Organizing seeds
Creating a culture of care with Yasmine
What’s an organizing seed, and how does it grow? We sat down with Yasmine to learn more about her organizing journey, the joy of the small wins, caring for coworkers and more.
Xiaowei Wang
Could you introduce yourself?
Yasmine
I'm Yasmine and I am calling from San Francisco, CA. I've been part of the tech organizing space, which is where I learned about Logic School. I've been working as an engineer for five years, but I've always missed school. I have toyed around with the idea of going back to school. So I was excited about Logic School because it seemed like something that was built for someone like me, who was working, but still had a lot that they wanted to learn in community with others.
Xiaowei
When we first started talking, you mentioned something about organizing and the news. Could you elaborate?
Yasmine
My first entry points into tech organizing was from the news — big stories like Maven, or the Google Walkout and things like that. Around the same time that I started Logic School, I started being part of a tech worker organizing circle where we would get together and talk about organizing updates — maybe we’d have a one-on-one, or would share that we got 10 responses on a pay survey. The circle helped me realize that organizing didn't need to be a big splashy thing. A similar thing happened when I was having these conversations with people for my Logic School project. It was a lot of messaging people, setting up phone calls, discussing the day-to-day of organizing — how to make sure you could actually talk to someone and build trust, how to run meetings, and how to make sure that you knew what your own capacity was while you were working. I think that I'm now a little bit more focused on the process as opposed to the end result. That's where I'm at in my own journey.
Xiaowei
During your time at Logic School and more broadly, what were some of your organizing efforts?
Yasmine
During my time at Logic School, I got very into organizing at my workplace, which was inspired by all the conversations I was having. During Logic School, I started a pay survey at my company with someone else and we got 400 responses, and kicked off some organizing meetings at my company. Right now, there's an ongoing effort for health benefits. It was interesting to me that the outcome of my Logic School project was not exactly what I wanted it to be. But I think a lot of the conversations and learning I did during Logic School helped me work on things like the pay survey, the push for benefits, and onboarding more people into organizing at work.
Xiaowei
Could you give us more details about your project?
Yasmine
I wanted to create a zine with stories from people doing different types of organizing. I wanted to focus on more of the nitty gritty details of organizing. For example, I talked to some people about how they would run meetings or a co-op, or how they would reach out to people for the first time when they were working remotely and didn't know anyone. For me, it has been important to learn how you start a conversation with someone, when you've never seen them, especially when working remotely. I also wanted to do this because you hear a lot of stories of organizing on the news when something really big has happened. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't make it into those news stories that are still very important. So I wanted to give some appreciation to those types of stories too — the details. I've incorporated parts of my projects into the pay survey, which was something that I was very proud of. When we did a second round of the pay survey, I used some of the tools that I learned from the interviews I did. For example, to make sure that more people were involved, we had a runbook and instructions so that anyone could spin something similar up.
Xiaowei
Can you describe what a pay survey is, why it's an organizing tool, and what prompted it in your workplace?
Yasmine
One reason that a pay survey is an organizing tool is that it gives some power back to employees, because a lot of the time you have no idea what your coworkers are making. And you have no way to negotiate for better pay, or to know whether or not you're being paid fairly. So pay transparency is one tool that people have. In our workplace, a pay survey had happened at a smaller scale, some years back. Me and one of my co-workers rejuvenated the pay survey, opening it up to the entire company. We got over 400 responses, which I thought was super cool. We are continuing to do the surveys, and now four people are working on it instead of just two, and someone even made a data visualization tool.
Another reason pay transparency can be good is to catch discrepancies — for example, if men are being paid more than everyone else. Something that we learned while working on the survey is that a lot of the pay discrepancies are actually in promotions. We had a promotions talk with the non-men at our workplace and we talked about what was going on with discrepancies and the promotion process, since that can't be put into a survey. It was very educational. Actually, just three weeks ago, somebody messaged me and the other people who organized the pay survey and said that they were switching roles in the company. They were initially offered a much lower salary, but they were able to negotiate for higher pay after they looked at the survey and saw what people in their new role were being paid. That was super exciting for me. I think the most exciting part is bringing a lot more people into doing this kind of organizing, and hopefully breaking the taboo of discussing salaries at our company.
Xiaowei
What advice would you give to people who are just starting off about doing the humble, quiet work, the stuff that doesn't make it to the news?
