Workers Need Strong Unions and an Independent Party
There’s growing agreement that reviving unions is essential to breaking the US out of its political dysfunction. That’s right — but efforts to rebuild workers’ power must also involve party building.
In a refreshing column for In These Times earlier this year, Hamilton Nolan urged readers to “Forget Elections. Build Your Union.” His argument, as I understand it, is that progressives and lefties who are dismayed with the current state of US politics should focus on building the labor movement into a force that can wield political power; and individuals can best pursue that by organizing their workplaces, building their own unions, and more generally supporting union organizing. (The column seems to reflect the argument of Nolan’s new book, which I haven’t yet read.)
Nolan writes:
Though it may seem unlikely when you consider the past half century’s long, slow decline of union density, there are very good structural reasons to believe that reviving labor power is a more productive way to improve this nation’s political outcomes than almost anything else that you could do. Instead of thinking of politicians and laws as the prime movers of the policies that determine how working people will live, think of the much more appetizing vision of politicians as humble employees who must bend the knee to working people in hopes of getting our support.
There are some core insights here I can’t disagree with. I believe that rebuilding the labor movement is key to building the kind of solidarity and power needed to win major reforms and stop the rise of the far right. And the unique success of social-democratic parties, rooted in organized labor, in winning policies that have made capitalism more livable makes a strong case for trying to build a political movement in which politicians see themselves as servants of the working class.
I also think, as Nolan suggests, that at this point rebuilding unions and shop-floor militancy is one of the most urgent tasks for those of us who wish to revive that sort of political vision today — and also for those of us who want to go beyond it. I’m grateful that the sentiment Nolan expresses here seems increasingly widespread on the Left. It’s a big part of why organizations like Labor Notes and the (much younger) Rank and File Project are so important.
But we need to put some meat on the bones of this pro-labor vision: building unions is far from sufficient as a lodestar for left political strategy. At times, Nolan suggests a perspective that is at odds with socialist and more broadly egalitarian goals, as when he says that “unions can replace the role that political parties now occupy in our nation.”
Unions by nature represent the interests of their members rather than the public as a whole. A union worth its salt will advocate for its members’ interests against their employers, fighting for higher wages and better working conditions at the expense of employer profits. In the political realm, too, it makes sense for unions to stick up for their own members — shoring up wages and employment for the particular firms or sectors that employ the workers they represent, even if that isn’t necessarily in the interests of workers in other sectors or the broader public. Fossil-fuel worker unions, say, typically fight to preserve their climate-killing jobs. Unions representing workers in defense industries have opposed cuts to the military budget. Many unions have also historically been reluctant to support single-payer health care because it would mean eliminating the health plans they have negotiated for their members.
The example of UNITE HERE that Nolan cites approvingly as a union that acts as “a political power player” gives a worrying glimpse, actually, of what it might mean to let unions by themselves run the political show. UNITE HERE is internally a very top down, undemocratic union. And its transactional relationship with Democratic Party politicians does not suggest a model of how unions can lead the way in winning transformative political change. Chicago’s UNITE HERE Local 1, for instance, endorsed Rahm Emanuel for mayor in 2015. The leadership of the Culinary Workers Union, UNITE HERE’s affiliate in Las Vegas — who Nolan singles out for praise — also famously opposed Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Medicare for All proposal.
That’s not at all to say that unions have to act in a narrowly sectional or conservative way — looking out only for their own members, everyone else be damned. But it does imply that putting the labor movement at the center of our politics can’t just mean letting unions “replace the role that political parties now occupy in our nation.” Instead, we need to rebuild and revitalize unions and figure out how they can act together, across sectors and industries, to raise workers’ living standards overall and create a more just economy for everyone. Moreover, they need to link up with activists in social movements and socialist organizations to build a broader project that goes beyond economic demands.
Historically, that has often meant workers channeling their power through national labor federations and labor-based political parties. Those classwide organizations allow for coordinated bargaining and the implementation of welfare-state policies that individual unions can’t or won’t make happen on their own. National labor federations can bring together workers in different firms and sectors, while political parties can also represent people who aren’t in unions for whatever reason or who aren’t engaged in wage-labor at all. And such classwide organizations, unlike individual unions, are responsible for formulating and trying to articulate programs that benefit the vast majority of society and thereby allow for the widest possible solidarity. Ultimately, we should be trying to extend that solidarity internationally, to empower workers’ movements and other progressive forces beyond our own borders.
In Sweden, for instance, a massive labor movement provided the base of a social democratic party that governed uninterrupted for over forty years. The national blue-collar union federation engaged in centralized bargaining across the economy that reduced inequality among workers while facilitating rapid economic growth, and the Social Democrats in parliament built up an incredibly generous welfare state and at times even provided aid and assistance to national liberation struggles and governments in the Global South.
Though the Swedish case is one of the most impressive, the great achievements of other social democratic countries (like Britain’s National Health Service) were typically the product of political parties that could articulate and push for demands that benefited the entire working class. That’s not even to mention attempts to transform the political economy to move beyond capitalist social relations entirely: that would certainly require a political vision that goes beyond the remit of any one union, and a political organization — a party — that can push for it.
One of the most exciting developments of the past year has been the reform movement in the United Auto Workers, which led a historic strike last fall and whose leadership is speaking, not just to its own members, but precisely to the broader working class. By calling for a shorter workweek, a just electric-vehicle transition, and a cease-fire in Gaza, UAW president Shawn Fain is doing something rather unconventional for a union leader: working to connect his own members’ interests to more universal political goals. Advancing that agenda, however, will require getting more unions and many nonunion workers on board, and building a broad political organization that can wage a coordinated fight for it — against employers in different industries and in government.
Without bigger, more democratic, more militant, and more left-wing unions, winning large-scale political change is a pipe dream. But the work to build and transform our unions has to include developing a broader vision for the working class alongside our coworkers, as well as the political organization that will bring workers together to fight for that vision.