Book Review of Promoting Your Union; Six Strategies to get More Organizing Leads and Union Members by Jason Mann

Promoting Your Union; Six Strategies to Get More Organizing Leads and Union Members by Jason Mann

Self Published

Soft Cover

118 pages

Union Label: Canadian Freeland Union Local 2040

www.PromotingYourUnion.com

ISBN 9781468137972

Available through Amazon.com

Promoting Your Union is a well thought out and practical guide on how to generate more leads for your union. Relying on his experience as a union organizer, labor activist and new media guru Jason Mann compiled his thoughts in a readable and implementable way.

This is an instructional book; heavily bullet pointed without any fluff. Mann’s writing style is like that of the great Tom Peters, without the signature exclamation points. There are no photos or illustrations, experts quoted, references sited, empirical data, or background information provided about the author, just a straight forward do these things and you will succeed. At less than 20,000 words, you can easily finish this book on a long plane flight. Here the author has given organizers and union leaders the essentials to easily move the proverbial puck forward.

Some of my favorite points are the importance of effective targeting, communicating emotion, improving your union’s website, creating a pull campaign, building a contact database, creating “I work at” Facebook pages (I did this), connecting with future workers, repeat referrals, gathering testimonials, creating videos for YouTube, and checking websites rating former employers. Other ideas would require research and detailed knowledge of HTML code, such as split testing campaign websites and tracking conversion rates using Google Analytics.  

Overall this is an easy read with plenty of great ideas organizers can implement right away. I recommend purchasing a copy for yourself and each member of your staff.

2 Million Dollars Recovered for Workers

The Los Angeles Unified School District Work Preservation Group announced $2,000,000.00 in back wages were collected so far this year for workers and $800,000.00 in penalties were paid by contractors who cheated their employees. Over 465 cases were closed and an additional 400 cases are still pending. The Joint Compliance Monitoring Program allows volunteers access to prevailing wage school projects for the purpose of conducting compliance interviews. The district provides identification badges to authorized persons for activities related to the enforcement of the payment of prevailing wage rates. Representatives of the LA/OC Building & Construction Trade Council, Dept. of Labor Standards Enforcement, and Labor Compliance Dept. acknowledged the hard work of the union volunteers. Several unions have participated in the program over the years including the electricians, laborers, carpenters, painters and ironworkers.