Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee

Supporting all workers in any workplace. You deserve a union!

[organizeworkers]

Organize Your Workplace

We're here to help any worker, in any part of the country, in any industry, working for any employer, organize for a better workplace and a union.

Learn more: https://workerorganizing.org/

Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee

Want to learn how to get a raise? Safer working conditions? Fill out our form and a workplace organizer will reach out within 48 hours.

[organizeworkers]

bosses when you ask for a raise: "Sorry, we just can't afford it."

bosses when you fight for a union:

[organizeworkers]

Take it from Philly Whole Foods workers: You can build a union at work too!

Come to "How to Unite & Win at Work in NYC" on May 26.

Not in NYC but ready to build? Join an online training!

[organizeworkers]

📢 Unite & Win at Work: an in-person EWOC training for NYC!

An affordable New York starts with talking with your co-workers to demand what you deserve. This training will help you build the skills and get the resources you need to win.

📍March 21 at 1 p.m. in Brooklyn.

RSVP: https://workerorganizing.org/training/nyc

[organizeworkers]

A quick look at how to make your workplace ICE-proof.

More info, including a shareable PDF, on our website.

[organizeworkers]

What you need to know about the upcoming strike in Minnesota this Friday.

How you can join (even if you're not in a union) 👇

In Minnesota? Not in a union? Ready to pressure your boss to confront ICE if they come to your workplace?

RSVP:

No-Work Workshop

If you're not in a union and want to strike on Friday, join the training session for non-unionized workers to organize co-workers and walk o

You don't need to be in Minnesota to join. Talk with an organizer today about how you and your co-workers can push back against ICE.

Get Support

Learn how you and your co-workers can address problems at work. Fill out our form and we'll connect you with organizers to get you the suppo

[organizeworkers]

Our latest podcast episode with @haymarketbooks and Kim Kelly: “We are the source of our power”

Guests Dawn Tefft and Bob Lawson join Kim to explore the basics of organizing. Learn how you can build power at work.

Subscribe:

Unite and Win: A Guide to Workplace Organizing

Society & Culture Podcast · Unite and Win: A Guide to Workplace Organizing is a 13-part podcast series by the Emergency Workplace Organizing

Listen:

[organizeworkers]

Check out the FIRST episode of our new podcast, “Unite & Win,” with @haymarketbooks.

We cover the intro lesson from our organizer’s handbook, explaining organizing, unions, the NLRA, card check, and more. If you’re new to labor organizing, this is the place to start!

Subscribe:

Unite and Win: A Guide to Workplace Organizing

Society & Culture Podcast · Unite and Win: A Guide to Workplace Organizing is a 13-part podcast series by the Emergency Workplace Organizing

Or listen here:

[organizeworkers]

NEW: EWOC’s first podcast: “Unite & Win.”

Starting Jan. 13, in partnership with @haymarketbooks, this series includes the audiobook of our handbook and eight discussion episodes hosted by labor journalist and author Kim Kelly.

Check out the trailer and subscribe!

Unite and Win: A Guide to Workplace Organizing

Society & Culture Podcast · Unite and Win: A Guide to Workplace Organizing is a 13-part podcast series by the Emergency Workplace Organizing

[organizeworkers]

This is a crucial time to organize. Bosses are funding war, ICE, climate change, and other crises targeting working people. Organizing at work gets them where it hurts: their profits.

Looking for how to start organizing? Subscribe today.

[organizeworkers]

NEW: EWOC’s first podcast: “Unite & Win.”

Starting Jan. 13, in partnership with @haymarketbooks, this series includes the audiobook of our handbook and eight discussion episodes hosted by labor journalist and author Kim Kelly.

Check out the trailer and subscribe!

Unite and Win: A Guide to Workplace Organizing

Society & Culture Podcast · Unite and Win: A Guide to Workplace Organizing is a 13-part podcast series by the Emergency Workplace Organizing

[organizeworkers]

Trans workers belong in unions

By Jamie Gardner

The first time I ever textbanked for my union, I only got three replies. One just read “It’s not [male-coded name], it’s Xochitl.” I panicked a little. We were using a list of workers our employer provided us, and the stupid management records had obviously misgendered one of my co-workers. 

But on the other hand, I’d been on the job at my big liberal employer for six months and hadn’t met any other trans people. I decided to out myself in my reply and sent a long awkward text apologizing and explaining how we’d gotten the wrong name. I added that, if I was reading the situation right, I’d love to meet them. A few months later, Xochitl had become one of our best organizers. They have a natural charisma that makes it easy to take risks together.

