Retired labor organizers and a new generation of unionizing workers collaborate at an organizing hub.

Tabletop Workers United wins its founding election as the workers of Hex & Company board-game cafe celebrate a victorious vote count on Nov. 15.Moses Jeanfrancois

Debra Bergen remembers the exact date when she first learned about the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee: “November the ninth, 2022.”

EWOC was launched in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as a joint project of the Democratic Socialists of America and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). It quickly became a nationwide network of organizers with labor-movement experience who advise and support non-unionized essential workers seeking to take collective action to improve their pay and working conditions.

Two years later, as Bergen was scrolling through Facebook, a video of Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls flashed across her screen. Bergen had been involved in the labor move- ment since she graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 1978. However, after nearly 30 years with the Professional Staff Congress — the union that represents around 30,000 CUNY employees — she retired in 2018. Bergen had spent the years since then pursuing other personal projects, relatively detached from the movement in which she had found purpose for decades. “With all the organizing that was going on all over the city with Starbucks and Amazon, I was really getting a little antsy,” Bergen said of that post-retirement hiatus from labor organizing. “I wanted to get involved.” She filled out the volunteer form on EWOC’s website and was answering phone calls from workers in no time. Soon she became a support organizer — a veteran labor organizer who oversees other volunteers’ campaigns.

    Despite the decades that separate her and the young people who are reinvigorating the labor movement, Bergen and other organizers like her are finding a way to bridge the gap through open-minded conversation.

Shortly after joining EWOC, Bergen was assigned to support Hex & Company workers, who were fighting to unionize the board-game cafe chain’s Union Square location. Employees were underpaid and overworked, some making only $12.50 an hour, crawling their way up to minimum wage through mea- ger tips. Despite this, co-owners Greg May and Jon Freeman refused to voluntarily recognize a union request.

Bergen worked on the Hex & Co. union effort for just about a year, and in November of this year, the employees at the cafe won their union vote by a decisive 50-16 majority.

Since 2015, the popularity of labor unions has skyrocketed, particularly among young employees in the private sector who are increasingly desperate for better conditions and wages. After the initial excitement among young activists begins to settle, uncertainty about what to do tends to set in — that’s where seasoned organizers like Bergen come in. Despite the decades that separate her and the young people who are reinvigorating the labor movement, Bergen and other organizers like her are finding a way to bridge the gap through open-minded conversation.

“People are afraid of getting fired for anything. Asking questions, [coming] into work one minute late — everything,” Ellen David Friedman said of the current climate in many workplaces. Friedman has been organizing since high school, when an older friend brought her to a United Farm Workers meeting; labor leader Dolores Huerta had come to Friedman’s native Long Island to teach activists there about a nationwide boycott of California grapes.

That was in the late 1960s. Officially enamored with anti-capitalism and “the feeling of instrumentality” that organizing gave her, she spent the next few years tracking down her own mentors — former members of the Communist Party who she hoped could teach her about unionizing from an anti-capitalist perspective. During this time, she met with “the founding generation” of labor agitators, like journalist Jane Slaughter and Teamster organizer Ken Paff.

“I would drive into the hills of rural Vermont and just drink coffee and talk with them for hours,” Friedman said.

Today, these conversations serve as the foundation for her own mentorship as a prominent labor organizer herself. She worked for 20 years at the Vermont chapter of the National Education Association. And for 10 more years, Friedman and her husband split their time between Guangzhou and Vermont, teaching Chinese workers why they should organize and how they should do it. In 2015, she was expelled from the country by the Chinese Communist Party and has not been able to go back.

When she returned to the United States for good, she planned to officially retire. Those plans changed when she realized the labor movement here was taking off in a way she had never seen before. The energy that young people brought to the table was infectious.

“It is so fabulous,” Friedman said as she spoke about working with this new generation. “I can barely contain my exuberance.”

Central to Friedman’s organizing approach is fostering communication, not just between organizers and workers, but between the workers themselves.

“There’s a lot about organizing training that focuses on having your one-on-ones,” Friedman said. “And of course you need to [have those conversations]… but if you stop there, you’re not going to build power.”

OBSTACLES & HOOPS

Organizing coordinator Patrick Cate also applies this philosophy to his work at EWOC. Cate is much younger than Bergen and Friedman, though he’s familiar with the power of both retired union staffers and excited young workers. As one of three permanent staff members, he helps manage the nearly 300 volunteer organizers at EWOC, pairing up advanced organizers like Debra Bergen with less experienced intermediate organizers like Geoffrey Wilson*, who took the lead on the Hex & Co. campaign.

In order to officially be considered a unionized workplace by the National Labor Relations Board, “the obstacles and hoops you have to jump through are really specific — you have to get 30% [of workers to] petition, you have to get a majority, and there’s an election and these dates and none of the system is in workers’ favor,” Cate explained. “So generally they rely on professional career organizers who know how to work the model.”

Wilson only started organizing in 2022—he told the Indypendent that as the support organizer assigned to oversee his work, Bergen played an instrumental role in their victory.

“I can’t emphasize how great Debra is,” he said. “There’s so much new, youthful energy in the labor movement, and I think a lot of people just don’t have a ton of experience… When workers meet with us, I think there’s something really impressive about having someone with Debra’s capabilities there.”

Like Debra Bergen, Bob Lawson volunteers with EWOC as an advanced organizer. Lawson started out as a construction worker and union member himself — “I still have my dues book,” he reflected with a small laugh — before getting involved in the civil rights movement. As part of the Students for a Democratic Society effort to build a multiracial base, he began to mobilize poor white workers in the rural areas outside of Chicago back in 1966. Lawson continued his work in California through the United Farm Workers and later among public-sector workers in Illinois.

“What you learn as an organizer and the connections you make… you [feel] lucky,” Lawson said, still a little in awe of the privilege of a lifetime in activism. “I used to do this for free, and now I’m getting paid for this?”

He started volunteering with EWOC after he retired, interested in learning about what challenges workers face today. After decades of a concerted corporate attack on American unions overseen by politicians from both political parties, he knew that conditions had deteriorated for workers.

“When I was growing up, unions were matter-of-fact,” Lawson said. “The political climate, I’d say, is much worse now at the institutional level.”

His professional life, like both Debra Bergen’s and Ellen David Friedman’s, is coming full circle now, as a volunteer speaking directly with workers — whether they be baristas, warehouse workers or home health aides.

“We can let people know that you can do organizing for a long time if you want,” Lawson said. “It’s a fulfilling life.”

*Geoffrey Wilson is pseudonym he uses to avoid retaliation as he is currently trying to unionize his workplace. 

Original Contents by The Indypendent