Education Workers Organizing Committee (EWOC)

The DC, Maryland, and Virginia Education Workers Organizing Committee (aka “DMV EWOC”) is a labor organizing committee for all workers in the education industry. That includes everyone who cleans, fixes, teaches, learns, or does any other work to keep our schools from pre-kindergarten to college up and running. We also organize with all workers in cultural institutions geared toward public or private education, such as libraries, museums, galleries, and educational research facilities. 

We believe that every education worker, regardless of their job title, plays a vital role in our communities. Yet the education system divides us, preventing us from organizing together over our shared material interests. The mainstream union leadership often upholds this division, separating workers at the same institution into different bargaining units that compete with each other for measly benefits and fail to support each other during a labor action. 

We in DMV EWOC hope to change this sorry state of affairs by uniting all education workers in the Greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and forming a militant labor solidarity network that is led by rank-and-file workers across the broad education industry. 

We are members of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor union for all workers that believes real democracy cannot exist without democracy in the workplace. DMV EWOC will help any education workers at currently unorganized workplaces build militant solidarity unions affiliated with the IWW. At the same time, we will support unionized education workers’ efforts to build workplace organizing committees that are independent of the mainstream union bureaucracy. 

As education workers, we recognize that various forms of oppression harm us, our fellow workers, and the communities we serve. We know that free, participatory, and fact-based public education is a right that should be available to all, but that our current economic system denies this right to many people who are suffering from poverty, systemic discrimination, and state repression. By uniting education workers across various skills, job roles, cultural backgrounds, and identities, we hope to both improve our working conditions and empower our communities. In doing so, we are creating a new and better education system within the ruins of the old.

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If you are an education worker facing problems at your workplace, please fill out this form.
If you would like to contact us directly, you can email us at DMVeducationworkers@protonmail.com.