2026 Elections (The Union Ones)

0:06 Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast sometimes about elections, but a different kind of election. Hell yeah, we're talking union elections, talking loosely reform caucus-y stuff, kind of, not really, but sort of. Yeah, I don't know. Welcome to a different kind of 2026 election episode. I am your host, Neil Wong. And today we're going to be talking about some other kind of union election. That's just to say union election in the IWW. And yeah, here with me to talk about that is Pam Sweetland-Hallis, who's an IWW member in DC. Also Andrew D. Ferguson, who's an at-large member from Houston and Elizabeth Coppice-Duclo, an IWW member and is the associate treasurer of the Portland branch. Yeah, you three,

0:59 welcome to the show.

1:00 Thank you. Thank you.

1:01 Thank you very much.

1:03 So let's start, I guess, by doing the thing we've done a few times on this show, but I think is worth at least getting into briefly here, which is, can you talk a bit about what the IWW is? And I guess for these purposes, like what it's up to these days? Yeah.

1:22 So the IWW is an all industries industrial union, which means that we're organized based on what the people working, what the union members make, what industry they're in, rather than exactly what specific job they are. So if, you know, you're an accountant for a school, then you are part of the educational workers. And if you're an accountant for a car manufacturer, your industry is manufacturing because it's based on, you know, who employs you and not what specific job you do.

1:57 Yeah, it's not like divided into different, like, trades or whatever. It's like, no, no, no, one union, one big one.

2:04 Yes, yes.

2:06 The dream of the IWW is to have all workers in one big union organized as best we can so as to maximize worker power so that we can end the wage system and the need for people to be exploited by a capitalist class by having their labor stolen from in the form of profits.

2:31 Yeah.

2:31 Something that we emphasize a lot is workers' democracy or workplace democracy. So one thing that the IWW does when organizing, you know, like building up to the industrial, because it's not like you get everyone all at once. You might do office by office or shop by shop, but we don't defer decisions to an outside representative. People tend to be able to vote on things themselves when it comes to them and like what they want to do and how they want to do it.

3:04 Aside from four national paid employees that just take care of mostly paperwork style stuff, we are an entirely volunteer-based organization. People engage in this, you know, not as their job, but as in a way of helping their fellow workers, sort of in a mutualistic, mutual aid sense.

3:24 And all power within the union is held by members who are elected by other members in elections like the one that we're running in.

3:32 Yeah.

3:33 Yeah.

3:34 And that's, I think, like a very unique aspect of the IWW in that it is the most democratic of the unions, but both in terms of like, you know, I guess what you would call like shop floor autonomy where, you know, like the actual like unions themselves get to, make decisions on how they're going to run their campaigns.

3:56 But also, yeah, in terms of the direct election of officials, which is a like it's like genuinely staggering that there have been a lot of unions in the U.S. that, you know, the names of where you couldn't directly elect like the president of the union for a very long time.

4:16 I mean, I don't think I have a vote in electing the president of the National Educators Association, even though I'm a member of that. Yeah. Yeah.

4:25 And that's like distressingly very common.

4:29 Well, to be fair to our allies in the broader labor movement, a number of the larger unions, the UAW, the AFL-CIOs, I believe they do actually elect their leadership from among the members now. So that's not as big of a difference as it used to be. It is good, exactly. But, you know, there is still, even among those unions, even though they've made that change, they still often will come into a workplace where a group of workers have said, hey, we want to unionize. They will come in with a playbook and say, okay, this is step one, this is step two, this is step three. And if you deviate from this, we're not going to help you anymore because you're not doing what we want you to do. The IWW is different because we believe that the people who

5:17 are doing the work know the best about the work and know the best about what the workplace needs. So we let them lead and we just support them.

5:26 And as a practical matter, because we are more accepting of the shop floor democracy, we often get a lot of union and unionization efforts that come from places that are overlooked or rejected by the Mainstream unions, recently, of course, as probably many of your listeners have heard, we organized an all-trans union, which I'm incredibly proud of to have been a part of.

5:50 Yeah.

5:51 The organization effort, not the union.

5:53 Yeah, and there's been a lot of service worker union organizing, which also does mean you get a bunch of trans people, because guess who's doing service work? Most unions won't organize.

6:04 Yes.