Unions need trans workers

From the early history traced in Leslie Feinberg’s “Trans Gender Liberation” to the EWOC-backed campaigns surging right now, trans workers have always been part of organized labor, whether or not we make it into the spotlight. We’re also in the midst of a dangerous backlash to both organized labor and trans rights. Trans workers need solidarity, and unions need the fearlessness of workers who can’t afford to back down or sell out, who have already learned that defying authority can be necessary and liberating.

For example, Starbucks Workers United found itself with a disproportionately trans membership through a few coincidences of modern capitalism: Starbucks is one of the most widely-accessible employers in the U.S. that offers insurance that covers gender transition–related healthcare, and trans workers have long sought out jobs there specifically to cover medical costs. 

Early in the organizing wave, Starbucks threatened that care and implied the union might sell out trans workers at the bargaining table in exchange for other perks. The tactic backfired: The unionizing workers called out the threat and doubled down on their commitment to protecting their trans members, deepening the solidarity between trans and cis workers and embarrassing the company in the process. 

Trans workers in the labor movement

There isn’t much data to back this up, but the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey listed 15% of transgender workers were in unions compared with the national average of just 12 percent at the time. Many of us gravitate towards the so-called strategic sectors, like healthcare and logistics, where demand for skilled labor is high. That means employers often can’t afford to pass over qualified workers out of simple bigotry, and those workers have organizing power. Others get forced into employers of last resort like call centers and Amazon, where organizing is hard but vitally necessary. 

Those of us who aren’t union, like most Americans, have a vague sense that union jobs are better, but too often we don’t think of them as being good for us. The stereotype of the hard-hatted, straight white male unionist catcalling and heckling people like us still looms disproportionately large in American culture. That was always something of a reactionary trope; now those guys are aging out, and half the Teamsters I know are trans women enjoying six-figure salaries.

At the last national Labor Notes conference, a panel on trans workers in the labor movement attracted Teamsters, nurses, Starbucks baristas, grad students, lab techs, Amazon drivers, and a staffer for the New York Times, filling the stage and the audience.

The Times panelist relayed an anecdote about how some of her cis co-workers took over arguing the case for gender-identity protections when she burned out on dealing with hostile management. The show of solidarity helped cement their demand, but what stuck with her was the relief of not being in it alone. Her story struck two different notes with me: Trans workers often find more support than we expect in labor spaces, imperfect though they are. And organizing on the job gives us more than the right to exist in a space; the warmth and shared dignity of solidarity nourish the soul, but there are more tangible benefits to be had. 

Material benefits

Take job discrimination. Even in places where gender identity is legally protected, if your employment is at-will, your boss can pass you over or fire you anyway so long as they’re not dumb enough to admit their real motivation. Most union contracts curtail those fig-leaf excuses by laying out objective criteria for promotion and including “just cause” clauses for discipline and termination. I’d have to actually do something wrong to lose my job, and I’d get to make my case to someone other than my boss before missing a minute of pay. Not to mention it’s in my union siblings’ interests to clamp down on any hint of attempted impunity by the boss, regardless of how much they like me personally. Between that and layoff protections, I now go to bed every night knowing there’s no way I could lose my income with less than two months’ notice and the option to sic 50 angry co-workers on whoever signed the pink slip. 

We can think bigger, too. Workers can demand that those non-discrimination rules go in the contract, whether or not they’re in your state’s laws. Same with health coverage for transition care, the right to add your pronouns to your nametag, to declare bathrooms all-gender Unions have codified each of those workplace protections. And in a political environment where conservatives in both parties use trans people as scapegoats to distract from the failure of their pro-capitalist agenda, unions stand alone in their combination of scale and independence. When Trump tried to pressure my employer into dropping treatment for trans kids in our hospitals, my union rallied, lobbied, and sued to stop him. Management wanted to roll over and cut him a huge check.

Solidarity with trans workers

It reminded me of an experience I’d had eight years before: A trans woman who worked at McDonald’s across the country had been told by her boss she couldn’t use the women’s restroom and would have to pee down the mop sink in the closet if she needed a bathroom break. Fight for 15, now Fight for a Union, called protests in her defense, one of which was scheduled outside a high-traffic McDonald’s in San Francisco’s Mission District during Pride. 

