.

That was really the point of this strategic planning process, to figure out how to build on what we already have in a meaningful way. I didn’t want us to spend months putting together a document that gets approved by the board and then gets put on a shelf. I wanted us to have some honest conversations about what kind of Labor Council we need to be.

A big part of our future comes down to turning passive members into active participants. We have more than 100 affiliated unions representing nearly 200,000 workers across our region. That’s a remarkable base. But having 200,000 people represented by affiliated unions doesn’t mean we have 200,000 people who are connected to the work of the labor movement.

That’s the gap we need to close.

The labor movement is at its best when people participate. Not just when they pay their dues or attend their own union meetings, but when they’re willing to step outside of their own bargaining unit and understand that what happens to another group of workers matters to them, too.

We’ve seen that happen. We’ve seen union members walk picket lines for other unions, volunteer on political campaigns, turn out for rallies, help with organizing drives and show up when working people in our community need help. Those are the things that make a labor movement more than a collection of individual unions.

The CLC can help create those opportunities, but we can’t create that participation by ourselves.

That’s going to require our affiliates to be more involved in the work. We need unions identifying members who want to become leaders and giving them opportunities to do that. We need more participation in organizing and leadership development. We need to know what our affiliates are working on so that we can figure out where we can be helpful and where different unions can help each other.

And I think we need to start asking something of our individual members, too: Don’t just think of yourself as a member of your union. Think of yourself as part of the House of Labor.

That doesn’t mean everyone needs to be at every CLC meeting or every event. People have jobs, families and lives outside of the labor movement. But it does mean that when another union is on strike, when we’re organizing workers, when there’s an important political fight or when our communities need us, we should have a base of members who are willing to step up. That’s how we turn membership into something more than a number on a spreadsheet.

The same thing is true of our affiliates.

Too often, unions are dealing with their own contracts, their own organizing campaigns and political priorities, and their own internal challenges. That’s understandable because that is the primary work of our unions.

But it can also mean that we’re missing opportunities to connect those fights.

A fight over public-sector jobs is connected to the fight for good union jobs in the construction trades. Organizing non-union workers is connected to the future of our existing unions. A fight over housing is connected to whether working people can afford to live in the communities where they work.

The CLC should be the place where some of those connections happen. Solidarity is a lot easier to practice when we actually know who needs help and how we can help them.

If we want to be capable of moving thousands of working people around a major issue, we have to have relationships with those people before the issue arrives. We need good communication systems. We need leaders in our affiliates who know how to organize people and members who are accustomed to taking action because they understand why it matters.

That work needs to begin now. And I think that’s probably the biggest takeaway for me from this entire process.

We have spent a long time and a lot of hard work building the Sacramento CLC to where we are today. We’ve expanded our organizing capacity. We’ve developed stronger relationships with community organizations and elected officials. We’ve brought new unions and new leaders into the Labor Council.

We have a much stronger foundation than we did a decade ago. Now we have to figure out how to use it. The CLC can’t build a powerful labor movement by itself. No individual union can do it either. The only way this works is if we start thinking and acting more like the labor movement we say we are.

It’s about taking all of the people, relationships and infrastructure we’ve built over the years and figuring out how to turn them into organized power.

That is the next chapter for the Sacramento Central Labor Council, and I hope you will be part of it.