Sponsoring unions are encouraged to utilize OI graduates in ongoing internal and external organizing campaigns.
Participants not sponsored by a union are given career counseling regarding job prospects and additional training and/or education upon graduation.
Successful completion of the field training is highly valued by AFL–CIO unions, and placement rates for field-trained organizers tops 90 percent.
But as the recession of the early 1980s took hold and employers vigorously resisted the AFL–CIO's efforts, the Houston Organizing Project collapsed.
The organizing model was introduced to AFL–CIO member unions in a massive, two-day telephone and video conference call on February 29 to March 1, 1988.
Additionally, many of these veteran staff were experienced only in older methods of union organizing, and did not have the skills or inclination to effectively combat new anti-union strategies and tactics utilized by employers.
OI staff believed that these young activists would bring a new level of commitment and energy to the labor movement.
[2] Despite being one of the few concrete outcomes of the AFL–CIO's 1983 strategic planning process, the Kirkland administration did not place a major emphasis on the OI.
Its budget remained small relative to the organizing department's, and it was not promoted in significant ways to AFL–CIO member unions.
SEIU president John Sweeney criticized the Kirkland administration for failing to boost union organizing, and pointed to the small budget and lack of focus on the OI as one example.
His successor and presidential candidate, Thomas Donahue, was able to lay a stronger claim on organizing success because of his role as the primary backer of the OI in 1989.
Its budget increased sharply, and a separate fund was established to subsidize strategic organizing campaigns.
The staff-driven organizing model, critics say, fails to empower workers, contributes to weak elected leadership, does not educate members about the nature and role of unions, fails to prepare members for effective collective bargaining, and leads to worker dependence on regional or national staff.
New Organizers are being recruited into an already crowded marketplace, creating what the AFL–CIO has termed, the "race to the bottom" (competition resulting in wage-undercutting).
With unions lacking in real political and financial support of organizing programs, there is no demand for the perpetual supply of entry-level staff.
Without full financial, staff and political support, these new organizers often become disillusioned, suffer burnout, and leave the labor movement.
In the early 1990s, OI leaders began to realize that many AFL–CIO affiliate unions gave only lip-service to aggressive organizing.
The OI subsequently developed a program to "educate" national, regional and local union leaders about the benefits of the organizing model.
But a number of elected union leaders perceived the program as a thinly-veiled attempt to interfere in their internal politics.