The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) started about six years ago at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to help nonunion workers fight for safety improvements on the job. It has been successful, with over 8,000 workers reaching out to EWOC for support in developing organizing campaigns.
EWOC has worked with hundreds of these campaigns before handing them off to unions to continue. Those cases typically try for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union election, with the ultimate goal of bargaining a contract; in other cases, workers organize for wins but don’t have the goal of an election and a contract. We have worked to better understand the latter campaigns, which we have come to call “premajority unionism.”
Some workers choose to organize this way because the traditional path is impossible or unrealistic — like public sector workers in states without collective bargaining rights, where winning a union election and contract is not legally possible. Other campaigns are located at huge corporations where winning either a giant election or many smaller elections will take years, if it happens at all. Some workers are classified (or misclassified) as independent contractors and thus can’t legally go through the NLRB election process. And other workers may not find a union willing to take on their campaign, so they continue on their own with a premajority strategy, at least for a while.
But all workers can and should get organized, no matter who their boss is. The premajority strategy, as we define it, involves a group of workers organizing to fight for and win workplace improvements but not necessarily win an election, get official certification, or sign a contract.
This organizing strategy has been given other names over the years, including “minority unionism.” We call it “premajority” because the ultimate goal should always be to obtain majority worker support. The Industrial Workers of the World have deployed a…
Auteur: Eric Dirnbach
