Preston Carter, Business Agent of FGSW-CWA 1104

1 May 2026

The crisis that gave rise to the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) did not end with COVID. In fact, it didn’t start and was never confined to the pandemic. As Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin, a new co-chair of EWOC NYC Local, puts it, “"COVID was an epic emergency that brought the day-to-day emergencies of work to the surface.” What EWOC names as emergency is, in fact, the ordinary condition of contemporary work: declining real wages, rising precarity, administrative expansion, and a deepening imbalance of power between workers and institutions. The emergency of EWOC turns out not to be COVID but economic crisis and war on workers. 

Nowhere is the emergency clearer than in higher education. The university has long relied on a fiction: that it is a workplace unlike any other. Graduate workers are framed as apprentices or interns, adjuncts as contingent professionals, and undergraduates as majorly students, even when they are performing essential labor that sustains the university. These distinctions do not simply describe reality or aid resolution; they actively obscure it and offer objections. They isolate workers, fragment grievances, and delay the development of collective power. 

But that fiction is breaking down. For graduate workers, adjuncts, and student workers, this is not an abstract diagnosis. It is the everyday reality of funding insecurity, overwork, and bureaucratic obfuscation. The question, then, is not whether there is a crisis. It is how we organize within it.

Scalable Organizing: Hostile Environment, High Demand

One of the central contradictions of the present moment is that support for unions is high, while organizing remains limited. As labor researcher and organizer Eric Dirnbach observes, the labor movement is not failing because workers are uninterested, but because “unions are doing too little organizing” relative to the scale of demand. “We need to organize well over one million new workers every year to start increasing union density again...” According to Dirnbach’s latest “State of the U.S. Unions 2026” report, this would require organizing 10x or more of the workers we currently organize each year.

The traditional model, with staff-driven campaigns, slow legal processes, and workplace-by-workplace targeting, cannot, by itself, reach the millions of workers who support collective action. In higher education, where employment categories are fragmented and constantly shifting, these limitations are even more pronounced.

EWOC intervenes directly into this gap. It offers something simple but rare: a way for workers to begin organizing immediately. Workers reach out, connect with an organizer, and begin by talking with coworkers, identifying shared issues, and building toward collective action. This is not a substitute for unions, but a recognition that organizing must begin long before formal recognition is achieved.

An Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) flyer emphasizes that workplace struggles are shared and that any worker, anywhere, can begin organizing toward collective power.

What EWOC Is, What It Does

EWOC emerged during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when workers across industries faced unsafe conditions and had few immediate pathways to organize. It was built as rapid-response infrastructure: workers could reach out, connect with trained volunteer organizers, and begin learning to organize collectively. But what began as an emergency response has become something more enduring.

EWOC is not a union. It does not bargain contracts or represent workers in a formal legal sense. Instead, it functions as a bridge. It helps workers move from isolation to collective action. Through one-on-one organizing conversations, structured training, and campaign support, it helps workers develop the skills needed to build majority-based workplace organizations.

For higher education workers, this fills a critical gap. Graduate workers, especially, often fall into ambiguous categories—students, employees, researchers—while undergraduates frequently perform essential labor without recognition as workers at all. Even where unions exist, not every worker is organized, and not every issue is immediately taken up through formal grievance procedures. EWOC offers a way to begin organizing in these spaces without waiting for formal recognition.

From Individualized Problems to Collective Power

Universities are highly effective at individualizing conflict. A funding issue becomes a bureaucratic error. A workload concern becomes a personal complaint. A pattern of exploitation becomes difficult to name at all.

Organizing begins when that isolation is overcome.

EWOC’s model centers not simply on sharing grievances, but on structured organizing conversations which identify patterns, map relationships, and assess where collective action is possible. As Dirnbach outlines, this process involves building an organizing committee, developing majority support, and escalating through coordinated actions.

What matters is not the steps, but the shift they produce. Workers begin to see that individual grievances are shared and that shared conditions can be acted on. The turning point is when someone realizes they’re not the only one, and thus don’t have to act alone.

A Tool for the Whole Labor Movement? Rank-and-File Struggle Unionism Put into Practice

Although EWOC has become increasingly visible among higher education workers, its significance extends beyond any one sector. The same dynamics shaping universities (e.g., precarity, fragmentation, and managerial expansion) are present across education more broadly, from K–12 schools to private institutions and educational nonprofits. Workers across these sectors face similar challenges: how to organize without immediate access to formal union structures, how to build power across fragmented workplaces, and how to act collectively under conditions designed to isolate them. EWOC offers one answer to these challenges. While not a finished model, it is a set of tools and practices that workers can adapt to their own conditions.

