Can labor organizers transform a moment into a movement?

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Can labor organizers transform a moment into a movement?

An organizing conversation often features an “ask,” a question encouraging a fellow worker to commit to some form of collective action.

In his address that helped kick off a conference held June 27-29 at Wayne State University in Detroit, educator Sean O’Brien, not to be confused with the Teamsters’ leader of the same name, told those gathered that the “ask” was to “Unite and win,” a call that echoed the title of the conference and simultaneously invoked the collective power workers can only wield if they act in solidarity with each other. In this article, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Nonprofit Quarterly look at how labor organizers help potential movements gain momentum.

Some 300 people gathered that weekend for the first-ever conference held by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a project started by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 2020 to connect workers with experienced organizers.

Mark Meinster, the UE director of organizing who spoke during a plenary session, referenced the uptick in union organizing—which many present in the auditorium had played a role in. Recent years have seen union election wins at a 4,000-person Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee; an 8,000-person Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York; an Amazon-owned Whole Foods in Philadelphia; and in stores involving over 10,000 people at 500-plus Starbucks locations.

Still, overall, union membership numbers remain flat. “What would it have taken to turn that moment into real growth for the labor movement?” Meinster asked, rhetorically.

Meinster mentioned EWOC can operate as a “laboratory” and an “experimental space” wherein working people can come together to figure out how to make the most of the next moment.

“It’s our responsibility,” he told those at the conference, which also seemed to serve as a movement-making lab.

Stories from the Field

Those in attendance, including a number who spoke to NPQ and EHRP, highlighted various ways they’re taking up the challenge.

O’Brien is the faculty advisor for Callie Moffett and Charlie Rougny, two students who volunteered at the conference via EWOC’s cohost, Labor@Wayne. But they were also conference participants.

Rougny said she and Moffett attended the volunteer orientation session on how to get plugged into EWOC because they both “felt impassioned enough after two days to…just press ‘send’ and do it.”

Moffett emphasized that for her the conference offered a way to get out of the classroom and interact with experienced organizers.

“You can’t be in the labor movement and just be totally heads down in a book if you want to get into the more organizing and active role,” she said.

Robert Switzer, a butcher who edits The Detroit Socialist, shared how he came to assume a more active role in his union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 876. Switzer said that a little more than a year and a half ago he signed up to become a union steward. After indicating interest, months went by, and he heard nothing about the vacant steward position. He joined Detroit DSA last December, got involved in their labor group, and took initiative.

“I started talking to my coworkers,” Switzer said. “I wrote a petition and circulated it to get them to name me a steward.” His efforts bore fruit, and he assumed the steward role. “I have a feeling that if I hadn’t done that, that we still wouldn’t have a steward, and that our morale would be worse at our workplace. It’d be less organized.”

As part of his “journey to stewardship,” he networked with workers from the UFCW reform caucus, Essential Workers for Democracy. At the conference, he sought to make similar connections while learning about how to build a local EWOC chapter.

Switzer found the workshops at the conference enlightening. “One thing that I realized,” he said after one session, “is that I put too much burden on myself with the basic things that I think a steward should be doing.”

At work, Switzer is mostly in the meat department, he said. He doesn’t interact a lot with those in produce, in the deli, or with cashiers. He knows and trusts at least one person in each department, however. Switzer realized at the conference that he could deputize coworkers as “sub-stewards,” teach them about Weingarten rights (namely, the right to have a union representative with you during disciplinary meetings), and share materials. Then these sub-stewards could organize their own departments.

Organizing in Music City

Brenda Waybrant, a Nashville, Tennessee-based bartender and a trainer with EWOC since 2022, facilitated one breakout session.

“My goal when I facilitate is to help everybody else recognize that they bring skills to it,” she said. “So, it’s not just about me leading a conversation. It’s about how do I get other people connected to share their insights so that everybody can learn from that.”

Waybrant’s organizing journey started during the peak of the pandemic when she asked her restaurant manager if employees would be paid if the place shut down, only to be laughed at. With bills to pay, she left that job. While “doomscrolling on Facebook,” Waybrant found others keen to form a restaurant workers’ union local. They began meeting regularly on Zoom and established Restaurant Opportunity Center Music City to educate and inform employees in the industry about their rights.

Having helped Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 205 organize library workers in Nashville, she came to understand that “cultivating a leaderful organization” where people can step back and have “somebody else…step up and take that place” is key to successful organizing and building worker power for the long haul.

What she said cuts against the grain of conventional business hierarchies that concentrate decision-making among a select few. A “leaderful” organization can serve as an antidote to what Waybrant called the “learned helplessness” produced by similarly patterned top-down, service-oriented union activism.

