What's Next for EWOC?
Does EWOC's Self-Description Match Its Actual Practice?
In June 2025, several members of Communist Caucus attended EWOC’s first ever conference in Detroit, MI. Following the conference, we had a caucus debrief of our experiences there. Several attendees reflected on how our experience as EWOC organizers in an EWOC local seemed to be diverging considerably from the expected roles of EWOC organizers as originally conceptualized. This short piece is an attempt to articulate this contradiction, and propose an alternative vision for how EWOC can work.
From its inception, the goal of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) has been simple: Support workers organizing their workplaces, no matter the industry or the prospects for winning a legally recognized union. This simple goal, along with a distributed organizing model that allows for a large degree of freedom for EWOC organizers to flexibly work with shopfloor organizing committees in a variety of different ways, has allowed EWOC to be a vibrant and refreshing presence in the US labor movement, developing organizers and laying the foundation for new worker organizations that continue to go overlooked by most unions in our country. This is also what has made EWOC such an attractive project to our caucus; with the spirit of experimentation and deep, long term development of new working class organizers, EWOC is fertile soil for spadework. This spirit is particularly alive in the EWOC locals, an initiative that was first envisioned and spearheaded by members of Communist Caucus in the years following the pandemic. In the ‘local’ model, groups of five or more EWOC organizers in the same geographic area collaborate to support each other as we support workers, most often with the help of a connected DSA chapter. Having groups of organizers in the same area working with local workers opens up new opportunities for developing organizers and community that are not possible from a national online database.
However, it is from the perspective of our local work that we are starting to identify a limit in EWOC’s organizing model, specifically when campaigns find an established union willing to work with them. The EWOC organizing model, as understood by volunteers and staff, allows international unions to offload responsibility for establishing an organizing committee (OC) or seeding potential organizing leads. EWOC organizers are meant to provide that early mentorship and support, before “handing off” the OC to the union staff organizers once they reach a threshold where the union believes that the shop can win a union recognition campaign. This is representative of the core animating questions of EWOC since our focus expanded beyond supporting workers directly affected by COVID-19, namely "how do we build the capacity to bring in all the people who want to be in a union, into a union?" and relatedly "how do we do that without relying solely on staff?” As detailed in the EWOC Organizer Handbook, EWOC organizers are to help bridge this gap for workers by first helping them develop a strong OC of 10 percent the potential bargaining unit, then help the OC reach out to a union. We help smooth that transition by helping the OC understand the union’s expectations and ask good questions to assess what joining the union would be like.
Once a union has been identified and agrees to organize with the workers, we are expected to only stay involved if the union staff – not the workers on the OC that the organizer has been working with for months or years - agrees to our involvement. Per the handbook (emphasis in the original):
When connecting the OC to a union, the EWOC Organizer will have a conversation with the union about the work that EWOC did to support the organizing up until this point and provide the history of the OC’s organizing. This conversation should make clear that once the connection has been made, EWOC will not try to influence the direction or outcome of the union organizing drive, unless the union asks EWOC to assist in some way. If EWOC has not been asked to assist, then EWOC volunteers will not attempt to continue to guide the campaign. If workers reach out about a challenge navigating the union relationship once the handover has happened please INVOLVE STAFF before attempting to offer advice.
Despite the linear process laid out in the handbook, our work in the local groups has begun to seriously complicate this understanding of the EWOC organizer role, and has naturally led to a schism between the theory of the handbook and the practice of local organizers and EWOC locals.
As EWOC local organizers, we often find it difficult to simply “hand off” a campaign to a staff organizer. Our organizing often comes into conflict with the well-intentioned but ultimately prescriptive sets of steps that the Organizer’s Handbook indicates contain our support. . Our local discussions have recently centered on the frustrations of feeling like we have collaborated with workers in a solidaristic way, building an infrastructure and solidarity that equips workers with tools to see themselves as protagonists, only to find that the unions with which they affiliate can sometimes act as yet another boss, dictating the terms of their strategy, and even at times decimating the size and scope of the bargaining unit. Even worse, when organizing with less union-dense sectors of the working class, particularly in completely unorganized industries, we struggle to find unions even willing to represent workers – paralyzing not only the organizing in the workplace, but also the horizon of dynamism and protagonism inherent to the best parts of the EWOC project. We have described this tendency as “helping workers to get off slippery ice only to get to the shore and be fed into a woodchipper.”