6:05 Well, one of the things that I meant when I said that, like, you know, we get to represent ourselves like folks are talking about here is I don't know which major union it was, but I know some library workers locally who didn't get to see their contract that like I'm using scare quotes here. They agreed to until after the city council had seen it, like until after it had been fully negotiated.

6:30 You know, they they.

6:31 Yeah.

6:31 There's not a lot of participation in that sense. I think that's what's very different in the IWW compared to other people.

6:38 Yeah. Yeah.

6:41 And like, I mean, we've talked to NNU or National Nations United folks on here have talked about like their union, like cutting deals with bosses behind their backs like that. Like not a thing you can even do here.

6:55 Yeah.

6:56 Yeah.

6:58 Because when workers want to engage in negotiations with the boss, which we don't require them to do, we have an organizing model that doesn't necessarily rely on formal structure or negotiations. But when the workers do negotiate, it is the workers negotiating. The union does not send people in from Chicago, where we're based, to negotiate for them. So there is no possibility that the workers at the workplace can get cut out.

7:24 Yeah, and I think the other consequence of that structure and of that decision making is that it also means that sort of internal elections are very important even though union elections are we finally found a kind of election that has lower turnout than like regular elections which is sort of astonishing but Jesus Christ nobody votes in these which yeah it is especially a problem in larger unions where like you get these you know you get these like admin caucuses that have been in power for like 40 years and who suck and who just win on incumbency every single year.

8:01 Yeah.

8:02 And the situation's a little different in the AWW. Do you want to talk a bit about what the elections are like actually for and what people do? And yeah. Yeah.

8:13 So right now there is the North American wide election for the North American regional administration. And so that's electing a handful of people for offices. Usually these aren't all very competitive races. Often these are races to fill committees like the education department or the IW editor. And it's a matter of more of wanting people to step up and volunteer to do that than a super competitive race.

8:43 But typically GST, the general secretary treasurer who is in charge of finances, not wholly in charge, but who has a lot of say over finances and the execution of, you know, the union's constitution as well, the general executive board that's supposed to act as a check on the general secretary treasurer and being a board of seven people.

9:06 It's the sort of highest level executive for the IWW. You know, in my eyes, these are, you know, people that are supposed to be acting in the background, largely the education committees, the general secretary treasurer, that facilitate all of the branches and industrial unions being able to execute their own local union democracy. And there are some elections there for treasure and whatnot, but largely the democratic decisions are made at union meetings. And the secretary for Portland, for instance, his main job is just onboarding and offboarding people.

9:42 He's not in charge of the union at all. He just facilitates the kind of secretarial work.

9:48 Yeah.

9:48 Also on the ballot this year, like in addition to what you were talking about, Elizabeth, there's the Gender Equity Committee, which they do a lot of great things, but they also, you know, facilitate... like mediations between conflicts and that kind of thing.

10:03 The IW editor, by the way, is the editor of Industrial Worker, which is our official publication. There are a number of committees, suffice it to say. that do really important administrative work to keep the union running and support our core mission of organizing workplaces to put workers in power, not bosses. And, you know, when these roles go unfilled, the union suffers. When people who are less concerned about the work and more concerned about the status come into these positions, the union suffers. So these positions are really important, as they would be in any organization. But Especially here, because we are trying to do something that is bigger than just, oh, we want to raise, oh, we want

10:47 more break time. We're trying to actually build worker power in society. And so we really want to encourage the members of the IWW who are listening to this, as we hope many of them are in your audience, to pay attention to these elections, to look at the options on the ballot, and next year, consider running for any office that takes your fancy.

11:09 Mm-hmm.

11:09 Yeah.

11:10 Also, there will be positions that will go unfilled after the election unless there are a freak amount of writing campaigns. So if you can fill those positions, you can also volunteer for them after the election is up if they are still vacant.

11:25 Yeah, it is one of the classic like there's this kind of like. dialectic is not the right term, but it's what's appearing in my somewhat sleep-deprived brain of, on the one hand, you have this thing where it's like, okay, this is a position that allows you to do stuff, and there's people who want to do it, and there's also sort of the classic anarchist thing of like, okay, all right, there's a responsibility here, and it technically comes with power, but you have to find someone to do it because... Yeah, otherwise it's just like....

