Bargaining Unit Mapping

When you think of a union, what do you imagine? Probably the United Auto Workers, right? Or maybe you think of Wells Fargo Workers United, the group that proved bank workers can have unions too.

Both of these are umbrella organizations. The entire auto industry doesn’t just decide to unionize at once. Rather, the UAW helps each workshop form up into its own union local, what the National Labor Relations Act refers to as a collective-bargaining unit. This group of similarly situated employees gets to negotiate their own contract separate from other, different workers.

You might instead have thought of the Alphabet Workers Union. That’s a different animal: their goal is to involve as many people as possible from all over their company to improve matters through direct concerted action. They don’t vote themselves into a collective-bargaining unit, and they don’t seek a contract, but they do get to pull strings and exercise influence through media outreach, protest, and public political action. Their attention-grabbing tactics let them achieve company-wide improvements despite being a small minority of the workforce they represent.

Here in the JPMC Workers Alliance, we are taking both paths. As an organized group of workers, we’re finding ways to challenge the company’s systemic problems, but we also want the benefits of collective bargaining and a union contract.

To that end, we are organizing the workforce into collective-bargaining units, and we need your help.

In our Discord, we have a channel called Collective Action Announcements. There, you’ll find some first steps you can take to help the process along. While you’re at it, you’ll earn rank on our Discord. We’re borrowing the structure from a certain well-known sci-fi franchise.