This approach aligns closely with what Joe Burns calls “class struggle unionism”: a model rooted not in legal recognition alone but in the capacity of workers to act collectively and disrupt the normal functioning of the workplace (Burns, Class Struggle Unionism). EWOC contributes to this by lowering the barrier to entry. It treats organizing not as a specialized activity reserved for formal campaigns, but as a skill that can be learned and practiced by workers themselves.

This is particularly significant in higher education, where many workers fall outside existing bargaining units or lack access to union infrastructure altogether. Graduate workers, undergraduate workers, postdoctoral workers, and contingent faculty often experience the same conditions, but remain structurally separated. Organizing that does not limit itself to strict and employer-constructed employment classifications, and units can help break down the barriers holding back real transformation.

You Don’t Have to Wait

One of the most persistent obstacles to organizing is the belief that conditions must first be optimal. Workers are encouraged (implicitly or explicitly) to wait for recognition, for institutional support, or for someone else to initiate a campaign. But waiting is not neutral. Workers know what they want. Waiting allows conditions to worsen and isolation to deepen.

EWOC operates from the premise that workers can begin organizing now, even under imperfect conditions, and that through organizing those conditions can be transformed.

This does not mean every campaign will succeed. As Dirnbach notes, many efforts stall before reaching majority action, and building an organizing committee remains a central challenge. Perfectionism, over-professionalization, and non-profitization can themselves become forms of demobilization.

What This Means for Higher Education Workers

For graduate workers reading this, the implications are concrete. If you and your coworkers are dealing with funding gaps, workload issues, inconsistent policies, or administrative overreach, you do not need to resolve those issues individually. You do not need to wait for a formal campaign to begin. And you do not need to have everything figured out before taking the first step. You need to start talking to each other in a structured way. You need to identify what is shared. And when you are ready, you need support in turning those conversations into collective action. That is what EWOC is designed to provide.

Just as importantly, it is something you can point others toward. If a coworker raises a concern, if someone says “something isn’t right.” If someone asks why we don’t have a union at this workplace, there is an answer that goes beyond sympathy or advice. There is a place they can go to begin organizing.

Conclusion

The crisis in higher education is not a blip, and it is not confined to any single campus. It reflects broader transformations in how work is structured, managed, and controlled. The emergency that gave rise to EWOC is ongoing. It is the same emergency that defines the conditions of graduate work today.

The question is whether that emergency will continue to be experienced individually or confronted collectively. In a world where choice is increasingly reduced to consumer choice, EWOC puts collective action back in workers' hands.

Preston Carter is an ABD Ph.D. Candidate at Fordham University, Business Agent of Fordham Graduate Student Workers-CWA 1104, and volunteer organizer and researcher with EWOC. His scholarship focuses on labor, colonialism, and collective resistance, drawing on the philosophy of Édouard Glissant and movements such as the syndicalist organization Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (Alliance against Colonial Profiteering).

Selected References / Further Reading

Burns, Joe. Class Struggle Unionism. Haymarket, 2022.

Berry, Joe. Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005.

Burns, Joe. Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America. Verso, 2011.

Bradbury, Alexandria, Mark Brenner, and Jane Slaughter. Secrets of a Successful Organizer. Labor Notes, n.d.

Brown, Tessa, ed. Graduate Students at Work: Exploited Scholars of Neoliberal Higher Ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2023.

Dirnbach, Eric. “How Socialists and Trade Unionists Built a New Labor Organizing Model During the Pandemic.” Jacobin.

Hoerr, John. We Can’t Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard. First Edition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997.

Kezar, Adrianna, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott. The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University. Illustrated edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

McAlevey, Jane F. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Reprint edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

McAlevey, Jane F., and Abby Lawlor. Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations. New York (N.Y.): Oxford University Press, 2023.

Parker, Mike, and Martha Gruelle. Democracy Is Power. Labor Notes, n.d.

Rhoades, Gary, Elizabeth Hohl, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Joe Berry, and Helena Worthen. Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History. Edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene. First Edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2024.

Rosenfeld, David. Offensive Bargaining: Negotiating Aggressively in Contract Campains. Union Communication Services, Incorporated, 2013.

Tolley, Kim, ed. Professors in the Gig Economy: Unionizing Adjunct Faculty in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.