Reflections on Tenant Organizing in Ottawa
We are a group of organizers active in working class neighbourhood organizing in Ottawa, as members of the Neighbourhood Organizing Centre, the Tenants of Sandy Hill, and the Bank Block Tenants. The below text includes some shared reflections on our experience so far and are not the position of the organizations that we are a part of. Much of our experience in this sector has come from building tenant unions and committees, and organizing mass support for tenant struggles.
Although this experience is focused on one particular aspect of neighbourhood work (tenant struggles), we view our work as part of a larger effort at building working class political power that goes beyond individual buildings, and which is not limited to tenant struggles.
We have arranged our reflections into four categories: 1) putting our work on a strong footing, 2) resisting the pressure to give up our leverage, 3) building working class leadership, 4) preparing for an uphill battle.
Putting our work on a strong footing
In order to be successful, our organizing work requires a clear political perspective. This helps us make sure that our wins are building into something larger, and that the lessons we learn in the course of our work can be synthesized. Even early on, we try to make clear that we do not view individual building struggles as isolated, but as part of a larger project of building working class power to resist exploitation and fight for an alternative system in which, not only housing, but productive resources in general are under the democratic control of working people ourselves. This, then, serves as the standard by which we can measure the success of our work. Maintaining a clear political perspective ensures we keep long-term goals in mind.
Our political orientation should have a clear militant and working class character. The issues that we face as tenants are part of a larger capitalist system, in which the rich and powerful are able to amass vast sums of money by exploiting working class people. If we are serious about addressing the issues of eviction, rent increases, neglect, and other abuses, then we have to oppose this larger system. Our perspective must be militant, meaning that we emphasize the importance of confronting the rich and fighting back, not allowing ourselves to be pushed towards court systems that ignore us, or politicians that betray us. Our perspective must have a working class character, uniting others in our neighbourhoods on the basis of our shared reality as people who have to sell our labour (or rely on fixed incomes) for a living. This means clearly identifying our opponents as those who monopolize the resources that we rely on, uniting with others on the basis of a shared struggle as working people (particularly with labour unions), and always being clear that our struggle is not against a few bad apples, but against a system that does not serve our interests. Maintaining a working class perspective therefore clarifies our strategy, so that we remember who our allies and enemies are, helps us build from struggles in our immediate buildings into a wider struggle against the system, and helps us cultivate the fighting spirit that we need in order to make any headway against the ruling class.
Encouraging people to confront landlords directly is crucial for moving individual struggles (and the working class struggle more generally) forward to a place where victory is possible. Victories generally don’t come without confrontation. Early on, however, people may be hesitant to take much combative action. Even if they know the issues they face, and can identify who is responsible, some hesitation usually remains. While organizers play a crucial role in helping agitate and organize people to take action, we cannot unilaterally instill a fighting spirit in people. It has to emerge from their own experience, which organizers can help interpret and convert into concrete action. The willingness to commit to a fight is something that develops over time, and usually grows in response to the actions of the landlord (or investors, politicians, etc). Moments of politicization usually come when people's dignity is insulted by one of these ruling-class figures. Encouraging tenants to directly issue collective demands to the landlord, for example, is crucial to this process, as it allows tenants to see the landlord’s behaviour for themselves. When we put forward reasonable, small-scale demands to the landlords, they threaten us, lock their doors, call the police, or treat us like misbehaving children. This experience, of being disrespected by the landlord, is absolutely crucial in tenant organizing. It brings the class divide between tenants and their landlords right into the open, and turns an abstract question of systemic exploitation into a concrete question of dignity and power.
Resisting the pressure to give up our leverage
Neighbourhood organizing work involves headwinds which push us into established channels (legal system, electoral politics, etc). These channels encourage us to try to work within the system, and avoid ‘rocking the boat’ through confrontational organizing. If we do not actively resist this tendency, we will fall into it. And if we fall into established systems, we give up our most powerful tools and trade them for empty promises. The legal regime, electoral politics, and a whole civil society apparatus have been built up over time to defuse class struggle, and turn movements into glorified lobbying groups. The price for dealing with them is often that we are forced to avoid taking actions that go beyond the boundaries of ruling class respectibility, including confronting landlords where they live, disrupting their personal and business activities, withholding rent, etc. If we make this concession, and surrender our ability to confront landlords collectively and in a way which seriously threatens their interests, if we do not cultivate a fighting spirit, we will have lost.
It is extremely easy to fall into the role of service providers or outside helpers. These are the dynamics most familiar to people, so tenants newly encountering organizations will often cast organizers in that role. If we don’t actively fight against this framing, and consistently emphasize that our focus is collective action and solidarity, our relationships with others in our neighbourhood will begin to reflect this dynamic, with a division between active organizers and the passive tenants who are being ‘helped’. This is detrimental to our organizing, as it stifles the proper political development of mass struggles and prevents new people from stepping forward to act as leaders.
