Melanie Barron is an organizer with the Communications Workers of America. She has been organizing with CWA for 13 years, first as a member of United Campus Workers (UCW), CWA Local 3865, a direct-join, wall-to-wall union for public higher education workers in Tennessee. She joined UCW as a member in 2012 while working at the University of Tennessee and served in a variety of member roles before joining the local staff in 2015. During her first few years as a local organizer, she was part of the team to defeat a major outsourcing push in Tennessee state government through a campaign called Tennessee is Not for Sale. This raised the profile of UCW, and in 2018, she joined CWA staff to expand the UCW model of organizing beyond Tennessee to universities across the South. Now, UCW is a mega-local with 5,000 members spanning 8 states and dozens of campuses, and there are additional UCW locals in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah.
Currently, Melanie is organizing with United Videogame Workers, a new industry-wide, direct-join union for videogame developers, and she’s supporting a variety of CWA organizing priorities in the Southeast region. She believes in the labor movement’s potential to reinvigorate civic life in the United States, and wants to support new forms of labor organization to aggressively organize as many workers as possible into our movement, regardless of the legal barriers they may face to certification and collective bargaining.