11:55 That's exactly right, and it's reflective of broader trends within the IWW as well, because historically we were inspired quite a lot by Marxist ideas, obviously, but we are structured very much in a very much a syndicalist way. I'm not going to say fully anarchist necessarily, but we take a lot of inspiration from anarchism and how we operate.

12:17 So the IWW is very much a meeting of the minds there. So it makes sense that we'd have sort of problems from both ends as well.

12:27 Yeah. I mean, syndicalist organization as a method generally came about after the IWW, but I'm not sure that's really that important. So maybe don't include that IDK.

12:39 Yeah.

12:40 I love to get into the history of it. You're right that it wasn't necessarily a form thing. I'm not good on dates, but like for the nerds out there who want to look into it, like the IWW kind of was like one of the early voices in some of these things, you know, so like syndicalism and all of its flavors, there were a lot of socialists, what, you know, whatever their political tendency was, like collective control over your working conditions was a central theme for sure. Well, I just.

13:13 Mean the specific structure of the IWW union, I think moreover came about through naturally recognizing the troubles that the IWW encountered and sort of created its own, uh, idea about how to solve these things, certainly based on previous theory, but in a lot of ways contributing to future theory that would come from later workers and philosophers, you know, anarchist and syndicalist ideas. That's my very brief understanding. Yeah, I guess.

13:55 what I'm sort of curious about is I guess partially like what y'all have been up to and talking a little bit about like what the union has been sort of up to recently and then how that relates to yeah like what you what you want to see happen at the kind of like large scale level of like the national union.

14:15 Well I could talk on a very particularly Portland experience but um uh maybe one of the two of you would like to talk about the larger experiences uh first well I.

14:25 Mean, I think that's part of it is that the North American regional, that it's transnational, spans many, many boundaries. And, you know, most of what the union is up to is the aggregate of what all the branches and at-large members are doing. So I can speak on my recent campaign in D.C. going back to, like, what was it we were saying before? That there's sometimes the bosses go and make, like, backdoor deals with the unions. Well, I'm a canvasser. You know, I've got a lot of skills.

14:57 I've worked a lot of jobs. But for the last seven years, I've been a canvasser in the D.C. area. And the people that I worked for when we formed our canvassers union with IWW a couple of years ago on their board is the heads and like like union industry leaders of our state. And that absolutely played into, you know, how things worked out for that specific campaign.

15:23 But yeah, I've seen campaign a lot. So a lot of what we're doing is organizing campaigns across the country. I think different sections of people are coming together depending on the locality.

15:33 Yeah, I guess I'm curious sort of on that level where something I run into with the NW a lot is like people know maybe about like one thing that the union is doing doing in their like local area and then there's like 16 000 campaigns going on yeah yeah that people just don't know anything about so i guess what i'm kind of curious about is like yeah like what are you taking from your sort of local campaigns that make you like want to get involved and like what do you want to see out of like out of the union from that.

16:09 Mine are pie in the sky. I mean, like, my goals are, you know, I mean, first of all, I do want to build up industrial unions, but, like, I'm hoping that we double our membership, triple our membership, and, like, not just, like, growing numbers to have numbers, but have people participating.

16:26 You know, you were.

16:28 Talking about how we found an election that somehow has lower turnout than.

16:33 All the others.

16:34 But that can be turned around if you decide to go out and vote in your local election. And our election period doesn't run for very long, so it's not supposed to take up too much of you as a rank and file member's time. But if you go out and vote, if you vote in the congressional races, for example, your vote might be represented as one in 400,000. Here, you are making a much bigger impact when you do that and then take next steps to say, what do you want to see? Like, that's actually been my experience and what I've heard from a lot of people who get good stuff out of the union is it's folks who say, I think we should be doing this. You know, like I have this frustration here at work or whatever.

17:16 And then you have an avenue to kind of pursue that within the union.

17:21 Yeah, absolutely.

