Can 'Unit of Work' Transform Union Organizing?

Some Silicon Valley VCs think so. Plus, a troubling update from the Amazon Labor Union, and how burnout plagues organizers.

Trying to organize a union in your workplace? Well, now there’s an app for that.

Just kidding. If only the process of building collective awareness and trust in the face of management intransigence and bullying and then filing for and winning a certification election was as easy as getting your takeout order delivered. But that hasn’t stopped Unit of Work, a two-year-old start-up backed by venture capital, from trying to insert itself as a helpful partner offering tactical and legal advice to budding independent unions. As a recent story by Sam Dean in the Los Angeles Times explains, the staff at PEN America relied on Unit of Work for its successful organizing drive this past spring, tweeting, “We’ve learned so much from their organizers, legal advisers, and comms experts!”

It could be that there’s a market opportunity here, with two-thirds of Americans saying they approve of labor unions while only 6.1% of private sector workers are currently represented by one. That at least partly explains why people like Roy Bahat of Bloomberg Beta, the investment arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, decided to lead Unit’s $1.4 million pre-seed round. “Work has failed millions and millions of people in the U.S., who have tried to work hard and been unable to provide a decent life for themselves and their families,” Bahat told the LA Times, and “organizing is one of the ways that workers can demand more.”

While that may be Bahat’s motivation, Tim Draper, another early investor in Unit, seems mostly interested in its potential to undermine big unions that have the scale to challenge the private sector. Last year, Draper started a push for a ballot initiative that would have banned public sector unions in California, and even though he eventually abandoned it, he told the paper that he was backing Unit because it will make unions “decentralized.” In his view, “Centralized unions tend to restrain trade, and government unions create bloated bureaucracy and poor government service on the whole. Government unions are the antithesis of a free country. The US is supposed to be run by the people. California is run by union bosses.”

Unit’s founder, Jamie Earl White, says in a founder’s letter on Unit’s website that the start-up has only given roughly one-fifth of its shares to these VCs (the others are Schlaf Angel Fund, Haystack, E14 and Gutter Capital), none has a board seat, and that ultimately they will be phased out of ownership by what he envisions as an “exit to community.” That is, he aims to use the income Unit will eventually earn to buy out its investors and give the company to the unions it helps organize.

Leaving aside whether Unit can fend off the predatory values of its initial investors, I have to question whether its business model is viable. Unit is offering an array of useful services to organizing committees at workplaces for no charge, betting that once they win their certification elections and then negotiate their first contracts, these new independent locals will choose to sign servicing contracts with it in order to keep using its software and advising services. In exchange, members of those locals will pay Unit .8% of their monthly wages. That would be $24/month for someone who makes $36,000 a year. White says Unit might also earn fees from helping a new local affiliate with a national union, which is an intriguing wrinkle. But it can take months or even years before a new union scores that first contract even if an employer is friendly (if you haven’t noticed, many aren’t—and sometimes the parent union helping a new unit isn’t so great either). So as Unit starts to pick up users it will have to keep raising venture capital.

Unit’s business model reminds me a bit of other attempts to service the bottom layer of our political economy, in particular platforms that tried to offer “campaign-in-a-box” toolsets to candidates running for low-level offices like school board or town trustee. The problem these start-ups inevitably encounter is how to find enough paying customers before they run out of venture funding. Talmage Cooley, a former student of mine, tried to do this with Democracy.com but ultimately ran out of funds and had to sell the URL to help pay back his initial investors. If, for arguments sake, shops like Pen America and PHS Providers, a community health provider in Chapel Hill, NC that has also used Unit to organize, each include say 50 workers making an average of $72K a year, their annual contribution to Unit’s bottom line once their contracts are finalized would only be a total of about $57,600.

That said, if I were sitting at 815 16th St, NW (the AFL-CIO’s HQ) I might try to invest in Unit of Work, if for no other reason but to get an inside view of its development. Other than CoWorker.org and ActionNetwork.org, there aren’t many tech start-ups explicitly focused on or backed by organized labor.