Very few queer people took time out of their party weekend to join the protest, but local Fight for 15 members, mostly middle-aged women speaking in Spanish, gave speech after speech that moved me to tears. None of them had met their co-worker across the country; a few said they’d never met a trans person before that day. But they knew or had personally known the feeling of a leering, smug manager using his position to humiliate them in intensely personal, sometimes sexual ways. They shared their own stories about fighting a boss for their bodily dignity, connecting them to their disgust at the treatment their far-away comrade had endured. They knew whose side they were on, and in turn, I learned there were more people on my side than I’d ever imagined. 

[organizeworkers]

EWOC is gearing up for an ambitious new phase of worker organizing across all five boroughs.

With the election of Zohran Mamdani, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build the labor movement in New York and beyond.

When workers organize in New York — especially at major multi-national companies — it sends shockwaves across the country and raises the standard for what’s possible everywhere. That’s why EWOC is launching a strategic expansion in NYC to meet this moment head-on.

Help us hire a full-time NYC organizer — right now.

This organizer will hit the ground running, teaming up with our dedicated volunteers to launch new campaigns and connect directly with workers ready to join together with their co-workers and fight for democracy in the workplace. Let’s make NYC a model of what a worker-powered city can look like.

Donate to UE Research and Education Fund

Show your support with a contribution.

[organizeworkers]

Academic workers from the AAUP and AFT won a federal suit against Trump's actions against noncitizen students and faculty for pro-Palestine speech.

The case underscores the power of unions to resist authoritarianism and shows workers' rights = civil rights = immigrant rights.

In what the Court called "perhaps the most important [case] to ever fall" within its jurisdiction, it ruled that the 1st Amendment applies to noncitizens and the government intentionally violated their rights to speech by responding to protest with relocations and deportations.

The ruling makes many references to earlier labor and free speech cases, noting that Red Scare expanded the definition of free speech, but targeting speech critical of a foreign nation "is a new invention that in important ways goes beyond its closest analogues in the Red Scare."

This case, like countless ones before it, is an example of how our civil liberties have been won and defended through many decades of struggle in courts, workplaces, and streets. If you support free speech in your workplace and beyond, join a union.

[organizeworkers]

AMA: Union organizers to help you ACTUALLY start organizing your workplace! 🙌

Bring your questions to Zack Frink and Lindsay Sanders this Friday at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET to get all the insight you need to know into how to make tangible change at your job.

TikTok: @genzforchange

[organizeworkers]

Can your boss REALLY fire you for innocuous posts they disagree with?

That depends on whether you have "just cause" or "due cause" protections — a key provision of union contracts.

"At will" employment is the default in the U.S.* That means that unless you have a contract stating otherwise, your boss can fire you "at will" for whatever they want whenever they want.

*Unless you live in Montana, they just banned at-will! 🫡

There's some exceptions.

Even under at-will rules, it's illegal to fire you out of discrimination, in retaliation for whistleblowing, etc

But there's a huge loophole: Bosses can pretend they're firing you for *literally any other reason* and it's pretty hard to prove otherwise unless they were *very* dumb.

(People tend to mix up at-will and right to work, because they're both euphemisms for weakening your power as a worker. "Right to work" means people can opt out of paying union dues even when the union is obligated to represent them.)

That's why unions demand "just cause" or "due cause" clauses in our contracts: we lay out what you CAN be fired for, plus a process to defend yourself. Anything else doesn't count.

Causes like harassing others, stealing, being incompetent even after training are standard.

Does THE CONTRACT say you can be fired because some weirdo sent your boss a tweet they didn't like and threatened to unleash a harassment campaign against your employer if they don't comply?

No? You're good.

Same if your boss finds your posts making fun of his yacht rock band.

If you've read this far and you're thinking "damn, I gotta get one of those union contracts before anyone finds my @" hit us up at workerorganizing.org/support and an organizer will contact you within 48 hours. 🫡

[organizeworkers]

NEW: Organizing Committees and Conversations

This two-hour session will teach you the basics on how to form an organizing committee and have conversations with your co-workers about building power to improve conditions on the job.

RSVP: September 21, 2025

[organizeworkers]

Workers can change the world by organizing and building structures together to fight for justice at work.

Together, we can win dignity and respect, better salaries and benefits, and protections from abusive bosses.

Our safety and strength come from our collective action.