The Southern California and St. Louis EWOC locals have had several cases that provide some insight into these complicated dynamics. We have examples of cases where we essentially “handed off” an OC, examples of staying intimately involved throughout the campaign, and some in between the two poles. We have also begun experimenting with practices and structures that could help EWOC locals stay involved with campaigns without depending solely on the one EWOC organizer assigned to the case carrying all of the relationships and work. And ultimately, we have tried to rethink EWOC as not merely a third party that supports union organization, but instead as a space where workers across shops can provide peer-to-peer mentorship and develop rank-and-file initiatives in our workplaces.
In Southern California, the Sugared and Bronzed campaign shows what campaigns can look like when EWOC organizers stay involved long-term. Sugared and Bronzed is a national salon chain, an industry that had no previous union presence. Southern California EWOC (SCWOC) has been working with the OC for over two years, and the campaign has gone through the gauntlet. The workers had already been trying to organize when they got connected to EWOC, mostly mapping and charting across multiple shops in Los Angeles. Early on, we saw our job as empowering the workers to be prepared for what was increasingly looking like a high-intensity campaign. Besides the fact that this type of organizing was wholly novel, the bargaining unit was also entirely female, and so we struggled to find unions even interested in taking on the campaign due to both the unknown terrain as well as entrenched sexism in the union movement. Initially, our local’s contact at a large national union – a staffer we felt was a fellow traveler – agreed to take on the campaign, much to the excitement of the workers who saw the union as a vanguard of the rank-and-file movement. Unfortunately, as one month of conversations turned into six, the union seemed to drag their heels on any type of strategy, goals, or deadlines that the workers could follow. We later learned that although this union representative had the salon workers’ best interests at heart, the union’s International cast many aspersions on the organizing, claiming that salon workers were less important than other workers, as well as condescending to the all-women bargaining unit. As the LA fires raged in January 2025, and the workers were more motivated to build their union for safety, they called the question with the union– who unceremoniously dropped them. We felt like we were back at square one.
However, during this rough period, the workers didn’t stop organizing and SCWOC didn’t stop supporting them. While Sugared and Bronzed management can claim that their spray tans are “natural” and “safe,” the chemicals used are only safe on the skin, and not when aerosolized for a worker to breathe in all day, every day. Workers demanded PPE, and documented management’s refusal to provide it while organizing. They also met collectively to look at the employee handbook after changes were announced, and built a campaign around not signing the new handbook changes. Then, as the LA fires engulfed the city in toxic smoke, the girls at the Santa Monica salon were forced to come in to work despite being in the evacuation zone. They collectively decided to escalate publicly during this state of climate emergency, blowing up the company’s spot on social media, and taking advantage of the publicity to reach more workers. They reignited their union discussions and were able to bring a lot of new coworkers into the conversation about how the fires, climate change, and the toxic chemicals in the workplace were interrelated. This campaign led down some creative paths, including connecting with the Labor Network for Sustainability, academics, attorneys, and climate scientists. Obviously, this pre-majority organizing went well and beyond the “standard” EWOC organizer model, insofar as we supported protracted organizing long before the recognition campaign had developed such that a local union would pick up the shop. Yet this was not only necessary, but incredibly powerful– for both the workers and the EWOC organizers.
Finally, in April 2025, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) took the case on, and Sugared and Bronzed won their first election at three shops. Even after CWA took them on, there was still a lot of support needed. In fact, we are still involved in supporting the campaign as they move into the psychologically difficult aspects of bargaining. These rank-and-file, worker-led initiatives continue to require support from our locals. Once again, maintaining the balancing act between empowering the workers and negotiating the larger labor movement has required incredible agility, empathy, and caution from the entire local. The workers may well have given up on the campaign if the EWOC local hadn’t been available for late-night calls, difficult conversations, and frankly, pure moral support as they’ve come up against the more moribund and sexist attitudes in the labor movement. SCWOC was critical to the ultimate success of the campaign, and continues our support as they organize in the face of brutal harassment and retaliation in the lead-up to a first successful contract.
In St. Louis (STLWOC), we have had similarly elucidating experiences on the limits of the “traditional” EWOC organizer role, and one in particular - a mental health direct service non-profit’s campaign to unionize with SEIU - stands out.
The workplace is a mental health non-profit organization of several hundred workers. STLWOC’s connection with the workers actually predates STLWOC’s existence; STLWOC grew out of an EWOC-style project in the STLDSA Labor Committee. We held our first workplace organizing training series in February 2022, and three workers from this organization who became the core of the OC attended.
