Being an organizer that is conscious of all that is wrong in the world requires adopting a dedicated persona for organizing. You will not be yourself, instead you are a dedicated organizer manipulating other people to either be organizers themselves or at least go along with the project. This is necessary unless your workplace is already cool. You will have to be in situations where you do nice things for chuds or listen to a liberal have the worst idea you’ve ever heard, get popular support for it, watch them fail, and still be the person that kindly advised against it and capitalizes on the failure by pushing in a good direction instead.

Organizing a union means organizing the people who are there, in other words. If you’re unable to do that, then I’d give up on the project entirely. I don’t mean this in a way that is dismissive towards you. Not everyone is in a place to bear that pain and frustration and fake complacency and it’s not your fault if you aren’t. It’s also not your fault that imperial core workers often suck so much to organize.

With that said, if you would like to give it another shot, then I would recommend practicing that persona as part of beginning the steps of a unionization drive, which is not just raising the U word with coworkers. You’d want to be strategic in your approach by orchestrating social situations in which to build ties and have conversations with everyone in the potential unit. Here are some tips/examples:

• Have a pizza party, go out for drinks, have a potluck. Use the opportunity to gauge what people care about (“if you could change one thing about this place, what would it be?”). Secretly take notes.

• Become the coworker everyone wants to dish to (i.e. feign interest in what they’re talking about) or find that coworker and get them on your side very early on.

• Gauge “seriousness” necessary to achieve unionization and compare it to what is currently there. Are any of your coworkers particularly precarious? e.g. undocumented immigrants? If so, you will need an extreme level of dedication to make it work, and be wholly committed. You’ll need a good mass of strong allies, complete solidarity, and a very coherent organizing committee.

• Speaking of organizing committee, you’ll need one. A good first step is to do a structure test by organizing your coworkers around a shared “one thing you’d change” (or similar). Something small. Maybe it’s free coffee in the break room. Maybe it’s getting a shitty manager fired. Maybe it’s getting safety equipment. Try to farm out organizing tasks to people and see if they follow through. As primary organizer, you’ll need to remind people and check in regularly. The people that do the work and speak up, etc, are the people you recruit for your organizing committee, which starts as a conversation outside of work among just those folks. Do not include anyone that you know is anti-union and make sure you’ve dog-whistled to get a sense of everyone’s take first.

• Once you have an organizing committee, you can develop a coherent and serious strategy for taking collective actions and jumping through the stupid legal hoops.

I think that listing this stuff out might be intimidating or discouraging, but I mean it to be the opposite: it’s a plan that can be followed and executed on and can help you get out of a headspace where you’d really like to unionize but kind of hate your coworkers.

PS I recommend blowing off steam in healthy ways and finding some people to commiserate with so that you can recharge with company rather than be drained with frustrating interactions. Any cool lefties or union organizers in your area?