Stop telling people they have to be 100% on top of their job to organize!

The more I learn about labor organizing, the more I run into the “tip” or “strategy” “be excellent, even irreproachable at your job.” The reasoning for this is fairly obvious — it’s protective, because any retaliation will be obvious as such given your spotless performance, and it’s also proactive in that your coworkers will tend to respect you. However.

I think this shouldn’t just be tossed off as some obvious, easy-peasy box to check on your way to organizing. First of all, you may need to organize precisely because there is something about the way your job is structured or your performance is evaluated that is wrong, or makes it difficult or impossible to meet the stated requirements. This seems especially true in corporate environments that intentionally keep employees in a state of fear over their jobs, or in nonprofits where the standards tend to be wildly unrealistic to begin with and people are blamed for their own burnout. Saying that being a good worker is a prerequisite to organizing may actually scare off people in these situations who will assume they are at fault *unless* they come together, realize the problems are structural, and organize to change their conditions. It also seems weirdly pro-capitalist to say that the best organizers are also the best little worker bees. Maybe, maybe not.

One of the more insidious management strategies I’ve noticed is for supervisors to convince individual employees that they are underperforming their peers, when their peers are often struggling with the same issues. This tends to leave people feeling such shame that it takes even longer for them to talk to one another and figure out what’s really going on. I think we need organizing to work against that feeling of shame, to empower people to speak up and talk together when they’re being asked to meet impossible standards.

Maybe what these organizing experts are most trying to emphasize is the value of being a good coworker — not just getting along well with others but being reliable and supportive. But that’s honestly something you can do simply by prioritizing it. And you don’t have to have never fallen behind on case notes to achieve that.