“Not Fissures but Moments of Crises that Can Be Overcome”: Building a Relational Organizing Culture in Community Organizations and Trade Unions

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12229
• Author: Maite Tapia
• Date: 01 April 2019
• Published date: 01 April 2019

“Not Fissures but Moments of Crises that Can

Be Overcome”: Building a Relational Organizing

Culture in Community Organizations and Trade

Unions

*

MAITE TAPIA

Community organizations and trade unions rely to a certain extent on a commit-

ted membership to be effective. It can be difficult, however, to build solidarity

when there are diverse members with competing interests and this can lead to

internal conflicts. Based on participant observation and interviews, this article

examines how membership organizations have been able to maintain an active

grassroots base and overcome internal crises through the development of a rela-

tional organizing culture.

Introduction

There has been a remarkable rise in social movement activism in recent dec-

ades—from worker centers, community organizations, the occupy movement,

and new insurgencies in traditional unions—but the sustainability of many of

these organizationsis often fragile and the ability to maintain an active grass-

roots base over time is problematic. To remain vital, membership organizations

need to build solidarity within as well as across their social networks, develop

affective ties among their members, and share cultural values and practices

(Taylor 2000).

Whereas historically, unions were created based on pre-existing solidarities,

centered, for example, around specific skills, currently this is no longer the

case (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2013). Defined in many different

ways, solidarity often refers to feelings of belonging to the same group and

*The author’saffiliation is Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. E-mail: tapiam@msu.edu.

This article would have not been possible without the support and time of people from the Greater Boston

Interfaith Organization. The author also wishes to thank Lowell Turner, Lena Hipp, Rosemary Batt,

Christian Ibsen, Peter Berg, Felice Klein, Mevan Jayasinghe, Tashlin Lakhani, the reviewer, and editor for

their excellent comments on earlier drafts.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, DOI: 10.1111/irel.12229. Vol. 58, No. 2 (April 2019). ©2019 The Regents of

the Univers ity of Califo rnia Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148,

USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

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translates into the willingness to engage in collective action. The latter is con-

sidered essential especially when social protection is not being achieved

through established channels of representation, such as collective bargaining

agreements (Tapia and Turner 2013).

Over the past decades, union membership has significantly declined and dif-

ferent forms of collective representation have emerged, such as community

organizations and worker centers (Fine 2006; Milkman and Ott 2014; Swarts

2008). These actors, however, don’t have the legal right to collectively bar-

gain, as is the case with traditional trade unions, but rather rely on the partici-

pation of their members to gain power and fight for better living and working

conditions in different arenas to that of the workplace. Furthermore, members

are often not united through one particular workplace and can have many dif-

ferent or conflicting interests and identities, making it even more challenging

to build solidarity in the first place.

This paper focuses on the development of a relational organizing culture or

a culture that emerges out of an explicit attempt to develop interpersonal ties,

in particular, through rituals such as one-on-one meetings and storytelling, as

one way to sustain an active grassroots base and build an organization across

people with different or conflicting interests. It draws upon an example of an

organization that practices “relational organizing”as a core strategy to build

and sustain its organization. In exploring how this approach is used to build

collective solidarity the paper examines the extent to which strategies found in

community organizations may provide lessons for trade unions.

Between 2010 and 2017, I conducted an in-depth study of a community

organization, the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), and examined

the extent to which this organization has been able to engage its membership

as well as overcome internal conflicts. In addition, to corroborate my findings

I include important trade union examples and show the way they have (or

have not) been able to build a relational organizing culture. This study there-

fore highlights the challenges in building an active grassroots base while at the

same time shows how organizations can deal with different and conflicting

interests, build solidarity, and fight together for the common good.

This paper makes the following contributions. First, unsurprisingly, labor

scholars have focused on the importance of common, class-based interests to

achieve group unity, organize workers, and potentially revitalize the labor

movement. Given today’s diverse workforce, however, we cannot presuppose

that workers will automatically collectivize around class when perhaps other

forms of identity are creating divisions among the workforce. My case study

research goes inside the organization focusing on the internal organizational

processes that are put in place to build new solidarities across fragmented

groups. I focus on a specific organizational mechanism—the explicit

230 / MAITE TAPIA