I did something awesome
Nov. 6th, 2020 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaSo, to distract you from refreshing the news, let me share this thing I did today.
I'm active in a radical grassroots union, and I've been slowly learning to negotiate to help members who have problems. Primarily our goal is to facilitate workplace organizing, but fairly often, you get members who just have an isolated problem with little organizing potential. And then we just need to help them.
Today we had a member (J) whose boss wanted to end her employment. I don't want to give all the details of her position and the relevant labor law, but the worst case scenario, which the employer was obviously aiming for, was that she'd just have to go and get nothing. Her boss had brought an actual professional lawyer to the negotiation, whereas on our side we just had me (a newbie), J (who didn't say much), and another, more experienced person from our negotiation committee (but still an amateur).
J didn't actually want to stay, she just wanted some compensation if we could get it. And in the end we walked out with the equivalent of $6000 for her! : D
And I came up with the idea for how we did this! J had been on sick leave for a long time, for mental health issues connected to her being trans. Another boss from the company had, among other things, told her that she was just lazy and not actually sick. My idea was that we present this as discrimination based on her being trans, because the company had definitely known about this at the time. We had documentation from the healthcare authorities, who'd had to tell the company not to contact our member because they were just making her problems worse. I'm not convinced it was actually discrimination because she was trans--my bet is that they would've been dicks to her whatever her mental health issues had been. But it sure made the lawyer look worried.
Maybe we could have got more if we'd actually gone to court over this. But that would've taken a lot of time/effort/money, and of course we couldn't be sure if we'd win. And J was broke and was pretty damn happy to get $6000, and would've got nothing without us! And I and the other negotiator got to stick it to that boss and his lawyer and contribute, in a small but very concrete way, to doing something about economic inequality. : D
I'm active in a radical grassroots union, and I've been slowly learning to negotiate to help members who have problems. Primarily our goal is to facilitate workplace organizing, but fairly often, you get members who just have an isolated problem with little organizing potential. And then we just need to help them.
Today we had a member (J) whose boss wanted to end her employment. I don't want to give all the details of her position and the relevant labor law, but the worst case scenario, which the employer was obviously aiming for, was that she'd just have to go and get nothing. Her boss had brought an actual professional lawyer to the negotiation, whereas on our side we just had me (a newbie), J (who didn't say much), and another, more experienced person from our negotiation committee (but still an amateur).
J didn't actually want to stay, she just wanted some compensation if we could get it. And in the end we walked out with the equivalent of $6000 for her! : D
And I came up with the idea for how we did this! J had been on sick leave for a long time, for mental health issues connected to her being trans. Another boss from the company had, among other things, told her that she was just lazy and not actually sick. My idea was that we present this as discrimination based on her being trans, because the company had definitely known about this at the time. We had documentation from the healthcare authorities, who'd had to tell the company not to contact our member because they were just making her problems worse. I'm not convinced it was actually discrimination because she was trans--my bet is that they would've been dicks to her whatever her mental health issues had been. But it sure made the lawyer look worried.
Maybe we could have got more if we'd actually gone to court over this. But that would've taken a lot of time/effort/money, and of course we couldn't be sure if we'd win. And J was broke and was pretty damn happy to get $6000, and would've got nothing without us! And I and the other negotiator got to stick it to that boss and his lawyer and contribute, in a small but very concrete way, to doing something about economic inequality. : D
(no subject)
Date: 2020-11-06 03:40 pm (UTC)