At the end of the first-cut research, it is easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of information you have gathered. The real question is what does it all mean? Now is the time to step back from the information itself and begin the process of summarizing and analyzing what you have gathered so that you can begin using your research to develop a campaign.
Summarize Your Research Findings
The Research Summary chart provides a worksheet to begin the summarizing your findings. In each of the three levels – command and control, operational, and outside stakeholders – you should identify your key findings. Note that no matter how thorough you research, you may not find significant information in all 24 areas.
Command and Control
When we think about a corporation’s decision-making, we usually think about the CEO—but there may be other decision-makers. Here it is imperative that we don’t stay stuck in a nineteenth-century conception of the firm. Decision-makers could include stockholders, a board of directors, and possibly a parent company.
Operational
A corporation isn’t just a bunch of people in charge of nothing. At its most basic level, your target firm sells a product or service that is produced by workers and sold to customers or clients. The things workers produce require supplies that must be transported to and from these facilities. This is the bread and butter of how a firm turns a profit.
Outside Stakeholders
There’s more to a firm than its leadership and its operations. Corporations operate in a larger milieu. They are beholden to regulators like the EPA and OSHA. They might make political donations. They impact the communities where they are located.
Determine your Targets
In addition to summarizing the information you have gathered, it is important to look at this information through a strategic lens. This is a fundamental step in identifying the key targets in a strategic campaign.
As demonstrated by the Traditional Bargaining Campaigns and Strategic Bargaining Campaign help to examine these concepts in greater detail. As the charts illustrate, a strategic bargaining campaign is much more targeted than a traditional campaign, not trying to pressure the firm as a whole, but focusing on a firm’s profit center and growth plan.
Decision Makers
It is imperative to think beyond the CEO and top company management. Particularly, given the rise of private equity and the complex structure of so many companies such as Google and Apple, it behooves you to slow down here and fully consider everyone who fits the bill.
Key Relationships
In terms of identifying key relationships or secondary targets, it is easy to start with suppliers, customers, and board members, as Ray Rogers did. And they may be important. But do continue to explore. Looking at the regulatory structures that apply to the target firm can often be fruitful.
Profit Center
Discovering the profit center may be very straightforward, especially in firms with a singular focus in their production or services. Companies will often segment their revenue and income by geography, demonstrating in which parts of the country or world they are generating profits. This discovery may have a significant impact on how you construct your campaign.
Growth Plan
This is where the company is heading and is almost always a key source of leverage. Disrupting the company’s growth plan can have a compounding impact on the firm’s bottom line and its stock price—while throwing a monkey wrench into management’s plans and ability to deliver for stockholders or other key stakeholders.
Analyze Your Sources of Power
It is also important to step back from your research and identify the types of power that you will be able to utilize in campaign. Although we speak about union power all the time in the labor movement, in many ways it is an underdeveloped concept. Rather than thinking about union power as a single category, researchers of the labor movement and other social movements have identified four distinct types of power.
Institutional (Governmental)
Institutional power is the power that is given to us by governmental entities. When we are filing charges with the NLRB or other state and local agencies, for example, we are using our institutional power.
Structural/ Associational (Economic)
Structural power is the economic power we can assert in terms of our employer. This might be our ability to strike, work to rule or other activities to impact our employer economically.
Coalitional
Coalitional power is power based on our association with others. Community allies, for example, are one way we create associational power. In recent strikes teachers unions have built coalitional power by working closely with parents and including their concerns in their bargaining demands.
Symbolic
Finally, symbolic power is the power that comes from our creating of meaning, often in the public arena. If often focuses on justice and dignity and fairness. For example, when workers centers expose wage theft from undocumented workers they are using symbolic power.
Before proceeding with shaping your campaign, it is imperative to conduct this kind of a power analysis to identify which forms of power, and how they were precisely be used, in your campaign. Once you have identified your sources of power and your strategic targets now you’re ready to begin your campaign planning.
Plan your Tactics
In designing your campaign, you will need to chart out how you will use various forms of power to exert pressure on the strategic targets and develop the appropriate tactics. Remember not to start too ambitiously, but that effective tactics need to escalate over time. They both build power and confidence of union members and also demonstrate employers that we follow through with our plans. It is also fundamental to remember that we should not rely too heavily on one single tactic, but that we need to build multifaceted campaigns that try out a number of different tactics. In this way were not over committing and can escalate the tactics that are the most successful.
It is important to go through a campaign planning process, charting out the campaign over number of months. This is not suggest that the campaign won’t change over time, but this kind of careful planning allows you to think through escalation and the ways in which you will be exerting power on a number of different targets.
Create a Campaign Calendar
The campaign calendar provides a visual way to think through the campaign process. And it is important to connect each tactic with a larger picture, which is why the chart prompts you to think of each part of the campaign in terms of a multifaceted approach, changing rules and outflanking power, building both bottom-up and top-down approaches, and always reframing meaning.
Assess Union Capacity
In the process of conducting strategic corporate research, we spend an extensive amount of time learning about the strengths and weaknesses of an employer. Before launching a strategic campaign, it is important that we shine the same light on ourselves. Conducting a strategic campaign is a major undertaking and it is imperative that we assess our own capacity with the same critical eye we would use when evaluating any employer.
There are a number of methods for evaluating unions under the general rubric of strategic planning. The general framework we have applied to firms – exploring command and control, operations, and outside stakeholders – works well to evaluate union capacity.
Our Assessing Union Capacity Chart (click on thumbnail above) is an adaptation of the 24 question model, indicating the areas where union assessment should take place. To gather the information necessary for this assessment we have developed a Union Capacity Assessment Survey Here are some things you should keep in mind when conducting this assessment:
Assessment is a collective activity
It is best to assemble a group of officers, staff, and members to complete this assessment. Multiple perspectives are essential in order to conduct an honest and open assessment.
Assessment is not criticism
The process of conducting an assessment is not an inventory of failures. During this process, avoid placing pejorative judgments on your findings by using a more neutral vocabulary of assessment.
Note areas of disagreement or areas for further investigation
There may be areas where those assembled have different evaluations. These should be noted. While this is primarily not a research exercise, you may also identify areas where you need to gather additional information.
Conduct a SWOT analysis
Use the information you have gathered as part of the assessment to conduct a SWOT analysis (SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). But remember that the SWOT analysis is only an assessment at one point in time and provides information you can use to institute changes.
Create a summary report
At the conclusion of the assessment, it is important to create a summary document. This process of summarization is important in order to establish an overall picture of your union and to indicate areas where you need to make changes.