17:22 Like the unfortunate reality is that, you know, a lot of the people who are members of the IWW are, I wouldn't say not awake members of the IWW. They're not active participants, but that means that everybody who does participate has a massively outsized impact. You have a genuine chance to change the trajectory of the union if you get involved. And as far as, you know, what our goals are, why we're running, you know, My perspective as an at-large member, a recently at-large member, because the Houston branch unfortunately had to de-charter a few months back because we couldn't find somebody who had the time to be branch secretary. A lot of the experience that we had in Houston was that we were waiting for somebody to

18:13 come along who wanted to organize their workplace. The members of our branch, we were all very eager to help people organize, but none of us were in a situation where we could organize ourselves. So I think there are branches like ours out there who, you know, the problem that they're facing is that there isn't enough interest from the general public to find people who are in a position where they could and want to organize. There are branches that are like Portland and like Philadelphia and like Chicago and where they've got a lot of people in them already. They've got a lot of leads, is what we call them, to organize already. They don't need publicity necessarily.

18:58 They need material support in order to support all those leads. So there's not a one size fits all path here to making the union stronger. But I think all of us who are running together, and it is a broader group than just the three of us, All of us who are running together want to treat branches as individual branches, want to speak to them, understand their circumstances and provide them with support that they need to be successful. Whether that is, you know, more people to help on board members and process leads or whether it is, you know, better support to use the Internet to get the word out about, hey, you have an IWW branch in your city.

19:38 If you want to organize, come do it with us.

19:41 Oh, yeah. So.

19:44 My perspective from Portland has been sort of based on the just reality of how it's been organizing in Portland. So in Portland, we entered, say, 2024 or so on a bit of a downturn. We had a couple campaigns that were moving along very slowly and weren't working on a whole lot else aside from that. As a group, we put together a strategy to increase membership. to find and create campaigns and to generally just make the union, our general membership branch of, of the IWW much more impactful in Portland and much more active. So we started tabling at any sort of political rallies or, you know, queer events or just, I mean, any, any events that, you know, would, would have us in that, in that we would fit for. And we would, we began to,

20:36 you know, sign up people. We would talk to people, you know, learn what their workplace problems were and we started you know finding a lot of leads we started working on a lot of campaigns we have a number of private campaigns that of course i am not at liberty to talk about.

20:51 Fun fun iww problem of sorry we have a bunch of campaigns you're working on that no one can know what they are because don't want it getting out yeah unless you join i.

21:05 Even then, we generally try and keep secrecy a priority so people don't get fired for organizing. But, you know, publicly, we have the Muji Workers United, Realm Workers United, Real You Electrolysis Workers United, Burgerville Workers Union, Friday Workers Union, Punchbowl Workers United, I want to say. I think these are all of our public campaigns. We might have a couple more.

21:29 There's a lot going on.

21:31 It's going to be a long list. And so we've had a lot of success as an IWW branch, and we're really proud about that. And unfortunately, in my experience, working as the assistant treasurer for the Portland IWW and as an external organizer helping these unions, GEB has, and general headquarters as a large, has ended up acting more as a hurdle to us than as somebody helping us.

22:02 Our Realm Workers United campaign got stuck in a limbo regarding the acceptance of it by the general executive board. They demanded that we jump through a handful of hoops. I forget the exacts of it. Admittedly, I think some of them were just genuinely needed. But rather than try and help us in getting everything in order, they would just continuously send us back with no ratification from the general executive board. And Muji Workers United, the lawyers working for Muji, were able to put out actually true information about about how the IWW has had a ULP filed against it by the workers working for the IWW. We'll probably have to talk about this later. Maybe we won't be talking about it too much. I don't know. This

22:55 is sort of an aside. And we've had plenty of people who, you know, talk about signing up, talk about wanting to sign up. And they're like, I love the Portland IWW. Y'all are doing great things. But why is 40% of my dues going to National when I have no idea what National does? And it becomes hard to justify it when, you know, we're not able to get monetary support from national when we are having our campaigns hindered by nationals for us, like the ratification and whatnot. And when national has been often dismissive of the work that we've been doing. And so I saw those and I started attending GEB meetings and, And what I saw was really disappointing. I think the first GEB meeting I was at, one trans woman was talked over by one of the

23:48 members of the general executive board. And then when another trans woman asked him to be more polite, he dismissed that other person. And then after that whole, frankly, rude incident, at the very least, He never apologized. Instead, another GEB member apologized on his behalf to everyone, which I just... Wow.