The “leaderful” approach that Waybrant advocates is not a new idea, however. As the late Staughton Lynd documented, when unemployed laborers marched in 1932 from the Motor City to Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, officers blocked the road and one asked, “Who are your leaders?” Before authorities opened fire and killed four people, the auto workers responded: “We are all leaders!”

Organizing in the South

While many participants came from the Midwest or the East or West Coast, the South had considerable representation, Waybrant included. The South has historically had depressed unionization rates. But that is changing—and evidence of that change was visible at the EWOC conference.

Another Southerner attending the conference was Amanda Cavazos Weems, who cut her organizing teeth as a lifeguard at Barton Springs Pool in Austin, Texas, where she and coworkers joined an AFSCME (American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees) local and soon after secured a 30% pay raise.

“It’s one thing to read about something,” Weems said, riffing on themes from a workshop geared toward the “learn it, do it, teach it” organizing philosophy. “It’s one thing to hear a lecture. It’s another thing to practice it. It’s another thing entirely to teach someone how to do the thing that you have just learned and done yourself. And it really does deepen folks’ knowledge of organizing and how it works.”

Another worker from the South, Alex Campbell, said that he had been part of a number of campaigns through North Carolina Triangle DSA. His DSA chapter assisted a campaign waged by Amazon workers at the RUD1 facility in Garner, North Carolina. The RUD1 workers lost a bid to unionize earlier this year yet continue to organize. Campbell said someone on the Amazon workers’ community committee expressed interest in getting greater support from EWOC.

“When I learned there was an upcoming EWOC conference, I jumped at the opportunity to see what was going on here, [to] learn more about EWOC, [and] see what I could learn to help support the Amazon workers,” Campbell shared. He said he got a lot out of a social unionism session, which focused on connecting workplace organizing with broader community issues and integrating those issues into union campaigns. “It was incredibly, incredibly inspiring.”

A Wobbly from Out West

Another organizer at the conference was Benno Giammarinaro, who is a member of the Urban Ore Workers union, affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World IU 670. He and his coworkers recently ended a 40-day strike at the salvaging and reuse store they organized in Berkeley, California.

They felt a “real affinity” after meeting with IWW organizers who respected their preference for autonomous decision making and direct action, Giammarinaro said. When the Urban Ore workers launched their underground campaign, they connected with (and became) Wobblies, as IWW members are known, embracing “solidarity unionism,” but they also met with folks from the East Bay EWOC chapter, which DSA members had recently formed. The chapter put them in touch with EWOC organizers at the national level.

“I took all of the foundational training series that they ran [and] met a lot of other workers across many workplaces, which was also just very inspiring and motivational, thinking about how connected our struggles are across various industries,” Giammarinaro said.

Preparing for ICE Raids

Even as unions make gains, workers also face new threats. One session, co-led by Sarah Coffey, an organizer with the Wayne Academic Union, specifically addressed the threat of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) workplace raids, which have escalated under President Donald Trump.

In addition to creating sample raid preparedness plans, session attendees received a handout about what employees and the boss can do about an ICE raid before it happens, as it goes down, and after agents leave. During a raid, workers have the right to remain silent. If safe, it can be useful to record video or take notes, which might later serve as evidence.

Coffey offered organizers contemplating acts of civil disobedience additional advice regarding how to best refer to that kind of collective action.

“It’s not that you’re breaking the law,” she explained. “It’s that you’re willing to risk arrest to stand up for your beliefs.”

Building Step by Step

Sometimes, threats compel solidarity. Bethany Beekly, a lecturer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said she thought the “general xenophobia and hostility toward our international scholars and workers” has the potential to unite people on her campus—even faculty who, she lamented, are often not easily engaged.

Beekly chaired the Graduate Employees’ Organization climate caucus when she was a graduate student worker and later helped organize postdoc workers at Michigan. She said a lot of her organizing work has involved translating issues into concrete tasks and conversations. Beekly has attempted to forge bonds of solidarity with the broader community and bring together different units on her campus too, she said.

“I am really excited about the momentum that I see behind this desire to protect each other,” Beekly said. “I think it’s really encouraging and makes me feel hopeful about our potential to engage in collective action on a large scale to protect our coworkers and our students, our colleagues, and our friends.”

She found the mix of practical training and opportunities at the Detroit conference designed “to stretch our imagination” valuable. “We do have to practice picturing what a better world looks like,” Beekly concluded.

This story was produced by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and Nonprofit Quarterly and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.