Worcester Speaks #2: Jake Dziejma
“You're doing a transactional job, but maybe you actually owe things to your coworkers.”
Worcester Speaks is an exciting new edition to Worcester Sucks’ small army of local columns. Appearing monthly, it’s an interview column with Worcester folks we think are cool and think you should know about! It’s the brainchild of Liz Goodfellow, this outlet’s copy editor extraordinaire. Read the first one featuring Jenn Gaskin if you haven’t yet.
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The subject of this second-ever Worcester Speaks is Jake Dziejma, naturalist program coordinator at the Ecotarium, where he’s a driving force behind the 25-member employee union. They voted (very nearly unanimously!) to join AFSCME Council 93 in July 2021.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. If you have ideas about who should appear in this space next, let us know at billshaner@substack.com.
Liz: Could you please introduce yourself to the readers?
Jake Dziejma: My name is Jake. I have lived in or around Worcester my whole life. I love to point out where I was born to all the young people that I work with and they are bored by that. But I like to hike across Worcester. I find urban hiking very fun. And for work, I am a science educator at a museum and I also organize a union there. Not alone, of course, but together we organize the union.
So I'm curious if you can lay the groundwork for what Ecotarium employees were going through, starting in like 2020 or so—just broad strokes.
Nonprofits are really interesting 'cause I think nonprofits everywhere [are] where like people really, really care about their work. And in nonprofits, people often are taken advantage of in a not-on-purpose way, but in a structural way where people are paid not enough money to do work that is very important, but also very exhausting.
So we had layoffs at the end of 2018. And in 2019 things had not really been organized or picked up in a way that made a museum work well or made a good working environment. And over time there was talk about things needing to be better and then COVID hit and all the issues that were there only sort of amplified.
I don't even know where we really started organizing on purpose. I remember we talked to a lot of different union reps or organizers with unions and there was a lot of talk about choosing different unions. And then I feel like momentum just carried us and then that's sort of how we got into the concrete organizing.
I would love to hear more about the ways that the mission—getting to do something good in the world—is somehow used as a substitute for adequate compensation.
The way that I sort of put it sometimes is like, almost like a weird structural gaslighting sort of situation where you tell people what your job is and they say, “Oh, that must be the best.” “Oh, I would love to do that job.” “Oh, that is so cool.” And it makes you feel like a loser or a stick in the mud or what have you for wanting to have more time off or wanting to be paid enough money to really live your life or live in the city in which you work. I think that having a job that is fun and worthwhile can pay for itself a little bit. Like I don't have to drink myself to death 'cause I'm working some sort of service job where you're treated poorly all day long, but at the same time, we are very skilled workers who deserve compensation.
That's grim.
Like, our job is so fun. On Saturday I had to go hide plastic animals 'cause I knew that I would go find 'em later on with teenagers and they would think that they were too old and they actually had a lot of fun. So it's not all grim, but I think that is sort of the undercurrent. It happens in museums, it happens in zoos, it happens in all those jobs where people are like, “That's so fun. I bet I could do that.”
Could they though? It’s also like, it's very hard to find a job—if you have a certain set of politics—that doesn't feel like you're doing harm in the world. And I want to be clear that worrying about that is a sign of a certain amount of economic privilege. Like people who drive the Amazon delivery trucks—I am not like, “How can you work for Amazon?” But for those of us who are in a position to choose a career or choose a job, sometimes you feel really lucky for getting to do something that's not evil.
Yes. It's so funny you say that because a lot of people in my life are often telling me that I should find another job. And a few weeks ago my therapist was like, “Would you consider working for Amazon?” And I was like, “What have you…? We've been talking for years!” But like, I don't know, maybe the grass is greener at a job that I don't care as much about—
Oh my god, I have this thought all the time.
And I also think organizing a union, especially at a place where they actually are really rich and treat you badly would be a lot easier. [At the Ecotarium] now we have this union and people who are elected by the people who work there to be trustworthy and speak truth to power and stick up for them. And then it sort of turned around like, “Well, we don't have enough money to do that. We don't have X, Y, Z to do that.” And it's like, how much of this is true? I'm definitely not trying to slander the institution I work for, but at the same time it's like, well, how can we make it so you can afford to pay your workers enough to live in the city where they work? Because at this point a bunch of my coworkers have to commute from elsewhere and they can't find an apartment to rent in the city.
I have some questions about the interpersonal side of organizing the union. I think we are all really conditioned to want to please authority figures. And in order to organize a union, you kind of have to get over that, right?
Yeah. That's definitely, definitely true. I think about it a lot—how much speaking truth to power do I get when I know that the CEO sits 25 feet from me at all times? Whereas I think that if I worked at—and this is me postulating—if I worked at Trader Joe's or Starbucks it probably would feel a lot different if I don't see the CEO and who cares if they like me. Whereas it feels like here it still matters a little bit if they like me.
