Report: Pre-Majority Unionism

What Is Pre-Majority Unionism?

  • Updated March 18, 2025

By Colette Perold and Eric Dirnbach

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 for 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 nation-wide 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.

Adding pre-majority unionism to our organizing toolkit does not mean opposing contractual unionism.

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.

In all cases, at all times, pre-majority organizing should always be looking to build worker majorities.

It does NOT oppose worker majorities.

Although we like the term “pre-majority” more than any other option, there’s one caution we need to give. The limitation of the term “pre-majority” is that it suggests minority support over broad base-building. But to be in a “pre-majority” union does not mean workers can get comfortable as a minority and stop growing their membership. It just means that the path to get to a majority may be unconventional or take longer than usual. In all cases, at all times, pre-majority organizing should always be looking to build worker majorities. 

What’s in a Name?

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”).

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.”

The concept is not new, and it's been called many different things over the years. Any unionist in pre-majority unions will tell you how they go in circles trying to find a better term.

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 co-workers. 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 five or ten times higher. This report has some tools we believe can help us get there.

But in the face of these structural factors, many argue that 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 pre-majority campaigns over time.

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. 

We hope this report offers tools for workers forging their own pre-majority union paths today. With thoughts, questions, comradely disagreement, or more stories and lessons to share, please join the conversation on X or Bluesky @organizeworkers #premajority. Want to tell your story of pre-majority unionism? Email us at [email protected].