A clear political orientation is necessary to resist these pressures. Without a deliberately outlined perspective, stating our goals, ways of working, and principles, we do not have a solid basis to push back against counter-productive tendencies. In order to assess our work, we need to be clear about what our focus is (and, sometimes more importantly, what it is not). If we do not have long-term objectives in mind, then short-term successes might feel like wins, even while taking us farther from longer-term, more meaningful victories. To take stock and correct our course, we need to know where we are going
Building working-class leadership
Developing leadership must be a constant focus. Leadership should be constantly renewed. We need to build experienced leadership but also need to always be drawing new people in, so that new leaders can emerge and be supported in taking on leading roles. This involves consistently creating opportunities for new people to step up and take initiative (to be successful, they should ideally be working with more experienced organizers). Not continuously developing leadership will lead to capacity issues, as a smaller number of leading organizers will quickly become over-burdened, and can lead to cliqueishness within the organizational leadership (making it less accessible to new people, and creating an environment where opportunistic behaviour can easily develop).
To effectively build unity within neighbourhoods, we need to be able to understand and engage with existing class differences between tenants. Our objective is to build working class power in our neighbourhoods, but most neighbourhoods are not homogenous in terms of class background. Building unity between working class and more ‘middle class’ tenants is necessary and beneficial, but the fact that middle class tenants are more likely to have access to education, resources, and certain technical skills creates a tendency for them to dominate organizational leadership. In addition to being contrary to our goal of building working class power, this can have a number of negative organizational consequences. Middle class tenants are often more concerned about respectability and more inclined towards working within established systems (as mentioned above, getting enmeshed in the ‘proper channels’ seriously weakens our struggles). In addition, the fact that middle class tenants often have better paying jobs and professional qualifications means that they are more likely to decide to move out when feeling overwhelmed (leaving behind working class tenants who do not have the financial resources to relocate), thereby removing the entire leadership layer of building-level organizations (in cases where this leadership is monopolized by middle class tenants).
Because of this tendency, we need to make deliberate and sustained efforts to develop the leadership of working class tenants,including by encouraging them to take on tasks and participate in decision-making and action, and to ensure that the overall political orientation of tenant unions and campaigns is towards the working class struggle. This does not mean the rejection of involvement by middle class tenants. After all, they share many grievances with working class tenants, and have a lot to contribute by virtue of their technical knowledge, education, and professional skills. Our role is to ensure that there is always a strong working class contingent within leadership which is being developed, sustained, and renewed, and that the orientation of the organization as a whole reflects a working class perspective.
We need to build connections between many people. While we should cultivate clear, accountable leadership, we should avoid over-reliance on a small number of organizers and contacts. Particularly when organizing new buildings, we should be careful not to place the whole burden of success or failure on one tenant in the building. Most people who are new to organizing will quickly find that it is more work than expected, and can begin to feel isolated and overwhelmed if expected to spearhead an organizing drive alone. Instead, we should not only try to engage a group of their neighbours in the organizing process in order to share the effort, but also make sure their neighbours are connected with one another, and are not relying on more experienced organizers as ‘middlemen’. This not only distributes workload and makes organizing gains more sustainable, but also creates opportunities for people to take on leadership within their building and develop their capacity and confidence.
Preparing for an uphill battle
All this said, most things don’t pan out. Most people who initially want to organize their buildings or get involved with a tenant union don’t follow through. A large chunk of organizing drives don’t get off the ground. Plenty of great ideas go un-implemented. Our movement is made up primarily of people who work for a living, and often have family commitments. Our lives are busy, and generations of decline in the labour movement have deprived working class people of access to the organizational and political skills that we need in order to build our power. At this same time, we are up against a class of ruthless professional exploiters with vast resources. We need to recognize the fact that this struggle is an uphill battle, and it can be slow going. We should be prepared for setbacks and slowdowns without allowing them to demoralize us. Nonetheless, this work is essential.
We need to be willing and able to have tough conversations. If we are unwilling to push people to move a bit faster, fight a bit harder, etc, we will lose. The path of least resistance will always win out if we let it. And that is a path that generally leads to defeat for us. Oftentimes, people’s first instincts are to rely on the law, to ‘have their day in court’, to avoid talking to their neighbours out of pessimism, or to wait until far too late in the struggle to ramp up organizing efforts. To resist this requires asking challenging questions, and sometimes navigating tense or uncomfortable conversations. Our job is not people-pleasing, or to be everyone's friend. We should maintain a rapport and avoid domineering behaviour, and we should be humble enough to not think we always know best, but we cannot be afraid to challenge people to go farther. This also means having some tough conversations about our own strategic priorities and the fact that we cannot support every struggle.
If we stay organized and keep focused on building power, we will win. Every struggle that we engage in provides us with new lessons, new people interested in getting involved (or at least hearing us out), and the opportunity to refine our methods, strategy, and analysis. If they aren’t connected to a larger project, then the lessons of all these individual struggles will be lost. If we stay connected to one another, and keep assessing our work, learning lessons, sharing experience, drawing in new people, and building new organizations, we can ensure that every struggle, no matter how small and no matter the final result, contributes to the long term success of our movement. Our organizational structures, our materials, our organizing methods, and our strategies and tactics are the products of previous experience and an ever-evolving analysis. As we accumulate experience, we can get stronger and smarter. But this won’t happen on its own. We have the opportunity to create a formidable movement. It is on us to seize it.
