What in the hell …

A hot shop is when the shit has hit the fan at work and everyone sees very cleary and very suddenly how fucked up the place is. A hot shop is not necessarily good thing. It is certainly as much of a problem for organizing as it is an opportunity.

A hot shop is “A guy pulled a knife at the store today. The boss won’t even pay for a security camera. I’m going to get hurt if things don’t change at my job, people are quitting, we have to do something now!” Not a good thing in part simply because folks in this situation are having a really hard time. This type of situation is why anyone who has ever said “if things get bad enough then maybe people will take up” is an asshole.

At the same time, it’s hard not be an asshole in the face of a hot shop. One can’t really say “yeah, great, let’s organize your shop!” Given the rate at which things are jumping, there’s too much volatility. What one can, and should, say instead is “let’s figure out what actions to take around these issues” and hope they proceed in such a way that there’s some groundwork laid for future organizing.

A hot shop is basically the same thing as when a committee has been built but isn’t very far along - small group, incomplete information, not a lot of organization built - and something happens that requires action (someone on the committee gets fucked over, boss threatens to close the shop, etc) immediately. In this case, the committee has to out itself to manage before it would otherwise choose to. This is better than the result of not acting at the time, but not having the situation that provoked the need to act would have been better still. One management knows there’s organizing happening, the workplace is a different playing field. While we’re under the radar, we’re much more in control and we can set things up to work in our favor for when we do let the boss know that something’s up.

One also can’t say, “you’re on your own!” in a hot shop. That’s the biggest asshole move of all. One has to help out and lend what support one can (and in a way such that the participant or participants remain in contact and gain something from the experience if they lose their jobs, which isn’t a super unlikely result), because the situation is too fucked up.

Act and risk that organizing means losing, because we lose more the less variables we control. Don’t act (which is also a type of acting) and risk that organizing doesn’t care about people, “they just sat and watched”. That’s totally unacceptable. Hence the dilemma of the hot shop. So, one must act and hope for the best. And plan the action as well as possible. This is why one can always use more information, more stories and examples, so that one will be that tiny bit better prepared next time, think that tiny bit more quickly when time counts.

“Here’s what you do: start with a public letter. Have everyone sign it, or better yet photocopy their picture to the back and sign it. Put it up in the shop. Give the boss one day. Then do your action. Document everything. Check in with each other regularly. Try to get more phone numbers. Have people lined up to turn out for the picket line. Have people lined up to go with your co-workers to the NLRB and to the unemployment office. Start raising money for work stoppages and firings.” It’s not rocket science. It’s not really very complicated at all (in the intellectual sense).

It’s just really, really heartbreakingly hard. Hence our class is not the one that flies from victory to victory. For us knowing the utility of history for life requires knowing how to live with and respond to failure. I suspect there is little that method can add here, that it’s more of an affective orientation, a learning to keep on keeping on, learning to want to keep on, just like in the bumpy parts of personal relationships and friendships.