Mobilizing members and colleagues to attend a rally, hearing or other action or meeting is one of the most challenging aspects of union organizing and stewardship. There are few feelings more anxiety provoking than the 15 minutes prior to the start of the action as people begin (or don’t!) to trickle in, particularly when your action or event relies on having key people in attendance and/or a specific number of participants.

In this free and entirely online lunch and learn, we’ll go into the art and science of turnout including setting goals and creating realistic timelines, strategies to get people to say ‘Yes’ and understanding why they are participating, building individualized turnout plans with participants, and what to do when you hear ‘No’ and how to respond to ‘Maybes’.  We’ll also touch on reconfirming participants, and the benefits of debriefing actions and meetings with participants’ post-event. Take the stress out of turnout and even learn how to accurately predict how many people will participate in an event.

This class is entirely online over Zoom and requires pre-registration. Join us just for the lunch hour (12-1) to share some of your experiences with turnout and learn this model and stay for the 2^nd hour (1pm-2pm) to get support in putting the model to use.

At the bargaining table, bosses want to take away our pay and benefits, while in the workplace, managers try to chip away at our hard-earned rights.

How do we fight back?

We build strong unions at work! Join us in this two-part series, where we’ll learn practical skills on how to take on the boss and win.

In this course you’ll learn the importance of organizing a strong union structure in the workplace, how we recruit leaders, map and chart our workplace, and how we keep our union strong in the long run.

This workshop is taught by Jonathan Rosenblum, a long-time union organizer who’s helped workers in a wide range of industries - from Amazon to education, public sector, healthcare, and construction - build and sustain strong workplace unions.

To get the most out of these classes we recommend attending in-person with at least one other member of your union or organization.

A crash course on the history of the U.S. labor movement and the ongoing fights for workers' dignified livelihoods. In this glimpse at our past, we'll examine how the development of our rights and protections as working people has not been a linear journey, but a constant struggle between the owning class and workers and we'll see how history may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.

This class is on Thursday November 14 from 6pm to 8pm in-person at the Labor Center in Georgetown and online. Advance registration is required, interpretation is available, and the registration fee is $10 with no one turned away for lack of funds. 

When workers fight back, we can count on the boss to retaliate with misinformation and union-busting. This is why inoculation, preparing our co-workers to resist these sentiments, is an essential part to building and maintaining power in our unions. In this class, we will discuss inoculation practices to help build resiliency against management's tactics as we shift the balance of power into workers' hands.

This class is on Thursday November 21 from 6pm to 8pm in-person at the Labor Center in Georgetown and online. Advance registration is required, interpretation is available, and the registration fee is $10 with no one turned away for lack of funds. 

Learn how to write an effective resolution that advances workers' interests and how resolutions function as an important tactic in our larger campaign strategies.

This course covers essential skills in leading effective trainings with a non-hierarchical, participatory, worker-centered popular education approach.