24:15 comes off as very deeply childish. And I feel like, unfortunately, this immature behavior has been repeated over and over by different general executive board members. And it seems to be that a lot of them, not all of them, have found more interest in common with their fellow executive board members than with the union as a whole. and see themselves, and have sometimes described themselves, not as stewards of the union, but as its leaders, that they have been acting with authority to control and dictate how the union is run.

24:52 I can go on about this at length, but it was the disappointment by the general hindrance and lack of support from general headquarters and the belligerent behavior of some of the general executive board members. That made me realize that there needed to be members of, I think, better character and greater humility running. And to be honest, I don't want to have to be that person. But I've always believed that if you see a problem, the first step to solving it is finding someone to try and solve it. And if you're the one seeing the problem, that'll often have to be you. So... When we started talking about the problems we were experiencing as Portlanders and how those problems were being reflected to other general membership branches,

25:43 I was one of the Portlanders that raised their hand and said, I will do this if it means that Portland can continue to do its amazing work. I love the NABW as a whole, but I have given so much of my time, my effort, and my life to Portland in particular. And I want to make sure that Portland is able to do its amazing stuff without having to deal with national. National should not be an obstacle we have to overcome or opponents we have to fight.

26:12 It should be our, you know, backup in the corner in case we, you know, need it. And it should be stewarding the union along so that, you know, these local, more democratic, more, you know, grassroots organization of the branches and the IUSBs can do what they are meant to do.

26:32 Well, I'd like to pick up from that, if I may, if everyone's all right with that.

26:35 Yeah, go for it.

26:37 Everything Elizabeth is saying is things that I think all of us running have seen in this current general administration. And it is the impetus for why I think all of us are running. The culture that we have seen of disrespect for members is based on their identity, but also just based on the fact that sometimes they don't seem to agree with everything that the officers are saying is a major point of contention in the union. And it drives people away from participating in the NARA level of the IWW. And I think that is one of the priorities for all of us running together in this campaign.

27:24 It's certainly one of my priorities. I am I am running to restore respect for the membership on the general executive board. One of my major points in my campaign has been that it does not matter who you are. It does not matter what I personally think of you. If you are a dues paying member of the IWW, you deserve a basic amount of respect. And that basic respect involves me not calling you names. It involves me not talking over you. It involves me being willing to listen to your ideas, even if I disagree with them in the end, but being willing to hear you out.

27:56 And that's how I try to live right now. And I think it's really important for our administrative officers to live that way as well. If we're talking about personal stories, one of the issues that I've faced, I was a member of our international committee working with unions around the world last year. And we had an incident where one of the portions, one of the sections of our union, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, there was some irregularity with their finances, and it turned out that they hadn't been keeping proper records, and that was a serious problem. But the general administration took that as an opportunity to punish them and sort of freeze their accounts for while the investigation was going on. They could make very specific transactions,

28:48 but the rest of the things that they needed at that time were subject to review or not approved. And the international committee, we decided to sort of speak up because we felt that this was a concern of the entire union. We felt that this was a concern of all the members. If this could happen to one organ of the IWW, it could happen to any one of us.

29:09 And in the process of that, I expressed my personal view that legal compliance is not always the goal. It's not the thing that we should be always striving for. What we should always be striving for is to do the right thing. What is ethical, what hurts the least people. And that is a sentiment that I believe is obviously that I believe is reasonable, but it's a sentiment that I've heard expressed by many people inside and outside.

29:40 Of our union.

29:41 It's not an uncommon sentiment within our union at all. But because I was an officer, it was deemed dangerous. For those who aren't familiar, the Constitution of the IWW, as well as the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 as amended, guarantees union members certain rights, including the right to freedom of expression. And despite both the Constitution and the LMRDA guaranteeing me a right to freely express my views, in this case, this was a view that I was expressing. I was doing so respectfully. I was still removed from my office. And the General Executive Board had the opportunity to overturn the charges because they were in violation, direct violation of the IWW Constitution and

30:28 of U.S. federal labor law, and they failed.

30:31 To do so.

30:32 And so that was my personal moment of, okay, this is the last straw. I have to do something to change who we've got making these decisions, because they're not putting the members first. They're not putting our rights first. They're not putting our interests first. They are doing what appears to them to be the easiest option. They are doing what appears to them to be what the law demands of them, whether they're correct or not.

31:03 Allegedly.

31:04 Allegedly.