When I was reading about the Ecotarium and the unionization drive, I saw a WBJ headline from 2021 and it reads, “Ecotarium employees vote to unionize, despite museum opposition.” And this cracked me up because it's like, who is “the museum?”
Yes! We are. The trustees are not the museum. If we are not the museum, no one is. And maybe it's the animals. I don't know. Maybe they are 'cause they live there more than we do, but I guess out of things that are a museum, the animals first, then the workers.
I'm wondering about when you and your coworkers were brought to the point of wanting to form a union because you were feeling overwhelmed or under-compensated or both. How do you then do more work to invest in getting over this hurdle to hopefully have a better work environment?
That's the big question. There's this new thing where people are fighting back against pouring their entire heart and soul into work, which I think is a good move because work is not going to love you back. People need to be spending time with their family and their friends and their hobbies and their things that are not work. But I think that it can swing really hard the other way where people are like, “I don't owe my boss anything.” Which is true, you and your boss are not friends. That is a power dynamic. You don't necessarily owe your workplace anything. You already show up. You're doing a transactional job, but maybe you actually owe things to your coworkers. And maybe you need to either stick your neck out for them or hold hands in such a way that no one has to stick out their neck alone.
It's really hard to sort of be like, “Yes, I know you were at work all day. Come to a union meeting 'cause I'm sure it will be fun and completely different except we'll still be at work and we'll be talking about work.”
So your thing about sticking your neck out for the sake of your coworker—I find that really moving and I'm curious if that is among certain talking points or certain kinds of rhetoric that you've used.
I've seen this great quote, it was something like “your union is not like a dues-paying service.” It is a thing that you pay into, but it is ultimately you and your coworkers. It's not a dues-paying service and I don't see your dues. All I get is more work [laughs]. It's hard to be like, yeah, I know you pay for this, but also you have to meet me a little bit more like halfway 'cause I can't do everything. Because there are a lot of people who work here.
But one thing that we were talking about today as being an issue [and] feels relevant in a nonprofit: I think there are very, very few people who have the same job description as anyone else. So all the educators have a unique job description and position title. Everyone in admin, everyone in grounds. People having different job descriptions from each other I think really sort of pieces people apart in a way that would be different at a grocery store or a factory or whatever. And it makes it hard, I think, to organize in a nonprofit. 'cause everyone's job is just a little bit different. And they also know that if they step away from their responsibilities, there's not a lot of nets to hold them up.
So like, I'm the one who runs my program. My coworker's the only one who is in charge of her program. So if that stuff doesn't get done, it just doesn't happen at all. And you just can see the hundreds of kids who want to do a Night Journey, like an overnight program, or like, my teenagers who have this experience that they're hoping is a particular way. And if I don't do it, then I may have closed a window for them in that time of their life.
It's a lot of responsibility.
It is. So I think that makes people less likely to either stick their neck out or give themselves more work 'cause they are already stretched so thin. You were asking me about interpersonal things though.
I was asking about what kind of rhetoric you've used to get people to buy in who maybe had some hesitation.
Yeah. It's mostly that sort of like, we can't really do too much to fix things, but they have to listen to us if we're all together. I listen to a lot of Pete Seeger, so I just mostly sound like an old person when I’m like, “Hello, fellow youth!” I look young, however the stress of this is crushing me and I only talk in old man things. Very sorry.
That’s great. And it seems effective.
I mean, enough for us to get a union. We were almost unanimously yes, except for one person. Which is so good. But since then we've had so, so, so much turnover that the original people who voted for it don't even work there anymore. People when they start, they still do seem willing, I think. I've seen the stat elsewhere that like Americans’ perspective on unions is very positive right now, but membership is still so low. So people are interested in joining, but we're still sort of lacking the community I think that good, healthy, productive unions have.
So maybe that's making people meet in person or, I don't quite know because I feel like we're already stretched pretty thin in terms of just keeping the paperwork, which is the worst part of any task. And just making sure we're not violating tax law. But I would love for there to be more of a structure and we're working very slowly on that. But I think four out of the four of us [on the executive board] have never been in a union before so it's a lot of building the bicycle while we're riding it.
So when you four, and perhaps more people, were talking with union reps, what were those conversations like and what were you trying to learn?
Oh, good question. I remember at this point, it was a long time ago, but I remember it was like 2020, 2021. So we were not meeting inside. We went to the Tivnan ball field and stood in the parking lot for a long time until it got dark and cold. Because at that point you can't bring an organizer to your workplace. I think? I forget. We were trying to get a sense of which union to pick and I don't know, I think we made an okay choice in some ways and in other ways AFSCME is very much the state employees’ sort of thing. So like, we don't have the state benefits. So in some ways I think we have sort of missed out on certain structures or certain skills that I think other private unions might have. But the individuals, why them? The individuals we worked on have been great.
