Welcome to the Rank and File Caucus. This page explains how we run ourselves. Read it once when you join, and come back to it whenever something feels unclear.
Our caucus is built so that real decisions stay close to the members making them, and so that no small group of officers ends up running things on behalf of everyone else. The structure below is what makes that possible.
We organize in small working groups that each handle a piece of the caucus's work. Each group has the power to make its own decisions in its area, and groups are connected to each other so that nothing happens in a silo and nothing important gets lost between them.
Three things hold this together:
That's it. Everything else is detail.
Anyone can start a working group with just two things written down:
Writing these down matters. If a circle's purpose is fuzzy, people end up doing overlapping work or stepping on each other's toes. If the range of its decision-making power is fuzzy, every small choice gets bumped up to a bigger meeting, which is exactly the bottleneck we're trying to avoid.
A few things to know about working groups:
Every group is connected to a broader circle through two people, not one.
Both of them are full participants in both circles. They can raise objections in either meeting.
The reason we use two people instead of one: a single representative becomes a bottleneck and a power broker. Two people, going in opposite directions, keep information flowing both ways and make sure no single person controls what the broader group hears about the smaller one — or what the smaller group hears about the broader one.
This is what keeps the caucus from becoming a top-down operation with one layer of leadership and a passive base underneath.
This is how we decide things together in a circle. The short version:
A proposal moves forward when no one has a reasoned objection to it.
Some things this is not:
An objection is a specific concern that the proposal, as written, would prevent the group from doing its work or would cause real harm to the caucus or its members. The person raising it has to explain the reason, so the rest of the group can understand it even if they disagree.
Objections are good. They're how the group catches problems early and improves a proposal before it goes into effect. When someone raises one, the next step is usually to revise the proposal so the concern is addressed — not to argue the objector down.
This is the test we use. A proposal doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be workable, and reversible if it turns out not to work. We can always revisit it.
When a circle needs to fill a role — facilitator, notetaker, delegate, leader, project lead, whatever — we don't appoint and we don't run a secret-ballot election the way a typical election works. We use an open process:
This is slower than a hand-vote on its first use, and faster on every use after. It also produces stronger buy-in, because the choice is made out loud, with reasoning attached, instead of in secret.
A lot of unions (including ours) end up with a small group of people doing most of the work and making most of the decisions, with everyone else either rubber-stamping or tuning out. We are actively working to prevent top-down power and don't want to let it sneak in.
This model is designed to push against that, structurally:
None of this is automatic. The structure helps, but it only works if we actually use it — raise objections when we have them, push decisions down to the right level, take our turns in roles, and keep the two-way links honest.