Book Review - Unite and Win: A Workplace Organizer’s Handbook

The graphic images in the book were produced by DSA-LA’s Paul Zappia

Published by Haymarket Books, 2024 • Written by Emergency Workers Organizing Committee

Last month, over 4,500 organizers and troublemakers descended on Chicago for the biennial Labor Notes conference.  On Saturday, as workshops and talks wound down for the day, one ballroom continued to draw throngs of people late into the night.  It was a book launch hosted by EWOC, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, to celebrate the release of Unite and Win; A Workplace Organizer’s Handbook, EWOC’s new guide.  I was attending with a few members of my local EWOC chapter and amid the crush of people and bumping music, one worker made a beeline straight for us.  

We hadn’t met in person before that weekend, but she was part of a cohort of workers from around the country that we had been advising in setting up an organizing committee at their seasonal workplace.  She had been attending EWOC’s new organizing track of workshops at Labor Notes and was so inspired by the day’s discussions that she was ready to buckle down and get to work right there at the party.  A few of us found a quiet(ish) corner of the hotel lobby and pulled out our laptops.  

By the time the house music died down and the crowds dissipated around two a.m., the three of us had talked through how to approach the worksite mapping her coworkers had been doing, and had developed a strategy for getting the organizing committee through a particularly difficult impasse they had been dealing with.  Despite being very new to workplace organizing, this worker approached the project with a level of confidence—both in herself and in her coworkers’ strategic intelligence—that many veteran organizers lack.  The skills and knowledge that guided that late-night strategy session are the core skills that EWOC aims to transmit through their Foundational Training series and which are now available in book form (print and ebook) in Unite and Win.

Indispensable guide

The book itself is divided into four lessons, each mapping on to the four sessions of the EWOC Foundational Training, but it is written in such a way that it works equally well as a stand-alone introduction to new worker organizing in unorganized shops and as a companion to the full training sequence.  It is an indispensable guide for anyone new to organizing, with lessons that walk you through how to form an Organizing Committee, how to approach organizing conversations with your coworkers, how to plan out an escalating campaign to change something about your workplace, and how to inoculate your coworkers against your boss’s inevitable anti-union tactics.  

For more experienced organizers, it serves as concise presentation of foundational organizing concepts that you will find yourself going back to over and over again in your organizing work.  It is peppered with real world examples from shops that EWOC has helped to organize, and like the broader training from which it is drawn, every page is aimed at ensuring that workers are approaching workplace organizing on a solid, member-led and democratic foundation.  

Agency of workers themselves

The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint project of DSA and the United Electrical workers union, places the emphasis on the agency and activity of workers themselves.  Turning back the tide of disorganization that half a century of neoliberalism has wrought on the working class is only going to be possible by workers recognizing that their power doesn’t come from outside—from lawyers, labor law or some distant “union” separate from the workers on the shop floor.  EWOC, and “Unite and Win”, aim at giving workers the confidence, practical tools (like Union-Busting Bingo cards and charts of escalation tactics) and the first steps to take in building structures and relationships in their workplaces that are able to truly challenge the power of the bosses.  

EWOC’s record of successful union drives around the country bears out this approach, and this short fifty-page book will be a machine for producing militant, practical, democratically minded organizers in the mold of the worker who took over the EWOC book launch party itself and turned it into a late night organizing meeting.