The Construction Workers Organizing Committee (CWOC) is a North American based committee of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The purpose of this committee is to aid and help construction workers organize on the job for better conditions now, and by doing so help to improve conditions across the whole industry.
As a committee, we seek to do this by facilitating and assisting in the development of workplace committees that can win concessions by flexing their power on the job through direct action.
The committee also seeks to develop industry specific resources, as well as political and industrial education that is immediately relevant to both the working conditions, and the day to day socio-economic conditions that impact construction workers.
Through these efforts, CWOC seeks to build an internal IWW structure and environment that is conducive to the IWW organizing in the construction industry. A committee that relates first to workers not through the strength of our ideas, but through the strength of our shared experience within the industry.
Guiding Principles:
- The constitution of the IWW– CWOC is a committee of the IWW and as such, it strictly adheres to its constitution.
- Industrial Unionism – 90% of the construction industry is un-organized. Of the 10% that is, it is represented by roughly a dozen craft unions that divide us by our trade and or scope of work. This serves to only pitt one group of workers against another. Only through industrial unionism can we overcome these false divisions. Across all crafts and from the field to the non-management workers in the office, we will find our strength as one industrial union amongst construction workers.
- Solidarity Unionism – A solidarity union is a worker-led rank and file union that is capable of exerting it’s collective power through direct action on the job. In this way, winning demands for all workers on the job without, or even in spite of a contract. Solidarity unionism rejects the no strike and manager rights clauses that are standard for all contracts negotiated by an establishment union. Our power as workers is on the job and can only be expressed through collective direct action. As such, these clauses strip workers of the only power we have, which is the power to withhold our labor.
- A United Working-Class – The IWW rejects all the ways in which capitalism seeks to divide, oppress and exploit the working-class. We vehemently oppose discrimination in any form, be it through race, gender, sexuality, nationality, legal status or between the already unionized and non-unionized workers.