The Essential Workers Organizing Academy is an initiative by Local 3000 to develop new worker-leaders in our communities. In response to this historic organizing moment, Local 3000 will train five to ten new worker-organizers during our pilot year.
For the labor movement, adequately investing in organizing the unorganized begins with worker-leaders. Every year a new record low is set for national union membership—2021 saw the number reach a woeful 10.3 percent, and only 6.1 percent in the private sector. Meanwhile, recent Gallup polling shows that 71 percent of Americans approve of unions, the highest since 1965, and nearly 50 percent would join a union given the chance. Further polling shows that Gen Z workers are the most pro-union generation alive. What gives?
The labor movement on a national level has an existential choice at hand: either make a massive investment in the working class to build a new movement or continue to fight growing global corporate power from union offices. Local 3000 is firmly on the side of investing in the working class to rebuild the labor movement into a force for economic and political democracy.