31:06 I think you both encapsulated that motivation for running pretty well in terms of how I've related to it as well. Yeah. For those who don't know, I am running for the GEB along with these lovely people. But my candidacy has been kept off of the ballot. So I'm actually running a writing campaign.

31:29 Oh, geez.

31:30 Oh, no.

31:31 You know.

31:31 Yay.

31:36 But yeah, something that's really important is just like the common theme is that the IWW is and has always been a diverse and inclusive union. Every good organizer knows that you're supposed to meet people with compassion and be constructive in your solutions for things. So the GEB does many things, but to me, one of the more important things that they're tasked with and are empowered to do is supporting campaigns, like Elizabeth was talking about, and supporting branch formations. So if Andrew's area becomes particularly interested in that way again, then It should be that you aren't feeling alienated or excluded when you try to access these things, but that you're being guided and supported. Yeah, when you're

32:31 interacting with your union.

32:32 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

32:34 And if we can touch on sort of the legalistic sense for a second, I've seen the GST and GEB back up their arguments by referencing a sort of reverence or respect for the law. And for the IWW Constitution, when, of course, they're only giving their personal interpretations on the law. And if you, you know, talk to a union lawyer or any lawyer, they will tell you, you know, these things vary and they're dependent on specific circumstances. And it's, you know, a lawyer's favorite two words are it depends.

33:09 Just below this is not legal advice is it depends. Yeah. Well, it depends also allows you to get out of giving legal advice.

33:18 The one-two punch.

33:22 Yeah. So even if they were experts on labor law, they would not necessarily have the correct answer. In fact, the matter is they're not experts on labor law. But members of the GEB have acted as if they have the final say on what is and isn't legally correct. And whatever they say is them following the constitution or is them following labor law is just unquestionably what needs to be followed. And so they have sort of used that authority to reach their power beyond what I think it's responsible for the GEB to be doing. Well, I can go on with what they've done with this, but I think just the thing I was trying to say, I think I'm trying to get at is that like, I think that there is to some degree a certain

34:13 amount of legalism that the GEB and GST are following that is guiding what they're doing. But I also think what they want to be doing is guiding their legal opinions regarding matters of the IWW.

34:39 A lot of this kind of comes back to a question that we've talked about on this show a lot. This kind of fundamental question of what democracy is in the sense of is democracy a process by which you come together and make decisions or is democracy a process by which a group of people is elected and they get to make the decisions for everyone? And it feels like a lot of what is being described here is people sort of wielding their power to make decisions for everyone and try to enforce them.

35:16 I think it would be fair to describe this as a conflict between those two notions of democracy. I think that our notion is that the members are the ones making the decisions. We appoint people who execute those decisions and, yes, sometimes make very small incidental decisions in the process of carrying out our will. But the people who are in the regional administration are not supposed to be making decisions for us. They're supposed to be carrying out our will as the rank and file. And it is our sense that they haven't been doing that. So we are stepping up to say, and we can do this because of how democracy in the IWW works. We are stepping up to say, it is time for you to go. It is time for an administration that will follow the membership,

36:08 not try and leave it.

36:10 Yeah, I think that's that's very true.

36:12 Yeah.

36:13 So I guess in that spirit, what do you want to see the GB do if you were able to take office?

36:20 Yeah.

36:21 So my hope is to act as GB member as somebody who is, you know, somewhat distant and partial and, you know, connect with the branches and talk to them, you know, as a fellow member and a fellow worker. and finds where I can help them, where they want help, and where there's confusion, and otherwise just facilitate the smooth running of the union without much, if any, intervention. You know, I would rather focus on connecting people, connecting different local branches together as they can help each other, connecting people to the different parts of the regional administration that are, you know, dedicated to education and organizing and international connections and whatnot. And, you know, otherwise... being someone who helps,

37:06 but does not lead. Yeah.

37:09 I think what I would like to focus on quite explicitly is, like I said, helping branches form, helping new branches grow, supporting the smaller groups among us. And I mean, it sounds so dry, but like properly funding campaigns, just making sure things are properly funded, not irresponsibly. You know, I like to look at spreadsheets and I like to look at budgets, and that's a lot of what you have to do with the GEB. But above all else, I'm hoping that I can learn. Like, it will be such a privileged position to be in to, like, as my job, essentially, be in contact with membership and branches and just learn about what's going on with people and.

