Building a union is always hard work. But in certain workplaces, the task of winning union certification and a contract may not be viable for many years to come. Workers in those jobs may feel they have no options, but in reality there are age-old models of unionism they can pursue.
We call this type of organizing “pre-majority unionism,” and we’re dedicating a whole section of the EWOC website to it.
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Foreword
Emergency Workplace Organising Committee || Trump’s reelection has left workers asking if it’s still possible to organize new unions, or if the labor movement will even continue to exist in the U.S. The answer to both questions is an emphatic — “yes!” While the terrain workers will be fighting on may change, workers and union organizers should avoid panic. During Trump 2.0, there are surprising reasons for optimism, and workplace organizing will become more important than ever.
This report is about what we call “pre-majority unionism” — an approach to building unions that will become increasingly helpful throughout this Trump term. We originally published the report in October 2022, but have updated it for the second Trump presidency to help workers meet the challenges of the moment. We’ve also added new case studies on the 40-year history of the pre-majority union at IBM and the Durham Association of Educators.
Pre-majority unionism means organizing with your co-workers and acting like a union even if you don’t yet have a collective bargaining agreement or official union recognition from your boss. It is a model that many workers will want to adopt in the immediate future since winning official union “recognition” will become harder under the second Trump presidency, especially in the private sector.
What does Trump’s presidency mean for labor?
Like under all Republican presidencies, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — the body that oversees union organizing in the private sector — will become less worker-friendly. In the least extreme scenario, workers will still be able to run NLRB elections under Trump, though they should expect to depend on even less support from the board than they currently do. In the most extreme scenario, some are warning we could see the end of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). This would take us back to the same conditions the U.S. labor movement was initially built under and is a possibility that unions should gear up for. Either way, we can expect cuts to the NLRB’s funding and staffing, making it harder for unions organizing in the private sector to get cases cleared and elections certified. Private-sector union election numbers overall may fall again.
But non-NLRB, alternative strategies like pre-majority unionism can keep up labor’s momentum and pave the way for a broader union resurgence down the line. They are strategies that public-sector and private-sector unions have used successfully throughout U.S. history, and they are ones we must look to now more than ever.
With the original EWOC Pre-Majority Unionism report we wanted to help equip workers with an organizing strategy appropriate for contexts where there was no clear or immediate path to winning a first contract.
Under this second Trump presidency, workers may want to pay special attention to our case studies, which show how workers have built formal, sustainable, dues-paying organizations outside of the NLRB-framework. In the absence of official employer recognition, strong organizational structures will help pre-majority unions continue to build and sustain power during this increasingly hostile period.
Pre-majority organizing has its particular challenges but also a significant advantage: Any group of workers can start organizing now, on their own, to win gains at work, without running a union election. Yes, there are significant benefits to winning union recognition and bargaining a contract, but in a new period where that will become harder to do and take longer to accomplish, pre-majority organizing provides a path for how to start organizing immediately.
While pre-majority unions are often started by the workers themselves, unions can also initiate pre-majority campaigns, especially in contexts where workers lack the right to collective bargaining (like many gig workers or public sector workers in red and some purple states) as well as at larger employers where it will likely be a marathon, not a sprint, to get to a company-wide contract. Pre-majority unions can also be a great way to start building workplace power, to win significant gains, to train new worker leaders, and to prepare for a hopefully better environment for union elections in the future.
The most important thing is that millions of workers want a union and can start organizing now. And they don’t have to figure this out on their own: anyone can contact EWOC anytime for training and assistance.
A fighting, powerful labor movement is our best bet to defeat Trumpism and the billionaires. As we show in the following pages, pre-majority unionism is an important tool for reaching this goal.
What Is Pre-Majority Unionism?
Workers today want to join a union more than at any other point since the 1960s. Yet only around 10% of U.S. workers are union members, and that number has been slowly declining for decades. The biggest reason is that if you want a union but you work at an employer determined to keep unions out, or if you work in the public sector in one of the roughly 25 states with anti-union public-sector legislation, labor law works against you. In light of this, most established unions don’t put meaningful resources into organizing workers at major nationwide companies or half of the country’s public-sector workplaces.
If you’re a worker in one of these types of workplaces, and you’ve reached out to a union to start organizing, you’ve likely been told that it’ll be almost impossible to get recognized as a union, let alone win a contract, unless labor law changes. But what most workers don’t know is that there’s another kind of unionism outside of the traditional model that workers in these more difficult workplaces have been using for decades to fight for dignity and build the labor movement — even when the traditional unionization route isn’t available to them. We call this model pre-majority unionism.
Defining Pre-Majority Unionism
Pre-majority unionism means workers organizing and acting like a union even in circumstances where they do not have a contract or where winning a contract does not seem to be a realistic near-term prospect. It’s about being a union in all the other ways traditional unions are, whether or not the boss recognizes that union as a legal entity it’s required to bargain with.