Yasmine
Be okay doing things differently. For example, there were some things in the pay survey that I would have done differently. We invited as many people who wanted to be a part of the core pay survey planning group, which turned out to be only four people, but then we released the survey questions to a channel of about 500 people and asked for feedback. We tried to be very clear about how we were going to share the data and what kinds of risks sharing it might entail. We made it so that we wouldn't release the data unless we got 400 responses. We did our best to make it so that more people felt comfortable responding. Obviously, not everyone did — there's ways we could have improved. My advice would be to start very small and to get lots of help, and not just do things yourself. Ask a lot of questions to the people that you're working with, gain the trust of the people that you're working with. Allow people to be involved in the process of whatever you're creating.
I feel like I'm still learning a lot from other people. Another piece of advice that someone gave me was to just try to start conversations whenever you can. Especially in the remote world — if somebody says something cool, I message them about it afterwards. I check in with people regularly so that checking in with people doesn't become as awkward. If people know, ‘Okay, Yasmine sets up one-on-ones with everyone on the team once a month,’ it's not weird anymore. That's my advice. But if anyone has any other advice, I'd love to hear it.
Xiaowei
Along those lines, I'm curious if you could talk about your own relationship to this idea of wins. You started talking about the idea of small wins, these “organizing seeds” as you termed it.
Yasmine
I think of small wins as things that build a different type of culture, a culture where people are checking in on each other, or a culture where people are covering for each other when someone makes a mistake. A lot of the culture in tech is about really big wins — I guess that's just society in general. What gets attention is the end result. We just have to have a different mindset in general. Otherwise, it's really easy to get caught up in fame or the end result, no matter what the process. I think it's important to recognize anything that you do because it's going to take a lot of small things to get to the big win or big result. Those big wins don't just happen spontaneously.
Xiaowei
It seems like when you say small wins, it's things like building solidarity and community and creating a culture of care.
Yasmine
Someone I was talking to, they worked at Starbucks at an airport, and they had one other co-worker. There were lots of things wrong with their job, but their co-worker had back problems and needed to sit down. They organized and got a bench, and they were like, ‘This is awesome. We did it. We got a bench.’ No one's gonna write a news story that my friend and her co-worker got a bench. But I feel like a lot of that kind of stuff is super important. There's relevant things for every workplace, really tiny things that can happen. I think a culture of care is a good way to explain it, creating a culture of care, where people care about each other. And they take care of each other at work.
Xiaowei
What advice would you give to yourself from five years ago about workplace organizing, knowing all the things you do now?
Yasmine
I think the advice that I would give myself is to be motivated by sincere love for my co-workers, as opposed to doing what is abstractly right, or abstractly important. Three years ago, I would feel frustrated when I thought something needed to be done and no one was ready to do it. Now, I don't really feel like that anymore.
Xiaowei
What are the ways that you see workplace organizing in tech, not only creating a better tech industry but also maybe spilling out into society more broadly?
Yasmine
I think that in tech, which probably could be said of any industry under capitalism, we're meant to think that we're super duper lucky to be here. If something bad happens to someone at work, we’re taught to see that as their personal failing. It’s not supposed to affect the rest of us because we're not the same as that person. We are taught that we're better, and we need to make sure bad stuff doesn't happen to us as individuals. I think we need to care more about each other, and the people that we work with.
Employees at tech companies have either bought into this myth that it's this wonderful, great thing, or just feel very disillusioned and are just doing it for the paycheck but don't believe anything can change. I hope that if we can shift some power back to the people actually building tech, things can be better. I do not like the tech industry at all. I feel like it's a pretty shitty industry. But I love the people that I work with. I think if most of the people that I work with, if they were in charge, things would be very, very different.
Xiaowei
It's a good reminder that yes, there are a portion of people who work in tech who don't necessarily believe in it but also have a family to support.
Yasmine
Yeah. There was a period of time where I really liked programming but I've thought about different careers. I've thought about a career change a lot of the time, but I want to stay. I'm from the Bay Area, and I want to stay in the Bay Area. Tech sometimes feels like the last industry where you can earn enough to pay your rent in the Bay.
Xiaowei
Is there anything you'd like to invite our readers to join you on? Or resources you'd like to share?
Yasmine
If anyone feels like the idea of small wins resonates with them, they can talk to me and maybe be included in my project, because it's still not done. I want to also add, one thing that was super helpful for me was actually getting off Twitter and reading actual books about organizing like Secrets of A Successful Organizer, from Labor Notes. I really enjoyed Mutual Aid by Dean Spade and anything by Labor Notes. As well as actually taking organizer training from EWOC, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. The information on how to do all this organizing is there.
Yasmine (she/her) is a tech worker living in San Francisco.