37:52 What they need.

37:54 My personal goals for a term on the GEB are Honestly, cultural, because at the local level, we're in somewhat of a holding pattern right now. We need to sort of lick our wounds and rebuild, but we need people to do that. We need driven people who want to organize. We believe that, frankly, a branch is best built around active organizing already. So we're going to try and foster that at the local level, but really for me at the national level or at the regional level, rather, I want to model the kind of officer I want to see. I want to be a respectful officer. I want to be an officer who listens.

38:35 I want to be an officer who will basically take orders from the membership and not do what is convenient, but do what is right. And that involves, obviously motivated by my personal experiences, defending our members' rights when something threatens those rights. And it is in my power to push back on that.

38:59 I will.

39:00 I will defend our members' rights to freedom of expression. I will defend our members' rights to a safe environment in which to express themselves and speak to power, to disagree with power. But at the same time, I want to reach out to those members who I described earlier as being asleep. I want to reach out to the people who aren't taking an active role in our union, and I want to see what it is that we can do to make them interested. Whether that's at the local level, because there are plenty of places out there that don't have branches or at the regional level and make NARA basically a place that isn't hellish to interact in, make the NARA level something that members can participate in without,

39:46 without fear. Maybe I'm shooting too high there, but I think it is a change that can be made. And I think that every little bit helps. And I think that modeling those changes on the GEB will help bring them about.

40:02 Yeah, I think that's a fairly reasonable set of things to want the national level of your union to do.

40:11 No, we're just wild and out there. Yeah.

40:14 I would like to be able to safely interact with the national level of my union. It is incredibly radical demands.

40:21 And have it actually support the things that I'm doing at the local level. Oh my God, yeah.

40:26 Like a national organization is supposed to function.

40:29 Hot take, organizing can be fun.

40:32 You know, many are saying this.

40:39 And it should be fun. And when it's not fun... We need to figure out why, and we need to change it. And that's what we're here to do. We're here to make organizing fun again.

40:49 Hang on a minute.

40:51 No.

40:52 No.

40:52 That's a bad cadence.

40:54 Hang on.

40:54 Scratch that.

40:55 If I can pull things back to Raiwu, because it's just one that I'm always happy to talk about. You know, all of the people who are on the picket line at Raiwu, they were showing up every day. They were there in June and July heat.

41:09 Yeah.

41:10 But they were all always approaching things in a happy and positive way, not because it was easy to do or because it was exactly fun to do, but because everyone there was uplifting everyone else. It was a community that had come together and was based on mutual support and mutual love. And I want to see that in the IWW at large. And I also want to be able to, as a external organizer, be able to say, You know, this is what we do in Portland. This is what we do at National. And both of these can help you in this way. Not this is what we do at Portland. And don't worry about National. They won't help you, but we'll try our hardest to make sure they won't mess anything up for you.

41:56 Yeah.

41:57 That's not a good pitch to prospective fellow workers.

42:02 Well, full circle, that 40% goes to strike funds. Or they should, you know. That's a much better answer than, I'll get back to you. Yeah.

42:14 This current GEB has, in addition to other problems, they've also been pretty dedicated budget hawks. They have basically been cutting from every single committee as much as possible. And while I do understand there is a need for fiscal security and whatnot, I think it's been taken to the point where it's been sort of overriding the needs and community decision makings of the individual committees to the point where just a lot of funding for the things that the committees at national are supposed to do and want to do isn't supportive. And you only really get support if GEB likes you or likes what you're doing. I know members of the education committee, they had put together a budget and, you know, a list for what they're

43:02 planning on doing for the year. And GEB said, well, we don't want to support this. Do you want to do something completely different instead? No, then we're not going to fund you. It, again, comes back to this question of whether or not you are a steward or a leader. Obviously, no matter what, the people in GEB will have an amount of power, but I think we need to elect people who do not want to use that power and who will not take that as permission to have control over other people. And also maybe in the future, we can institute, you know, reforms to decrease the amount of power that GB can take for itself and that other institutions can take for itself, continue to make the IW more and more democratic. The IW is, I'm going to

43:51 say just pretty definitively, the most democratic union in the country and in Canada as well, but it can always be more democratic. And I think that we can always make the AWW better, as amazing as it currently is.

