Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1124770
8 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2019 80 70 70 100 10.2 7.4 7.4 100 100 100 100 100 60 100 100 70 70 30 30 100 100 60 100 100 100 100 70 70 30 30 100 100 60 70 70 40 70 70 30 30 100 40 100 40 40 100 10 40 40 20 70 70 3.1 2.2 2.2 70 40 40 75 66 66 50 40 40 25 19 19 B 0 0 0 0 100 70 30 100 10 25 50 75 90 100 100 60 100 70 30 100 60 40 70 40 70 30 100 40 40 100 40 100 40 70 40 70 40 40 3 40 70 40 70 40 40 100 60 A 3% ISO 12647-7 Digital Control Strip 2009 GET TING ORGANIZED by Rob Callahan O ne of the social media companies competing for my ever-diminishing supply of attention sends me almost daily e-mails imploring me to log onto its site so that I can build an online simulacrum of my professional network. Those e-mails egg me on with a declarative catchphrase: "It's not what you know, it's who you know." In a short-lived career that ended so long ago it now seems almost to belong to a previous lifetime, I taught English for a stint. So, upon reading "It's not what you know, it's who you know," I imagine myself wielding my red pen, changing the comma to a semicolon, replacing "who" with "whom" and scrawling "Trite!" in the margins. But most clichés, however hackneyed, endure on account of their resonance with received wisdom. This stock phrase, too, contains some truth. If you are a freelancer regularly hustling for gigs, you don't need me to tell you this: Career success depends largely upon the strength of your network of colleagues and contacts. Talents, skills and abstract knowledge are all key, sure. But it takes a wide network of well-placed people well aware that you possess those keys in order to find open doors. Our members mostly get gigs through leads, not help-wanted ads, and those leads come down to who knows whom. In this regard, what makes for the health of a union is not so very different from what makes for the health of a career. It's less about information (what you know) than about relationships (whom you know). The health of our union is, of course, my focus here. When the Guild's elected leadership convenes its monthly meetings, a perennial topic of conversation is the need for greater membership engagement. Our want of such involvement manifests itself in a lot of different ways — disappointing attendance at union meetings, poor turnout in Guild elections, a reluctance to stand up on the job for oneself or one's co-workers — but all are symptoms of members not feeling sufficient connection to, and not taking sufficient ownership of, the mission of our shared Guild. Our Membership Outreach and Diversity Committees have done a lot of great work in recent years to promote members' investment in the Guild. Initiatives such as the craft roundtables and the "I Am the Union" Facebook forum have helped strengthen the sense of community within our local. Thanks to these efforts, our union's culture has been changing for the better. But we recognize a need to do more. When it comes to member engagement, it's easy to assume doing more is chiefly a matter of members knowing more. We might suppose members' involvement in the union will improve if we simply improve the quality or quantity of the information they have — through the website, via e-mail updates, or in the pages of this magazine. Building a stronger union, in this view, is largely a matter of public relations: crafting a better message, getting that message before more eyeballs or otherwise burnishing the brand. But a union's real strength isn't a function of its public relations so much as it is a function of its personal relationships. As with constructing a career, building a solid union is largely about cementing solid ties with colleagues. It's a question not of knowledge but of connection. Only by fostering such connections can we build a union that's not merely a brand but is instead a genuine community. The centrality of personal relationships to union strength is why most unions rely upon a system of shop stewards to keep members informed, to promote participation in union activities and to safeguard employees' rights in the workplace. Shop stewards comprise an intermediate tier of grassroots leaders and trusted co-workers who bridge the gap between rank-and-file members and the organization's central leadership. They ensure that the union isn't merely an abstraction or some remote Personal Effects The Power of Peer-to-Peer Interaction CONTINUED ON PAGE 10