https://jacobinmag.com/2020/6/united-electrical-workers-workplace-organizing-dsa
Something Is Stirring in the Labor Movement
A coronavirus-era partnership between the United Electrical Workers and Democratic Socialists of America has given birth to what may be the most innovative labor organizing campaign since the '30s: the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee.
If you have to work during this pandemic, it’s best if you have a union. Research from the Columbia University Labor Lab found that essential workers who belong to unions were more likely to receive testing for COVID-19, be provided protective personal equipment on the job, practice good social distancing at work, and be guaranteed paid sick leave in the event that they contracted the virus despite all precautions.
Unfortunately, the US unionization rate is at a historic nadir. And with lives on the line and time of the essence, workers facing danger on the job can’t simply snap their fingers and get unionized to protect themselves, their families, and the broader public from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, non-unionized essential workers need to improvise.
Enter the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, founded to provide logistical support to workers who want to organize for better pandemic-related working conditions, but don’t have a union to rely on. EWOC was started and is run by a group of independent members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and organizers for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE).
Colette Perold, EWOC’s National Coordinator and a member of DSA, says many of the initial EWOC organizers had gotten to know each other on Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. That’s also where many of them became familiar with the “distributed organizing” model that they’re using to help workers across the country mount pressure campaigns and win demands on the fly.
“The people volunteering to do EWOC include a lot of former Bernie staffers and volunteers and a lot of members of DSA,” two groups with significant overlap, says Perold. “Many of these people have no labor organizing experience, but we’ve created a structure to train them and equip them with the organizing tools to help run a project like this at scale.”
When people sign up to volunteer for EWOC, they’re asked to give information about their organizing background “so we can place you where you’ll be of the most use and gain the most out of EWOC,” says Perold. “For those without organizing experience, you’re doing initial intake calls with workers, meaning you’re getting an initial assessment of the situation. But we don’t want to put any workers at risk by having someone without experience work on their campaign. So if you’re inexperienced, you’re not escalating anything with them.”
Not at first, anyway. EWOC also has a comprehensive training program, an organizing curriculum complete with assignments and assessments. Then there’s a shadowing and mentorship program to prepare trained volunteers for organizing in the field. For socialists and other committed pro-worker activists who want to learn how to coordinate workplace-based campaigns, EWOC functions as a sort of ad hoc school of labor organizing.