There's a union that has a lot of museums, it's like museum professionals or something. And I didn't get a great sense of what they were like. And my grandfather was a Teamster and he is still like a Teamster retiree. So I was like, yeah, Teamsters! But I think that they would've knocked everybody's socks off. Like I think that maybe they were too aggressive. Or we could have been sitting pretty right now, who knows?
But as we were learning with the [Worcester Commenter’s Union] book club, Worcester does not have a strong union presence in a lot of ways, or a strong history. I guess that's terrible to say 'cause we know the St. Vincent’s nurses have won big and have been very strong. So I guess if I say that, maybe it snowballs the argument that Worcester's not a strong union town, which it can be. Maybe we just have to say it more and show it to each other more. I don't know.
Well, it was interesting in the first meeting of the book club, that assumption was supported by the text. And then someone spoke up and was like, “I'm a union carpenter, and we're doing great.” It’s like, oh, maybe we just have a very defeatist Worcester narrative?
Yeah. One of my coworkers was a union carpenter and now he works here and I think emotionally the job is a bit better, but he's like, “in our union it was super strong.” And I was like, yeah, I bet people showed up at meetings. Yeah, I bet people were banding together in a way that allowed them to be strong. But we can't put the cart before the horse here.
Do people have maybe outsized expectations? Like a flip is switched: “Okay, we unionized, everything's gonna change.”
It’s hard to sell people more work. Because you're like, yeah, vote yes. Like yeah, vote union. There's protection, there's safety, blah blah blah. And then we can have a lot more meetings and we can do a lot more work and maybe things will get a little bit better very slowly over time. But someday it'll be really cool. Which I think for some people who work in a museum, who see how long history is, that can be okay.
Can you tell me some of the things that you're hoping the union will improve for you all?
In a perfect world we have a lot more strength in community and when we say things are a problem, we are listened to.
We recently had a meeting where I was trying to inspire some sort of workplace action to get people to band together. I had just finished steward training and I read a lot of Labor Notes and I was like, okay, we're gonna try to find a workplace action. We need to find an issue that is deeply felt and universal and not contentious. So I was like, I know what we'll do. We will use sticky notes. We made a board and it was like, what is the biggest problem for your job for yourself? Something that's a major issue for your department. And then things that you see overall at the institution. And I was like, this is genius. We will write these down and then we'll know exactly what we need to do. But all the issues were like, understaffing. And I was like, ooh, that's a little bit harder to plan a workplace action around. It's just we don't have enough people here. Is there this somewhat misplaced expectation that we can just like, fix that overnight? Because that's not something that we can fix overnight.
What other things do I hope will be better? I want people to feel more comfortable saying no to things that their manager asks them to do. We have been working a lot on boundaries and setting specific actionable boundaries because in nonprofit worlds it feels like you just have to give and give and give and like, how do we help people set boundaries? Like, how do you set this boundary of like, I can work one evening per week, or if I do this and this, then I need to get this day off, or something like that. [That] is sort of a gender thing where like women feel like they have to give and give and give. And nonprofits are made up of a lot of women.
Caring work.
Caring work, absolutely.
Which is not maybe how you would describe your job, but I think inspiring young people falls under that umbrella.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
I’m hearing about work that you're doing with your coworkers and it sounds a little bit like therapy. Does that ring true for you?
Yes, yes it does. I think a lot of the people who I work with do go to therapy and I think that it has unleashed this muscle within them where they will talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. And I'm like, I don't wanna silence you. This feels like a bad gender experience to be like, please stop talking about your feelings. We're working on coaching people: When you're meeting with your manager or your manager's manager about workplace problems, do not talk about your feelings. Talk about them as objective. Sometimes the issue is that your feelings are hurt and your feelings shouldn't be hurt at work, but how do we use brief facts and brief experiences to build a case for something? It feels bad to be like, “yeah, don't talk about your feelings,” but sometimes that's it.
As someone who sends their kids to camp at the Ecotarium, I am struck hearing everything you're saying about staffing. And I'm like, wow, if more people worked there, it would be better for the whole community. And that strikes me as a very practical argument, not a feelings-based argument.
Absolutely. There are so many things that staff want to do that would objectively just make the museum experience better for everyone. None of the things that we are asking for are things that would make anyone's museum experience worse in any way. Like, we want coworkers that speak Spanish because none of us speak Spanish well enough to interact with the visitors. We want better captions in the planetarium.
Also, we want enough pay that we can not be stressed, because I have coworkers who have other jobs so that they can afford their apartment. But one full-time job should be enough.
Know someone we should interview for Worcester Speaks?, let us know at billshaner@substack.com.