Early on, we were less confident in our role as EWOC organizers, so when SEIU Healthcare expressed interest in taking on the campaign, we went along with the “handoff”. While we did stay in touch with the OC, we were not nearly as involved as we could have been. To put it bluntly, the “SEIU era” was a two-year constant struggle between the OC and the union staff. The OC had already spent a few months organizing when the union got involved, and were having increasingly vibrant and well-attended OC meetings, identifying issues and charting and mapping, feeling like they were building momentum while also staying under the bosses’ radar. However, tensions arose when the SEIU playbook clashed with what the workers thought were strategic moves, particularly the union staff’s aggressive focus on collecting cards as opposed to following through on addressing issues that had been identified. Those differences in approach were compounded by SEIU’s general reluctance to receive feedback from the workers. Tensions also escalated in the workplace, with the bosses able to mobilize some particularly well-entrenched “5s” (or workers who were firmly anti-union, in our assessments) to exploit class and race divides in the workplace, which was not only toxic for the prospects of the campaign but incredibly demoralizing to the OC. SEIU was unable to offer much support to the organizers about how to navigate this, even when SEIU’s history - “history” meaning the misleading and bad-faith information readily available online to any anti-union coworker or boss - was being weaponized against the OC. Management even filed for an election themselves, clearly in an attempt to force the union’s hand for a loss; when SEIU got the election canceled through legal means without involving the OC, it further hurt the organizing effort in the shop as it gave even more ammunition to the antis, and gave the bosses a huge win that they took full advantage of.
After two years of struggle, SEIU’s involvement ended abruptly with a short email after the company merged with a larger corporation. Because STLWOC had essentially sidelined ourselves at a very early point, we found out about all of this after the fact, in bits and pieces and through the grapevine. Once we realized what was going on, we were not in a position to make much of a difference. Three years later, we were at square -3 with an OC of three, reeling from the two-year campaign, the firing of two longtime core OC members, and facing both a workplace still recovering from a highly contentious campaign and an even bolder boss in the new corporate management that has no hesitation in crushing dissent. The OC has gone dormant, and while we still have a relationship with workers, we can’t help but feel like we dropped the ball.
Through our locals’ work, we are developing a new vision for the role of the EWOC organizer, one that takes the EWOC ethos to its logical conclusion: supporting workers and developing organizers regardless of what organizing phase an OC is in. This alternative method for the EWOC organizer, however, is incredibly labor intensive, and requires a tremendous amount of time and energy from one to two volunteer organizers.A well-organized local can help remedy this problem, with each case becoming more of a team effort than an individual project.
Additionally, a promising experiment that some locals have started is workers’ circles. Workers’ circles as a concept has meant different things to different groups and locals. Past circles have been focused on a specific industry, bringing workers in similar working conditions together to strategize. St. Louis and others have started experimenting with more general circles, where workers across all industries and at all phases of organizing who are connected with the local come together to discuss their organizing, commiserate losses, and celebrate wins. Our first circle last month involved Starbucks baristas from unionized stores; nonprofit workers, some bargaining their first contract and some beginning to organize; recently unionized graduate workers bargaining their first contract; and union machinists preparing for a strike. We used the same popular-education style of facilitation we use in EWOC workshops for this conversation. This initial attempt showed glimmers of the organizing community we think could help sustain EWOC’s support for individual OCs for the long haul. We plan to continue to experiment with this practice in the coming year.
In short, this new model, centering less on case management and recognition campaigns, is predicated on building out the spaces whereby workers can coach other workers and provide ongoing peer-to-peer support in our organizing. This is a model that fortifies the resolve, initiative, and confidence of the rank and file, builds cross-sectoral connections, and allows us to put a real stamp on the labor movement.
Despite the limitations we've encountered, we believe that EWOC's vision and practice can be fruitfully expanded and adapted to the changing needs of the labor movement. In fact, the ongoing experimentation with workers' circles, the ambition of EWOC to support the general strike in Minneapolis, and the daily experiences of volunteers and staff alike to think creatively about how to best scaffold working class self-organization points towards an exciting direction for the organization to develop in the coming years. We think that special attention can be paid to developing local EWOCs and to get involved in EWOC's national Local Support Team, and to continue to reflect on the practice of peer to peer support and mentorship that the workers' circles provide.
At the EWOC conference, Allie Rooney, a worker from Sugared and Bronzed, said, “After we win our election, I will be organizing for the rest of my life. This is what I was meant to do.” This, perhaps better than anything else, sums up the potential we see for EWOC.