44:09 Yeah.

44:09 If I may, actually, this is something that's really important to me. I don't think there's any place for austerity in a radical left union. Yeah. Or any radical left organization. You can't grow by cutting, you know?

44:24 Yeah.

44:25 There are many creative solutions to times of downturn, but I think how Elizabeth described it is perfect. To me, there's a difference between fiscal responsibility and using the budget as a boogeyman. I think it's incredibly dismissive and assumes that myself and my fellow workers are too ignorant to understand numbers when people say, So this is a personal experience of mine that I'll ask for like line items on things and they'll say, just look at the budget.

44:55 And it's like, well, I did. That's why I'm asking, right? It doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. There's a huge fund here that's not being dispersed, you know, if that makes sense. To me, there's no place for austerity here. Our solutions will come from other ways of organizing and supporting each other.

45:14 And this current administration has seen a huge downturn in members and therefore in funding. And I don't want to say it's all general headquarters doing. I think a lot of these are trends outside of any members control, but I don't think that it has to be as bad as it is now. And I think that if we were a union more willing to support its members, more visibly supporting its members, that we would not be having to worry as much about the budget because you would have growing membership and therefore increasing funds.

45:47 Yes, it is absolutely a policy of austerity that the current general executive board is maintaining. And that's their solution. Their solution is cuts, not growth. And that doesn't work. Obviously, growth cannot be infinite. That's one of the problems that we're running into with capitalism. But in July 2026, the Federal Reserve estimated that there were 210 million working age people in the United States. we are a union of, I think the largest estimate we've got is 9,000 members.

46:19 I'm not even sure if that's accurate anymore. So we are not at any point of reaching the limits of our potential growth yet. And in terms of specific financial analysis, I looked at our balance sheets, which is something that any member can do. And I sent my analysis in a letter to the member bulletin in July of 2025.

46:39 And From what I saw, I calculated that we could afford to maintain the deficit at the time for six and a half years. Now, that is not forever, but it's certainly not the kind of crisis that this GEB has used it as in order to slash committee budgets and barely touch their own. And it's definitely enough time to turn around our flagging recruitment numbers. You know, we need a GEB that can meet this moment, and that is the kind of board that we want to be.

47:12 Yeah. Also, one note, I mentioned some ways that we might change the union and improve it. I don't think it's necessarily the GEB's place to make those changes for the members. We shouldn't get in the way of change. We should be able to facilitate it when it happens. But again, we're not in charge. We're not the ones changing the union, the membership at largest.

47:35 Yeah, it's ultimately... the workers, the fellow workers of a union who will change it is a good place to start wrapping up. So there has been a lot of mention of we in this endeavor. Do you all want to talk about who is running and what the sort of campaigns and write-ins are?

47:55 Yeah, I specifically would like to highlight the write-ins. So for a recap, I'm Pamela Sweetland-Aulis. Hey, y'all. I'm running the a write-in campaign. So that means that if you could please write in for GEB, Pam S or Pamela S. In addition, we have John Hollingsworth running for GEB as a write-in and Greg Murray from Portland running a write-in for GEB. So to recap that, write-ins for the GEB includes Pam S, John Hollingsworth, and Greg Murray. In addition, We have a fellow worker who, in addition to myself, was obstructed from the ballot, who is running for the IWOC administrative assistant. They go by Iggy, but I believe their name in red card is Philip I, or Philip Igiarto. So, yeah.

48:53 And then you can find the rest of us in the GOB, me and Andrew, both cross-endorsed each other and a whole bunch of other people who are all support each other in trying to make this union better.

49:05 Yes, there is a candidate statement section in the October GOB that lists our visions for the union. And then make sure to check the member submission section for our write-in candidates.

49:20 Statements.

49:21 Because unfortunately, as write-in candidates, they weren't given a dedicated space.

49:26 Yeah, we will get a link to that in the description. And yeah, thank you all so much for being on the show. And thanks for fighting to make the union a better place.

49:37 Thank you very much for having us.

49:39 Thank you for having me.

49:40 Indeed. And trans rights are workers' rights.

49:44 Hell yeah.

49:45 Hell yeah. Hell yeah.

49:51 It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

50:08 Thanks for listening.