In the cases we document here, workers engage in pre-majority unionism with the eventual goal of employer “recognition” and a contract (or what’s called a “collective bargaining agreement”). The main differences between the cases we cover are (1) how likely the workers believe employer recognition is and (2) how they choose to organize based on that assessment. In some cases, pre-majority unionism is the only way the workers can organize successfully for the foreseeable future. In others, it’s one step in a strategy of building toward a traditional union election.
We’ve found that the most successful cases of pre-majority unionism have been pursued for one of the following five reasons.
- The workers are in the public sector — where the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) does not apply — in conservative states with no collective bargaining rights, making it impossible to win official union recognition without major legal reform. Indeed, there are many of these kinds of unions now, for example, all of the education unions in states without collective bargaining rights.
- The workers are in the private sector in states with anti-union legislation (such as so-called “right-to-work” laws), also making union recognition much harder to win.
- The employer is a massive nationwide or global company where unionizing at one location or within one franchise at a time is an enormous challenge or has been tried and failed repeatedly.
- The workers have already voted for a union through a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election and won, but the employer has dragged out contract negotiations for months or years beyond the expected timeframe.
- The workers are in contingent work arrangements with no collective bargaining rights. The major examples for this category are “gig” workers and other independent contractors.
In each of these areas, pre-majority unionism has been the only path workers have found to fight for justice and build worker power in the near-to-medium term.
Three Things Pre-Majority Unionism Is Not
It does NOT oppose union certification.
There are versions of worker organizing that oppose union elections, employer recognition, and collective bargaining agreements on principle, but we believe union recognition should be an aspiration where possible. The tactics and strategies that workers pursue must meet the goals, level of militancy, and structures available in a given workplace. All tools must remain on the table for shifting the balance of power in the workplace and beyond.
Instead, pre-majority unionism recognizes that, despite the fact that workers have won union elections at the most anti-union workplaces (at time of publication, at Amazon and Starbucks, for example), official NLRB elections and union contracts still remain very hard to win at the scale we need. This is because labor law and the way it gets enforced have become increasingly stacked against workers since the late 1940s and even more so since the 1980s (see “Overview of Union History, Structure, and Function”).
For us, recognizing this reality is not a reason to oppose union recognition but a reason to fight like hell for it and to find other ways of organizing when necessary. Powerful worker movements have been taking this alternate path for decades.
It does NOT oppose collective bargaining agreements.
Some organizers argue that winning union recognition or a contract necessarily results in workers being more passive and less militant. We disagree. Adding pre-majority unionism to our organizing toolkit does not mean opposing contractual unionism. While there are unions that use the excuse of contract bargaining to concentrate knowledge in the hands of a few workers and staff, and to generally divest from on-the-ground worker organizing, we do not agree that one necessarily follows the other.
Winning union recognition and a contract can be a democratizing and profoundly empowering experience for workers, teaching them the power of solidarity across differences, collective action, and worker leadership. Crucially, it adds to the structural stability of unions and the labor movement as a whole. A central pillar of the broader fight for labor-law reform must focus on expanding rights and organizing pathways to achieve these ends free from employer interference, and pre-majority unionism is one tool to accompany that battle.
It does NOT oppose worker majorities.
All unionization starts as pre-majority organizing because it begins with a small group and then grows — if successfully, to majorities. In fact, the first unions in the U.S. were versions of what we’re calling pre-majority unions. The term itself has been used from time to time, and the general concept is not new. Over the years, it’s been called many different things: “minority unionism,” “non-contractual unionism,” “solidarity unionism,” “direct-join” unionism, and others (see “Glossary”).
What’s in a Name?
Emma Kinema, campaign lead of CODE-CWA, describes the language problem that arises when workers try to give this kind of non-traditional unionism a name. In the case of the Alphabet Workers Union, she says: “I would simply describe [them] as a union because that’s what they are.”
Over the years, it’s been called many different things: ‘minority unionism,’ ‘non-contractual unionism,’ ‘solidarity unionism,’ ‘direct-join’ unionism, and others.
The late Saladin Muhammad had a similar perspective. In a 2021 interview about organizing in the U.S. South, he said: “It’s important for workers to understand that real union organization starts with worker organization. It is not just about being legitimized by the National Labor Relations Board … . We don’t say we act like a union, we say we are a union.”
There are many workers and organizers building pre-majority unions who also just call it “unionism,” plain and simple. When comparing models, we find the term “pre-majority” to be helpful for many workers, but it doesn’t matter what term you use as long as it resonates with your coworkers. Call it something else, or don’t call it anything at all. Just go build your union.
Why Pre-Majority Unionism Now?