—Related: Going through the many newsletters I subscribe to, I was dismayed to find this update from the Amazon Labor Union’s Substack, which was written by Mat Cusick, a worker who was fired by Amazon in May after the successful JFK8 organizing drive on Staten Island: “It gives me no pleasure to announce the end of this newsletter and my resignation from the Amazon Labor Union. (Does it still count as a resignation, if a secret interim executive board decided to expel me two weeks ago and simply hasn’t told anybody yet? I think so.) Anyway, let’s call it a departure: I am departing the ALU with a troubled heart, at a troubled time.” Cusick’s final post on the ALU Substack recounts all the budding union’s early victories and challenges, but reports that “something strange happened” after he was fired. Core members of the union’s organizing committee, including Chris Smalls, its president, “began to object to every act of solidarity work—often only after the fact—and then began to gather these into infractions of secret rules I never knew. It was perfectly Amazonian.” He details a series of complaints, all amounting to a “turn away from democracy” and centralization of control under Smalls and a small coterie. I’m in no position to verify Cusick’s charges, other than to say that they’re pretty troubling and deserving of more scrutiny.

Privacy, Shmivacy

—Longtime readers of The Connector know that I’ve been worried about how our cars are turning into personal surveillance systems ever since we got a new Toyota RAV4 plug-in hybrid. Now Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng at The Markup have done a deep dive on the burgeoning field of connected vehicle data, zeroing in on 37 companies seeking to monetize the information our computers on wheels collect on us. As The Markup’s Julia Angwin notes in an accompanying post, it’s hard to see why these companies are doing things like monitor a driver’s race. Until we get strong federal privacy legislation that puts the onus on companies to serve their consumers’ best interests, expect more trouble on this front. (Also, the existing software that most car users rely on, CarPlay and Android Auto, aren’t very good at the one thing any car owner should want, which is help navigating their car’s energy use, as this review of the new Ford F-150 makes clear.)

—The New Jersey State Police used a blood sample collected from a newborn in order to do a DNA analysis connecting its father to an old assault case, according to a complaint from the state’s public defender office. Under state law, all newborns are tested for an array of disorders; as the ACLU’s state legal director told the New Jersey Monitor, “This program was developed for health purposes and to protect health, and there’s no consent process for the state taking this information from newborns. Parents, when this happens, trust the state to protect this sensitive information and not make it easily available to law enforcement agencies or other agencies.”

Organizing Notes

A new survey of nearly 350 progressive organizers conducted this spring by training organization Re:Power in partnership with the Analyst Institute finds that the number one threat they are dealing with in the short-term (ie, the next 18 months) is burnout, while longer term they are also quite understandably most focused on entrenched powers external to their organizations that stand in the way of change. Down in the weeds of the report are some interesting nuggets, including these:

-Respondents use tools like Google Sheets, VAN/EveryAction, Excel and ActionNetwork to manage data but most said they have at least some data needs that aren’t met with existing tools. One noted that their organization didn’t have a volunteer database and only use a CRM for tracking fundraising and petition signatures.

-Respondents also called for more granular and accurate data about enthric communities and on “the invisible citizens” who don’t vote.

-Only one third of the respondents expected that they would still be working or volunteering in organizing five years from now. Not good!

If you want to dive deeper, Re:Power is holding a movement briefing on its findings Monday August 22 at 2:00pm Eastern.

—The Federal Election Commission has voted to let political campaigns send unsolicited spam to Gmail users, and Josh Nelson explains why this is a very bad idea and tilted to benefit Republicans. (Related: Say hello to EthicalEmail.org.)

—Jon Warnow and Nathan Woodhull are up to something interesting.

—Attend: The Code for All global civic tech network has just announced its 2022 Summit, which will take place September 19-22. All sessions are free online.

—Netroots Nation is happening at the end of the week in Pittsburgh. Lots of people are expected for its rich mix of keynotes, panels and workshops. I’ll be attending virtually; see you in the conference app!