Like @ares (SFbay) mentioned, I always use her distinction when looking at activist groups: organizing vs mobilizing vs advocacy. She has an excellent table about it in "No Shortcuts", chapter 1
Her 2 books demystified union organizing for me. Ironically, it made me finally feel ok about being a direct-action organizer, now that I understood what I was missing by (mostly) not focusing on unionizing
Anyway, she focuses on influencers ("organic leaders") to obtain worker support for unionizing. Who does she warn against? "Loudmouths":
In a workplace organizing campaign, often the first workers an organizer meets are those who might be termed the “loudmouths.” They talk back to the boss—but they talk back to everyone else as well. Inexperienced organizers often mistakenly identify them as natural leaders, when in fact their coworkers rarely pay serious attention to anything they say.
— Jane McAlevey, “Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell).”
(In her new book, she replaces loudmouths w/ "activists" & "self-selecting groups")
My workplace organizing offers some evidence for her claims:
- felt the need to be exemplary at my job to win respect — an organic leader
- had to the opposite of a loudmouth
- one coworker started as a loudmouth & we trained her to become an organic leader & less of a loudmouth
I constantly had to watch my mouth, gradually working on people. With one new coworker (a dev):
- I cryptically said, "Of course, all workplaces suffer from internal politics. [shrug, big smile] So just in case you hit any silly politics from management [eyeroll]... feel free to discuss with me & hopefully I can advise you!"
- Included her on the workers' skype channel, so my radical non-dev coworkers could more easily support her
- As King Joffrey kept screwing her over, we helped her see the dynamics
One day, she had enough & quit. As a postmortem, I asked: "When you first started here, I didn't want to tell you everything upfront b/c I feared you'd think me crazy. What'd happen if I instead simply dropped my mask & warned you about everything that'd happen?"
She replied, "I would've assumed you were ensnaring me in a political game & wouldn't have trusted you." The dev room laughed
But. The US is ruled by a loudmouth. And an organic leader at one company can be a loudmouth in another
McAlevey was an elite well-financed union "salesperson". Without that institutional backing, she's reduced to loudmouth:
My future in labor is uncertain, if only because I’m publishing this book. So often, criticisms of labor never see the light of day because the only people who really know the story don’t want to burn their bridges. I call it the yo-yo effect: They get thrown out on a string when the leadership perceives their work as a threat, then pulled back in when their services are urgently required. This book will probably cut my string.
...
I operated under the assumption that if you just kept winning in a principled way, the work you were doing would create the conditions for its own continued existence. The people at the top might not like you, they might not understand what you were trying to do, they might consider you a big pain in the ass, but if you consistently succeeded at the assignments they gave you, ultimately they would give you more assignments and the work would go forward.
I was wrong. The further up the power ladder you go, the less it matters whether you win or lose. Past a certain point, winning actually becomes a liability, because the people at the top will feel threatened by the power you are accumulating unless they can control it; they cannot imagine that your ambition would not be to use that power in the same way they use theirs. It took ten years of banging my head on a wall to finally knock that into it.
— Jane McAlevey, “Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell).”