Pursuing elections overseen by the NLRB to achieve formal employer recognition and a union contract remains the principal strategy for most unions. But in a context in which labor law has become increasingly anti-worker, and the NLRB often won’t adequately enforce the right to organize, this strategy has failed to grow the labor movement meaningfully in recent decades. (See “Overview of Union History, Structure, and Function.”) The union density rate (the percentage of all workers who are union members) is now around 10% nationwide and 6% in the private sector. These numbers sink lower nearly every year.
For decades, the number of annual private-sector NLRB elections and workers organized had been falling, reaching a low of only about 500 election wins and 30,000 workers organized during each of the early COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. However, for the past three years unions have been doing better at winning elections in what could be the beginning of an upsurge, with increasing elections, wins and workers organized: In 2024, nearly 100,000 workers organized through NLRB elections, the most in several decades. This was assisted to some extent by the best NLRB we have seen in many years, under a fairly pro-union President Biden. However, for the labor movement to grow, the number of workers organized each year needs to be 5 or 10 times higher. This report has some tools we believe can help us get there.
The labor movement’s all-or-nothing approach to unionization (either workers push for official recognition or they’re not a union) has also inhibited its potential to grow.
The major culprits in the broader pattern of union decline have been employer union-busting and major economic transformations like deindustrialization and corporate restructuring. Changes to federal labor law and the way it gets enforced have made it commonplace for employers to engage in crippling and often illegal tactics to oppose union organizing. But in addition to these structural factors, the labor movement’s all-or-nothing approach to unionization (either workers push for official recognition or they’re not a union) has also inhibited its potential to grow.
What people often forget is that the labor movement needs to grow by millions of workers in order to even remotely shift the balance of power in this country. The speed and scale at which worker militancy needs to grow will by necessity outpace unions’ ability to staff election efforts. For these reasons and more, pre-majority unionism must remain on the table for unions to have a shot at seizing on the next labor upsurge.
We at EWOC are by no means the first to raise these strategic and tactical questions. In addition to supporting efforts to reform labor law, labor strategists have been looking for new ways to organize more workers into unions for over 30 years. There have been experiments with “corporate campaigns” and fighting for “card check” certification. There have been campaigns such as Fight for $15 and United for Respect and a worker-center movement that has grown to help workers with wage theft and other workplace abuses outside of collective bargaining agreements. These types of campaigns have often been called “alt-labor” because of how they break from traditional unionism, and in certain aspects they fit the pre-majority mold too. (For more, see Further Resources.)
These campaigns and tactics have been the subject of recent debates in New Labor Forum and In These Times. This EWOC report builds on these conversations, offering in-depth background, case studies, analysis, and additional resources.
What Does EWOC Have to Do With Pre-Majority Unionism?
This report features a longer section on the unique challenges and advantages faced by workers in pre-majority unions, but perhaps the biggest constraint on pre-majority unionism is the lack of financial resources. Without contracts that require and streamline the collection of membership dues, workers are in a position of organizing their co-workers to pay dues while fighting workplace battles at the same time, in many cases without feeling the gains of the union beforehand.
Workers in our case studies approach the question of dues in different ways. In several cases, the workers’ organizing is subsidized by a parent union at the beginning, with the parent union contributing less over time as the pre-majority union’s dues-paying membership numbers grow. In some cases the parent union has been unable to subsidize the workers’ pre-majority organizing over the long haul, and when funding gets pulled, the campaigns fizzle out.
Despite the fact that pre-majority unionism has often required more resources than the traditional labor movement can expend, at EWOC we believe that pre-majority unionism does not need to be as resource-intensive as it has been in the past. With the renewed interest in labor unions, along with the organizing infrastructure we have built within EWOC, we have new models for activating volunteer union organizers to support worker campaigns over time.
Because of our mass volunteer base, EWOC is in a position to support both the early stages of union election campaigns and longer-term pre-majority campaigns all on a shoestring budget.
We train hundreds of volunteers to support workers anywhere fighting for justice at work. When workers reach out to us, we assist them in starting their organizing, often without affiliation with an established union. When the workers, as a union, have built up enough strength — which often includes fighting and winning workplace improvements — they may choose to pivot to a formal union recognition process.
Because of our mass volunteer base, EWOC is in a position to support both the early stages of union election campaigns and longer-term, pre-majority campaigns all on a shoestring budget. Our volunteer organizer model opens up new pathways for pre-majority organizing that weren’t available to the labor movement in the past.
There is no one union strategy that will work everywhere. But experience shows that militant, rank-and-file-led workplace organizing by non-union workers must be supported and strengthened on a large scale for the labor movement to be able to seize on union upticks and expand its ranks.
For information on how to use Section 7 to strike without union recognition, see this article by Richard de Vries, originally published in Labor Notes.
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