Which Way Forward for US Labor’s Resurgence?

By Henry De Groot

The Contrast Between Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and the UAW’s Shawn Fain Raises the Question of Which Forces Will Drive the Labor Revival – and What DSA’s Role Should Be

Looking back on the last few years it is clear that the U.S. labor movement has entered a period of revival. Since at least the 2018 teachers’ strike wave, workers and their unions have shown ever growing confidence, consciousness, and militancy. Over the last half-decade, this movement has manifested in all the major areas of the labor movement, including new organizing, contract fights and strikes, labor law, the reform movement, and the growth of its socialist wing.

In 2023 this revival reached even greater heights, in part magnified by economic and social pressures built up during the pandemic, including inflation, a strong labor market, and the hollow corporate praisings of essential workers.

New union organizing campaigns at prominent national companies including Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and Amazon notched new victories in the past year, and these attempts to succeed in organizing at these seemingly insurmountable corporations also spread to chains including REI, Michaels, Barnes & Noble, and more. While a few large national campaigns took the headlines, this interest in new organizing, led especially by young, progressive workers, was replicated a thousandfold at smaller workplaces in virtually every major city in the country.

In the last few years unions have finally been able to stand their ground after decades of accepting concessionary deals. But in 2023 labor finally took the counter-attack, in many cases flexing their increased bargaining power and energized membership to win the major wage concessions necessary to keep up with and surpass inflation. Contract campaigns were marked by increased strike preparations to threaten, if not actually unleash, a credible economic threat to corporate profits. This was most prominently marked by the Teamsters’ UPS contract fight, but was also replicated in countless other national and local fights where unions were able to win at least respectable victories without actually striking.

The UAW’s “Big Three” autoworkers and many other workforces including Kaiser nurses, University of California employees, and more took the fight even further, launching tenacious strikes which almost universally ended in victory and forced additional concessions which could not be won at the bargaining table. Strikes and other militant actions were also a feature of some of the most energetic new organizing campaigns, for example when Cleveland REI workers organized with RWSDU staged a walkout to defend the integrity of their proposed bargaining unit.

On the terrain of labor law, despite a concerning Supreme Court decision in Glacier Northwest, Inc v. Teamsters, which threatened the right to strike, in the main Biden’s National Labor Relations Board has ruled favorably for workers in discrete cases and by revising general regulations. The NLRB’s Cemex ruling, which is arguably the most important pro-worker reform passed by the NLRB in several decades, had an immediate and meaningful impact on the balance of power in union elections. While still a limited progressive reform rather than a radical overhaul of labor law, Cemex and the overall orientation of Biden’s NLRB shows that it is false to equate right-wing and openly anti-labor Republicans with “pro-labor” Democrats, even if the later are inevitably equivocating and treacherous. The Biden administration’s reforms are marginal, but in the fierce contests which typify virtually every labor organizing campaign, margins matter.

Another major trend in labor organizing was the continued strength of the reform movement. This was especially typified by the election of Shawn Fain to the presidency of the UAW.

Fain’s UAW strike framed a contrast between the Sean O’Brien’s leadership of the Teamsters’ UPS contract fight and the class-struggle reformer Sean Fain’s leadership of the Big Three strike. While O’Brien’s campaign engaged masses of the Teamsters’ UPS membership, took on a fighting rhetoric, and won meaningful reforms, it paled in comparison to Fain’s even more militant, politically radical, class conscious, and materially successful confrontation with corporate America.

Who’s Revival?

The contrast between O’Brien and Fain’s contributions raises the question of which forces have driven and will continue to drive the labor revival.

Sean O’Brien typifies the “progressive bureaucrat,” who sees in the current period the possibility of returning their union to a footing of limited militancy with a top down approach, while leaning on the support of members to overcome resistance from more conservative wings of the bureaucracy. Through this approach and through a significant but incomplete altering of the political balance within the union, the progressive bureaucrats are able to advance their career and deliver the reforms necessary to stave off widespread criticism. Whereas for decades the US union leadership has underinvested in new organizing and accepted concessionary contracts, the progressive bureaucrats take the unions back to at least an attempt to run fighting campaigns, for example with the Teamsters’ continued investment into organizing at Amazon. And the ability of the progressive bureaucracy to deliver is especially facilitated by the favorable conditions of the current labor market and political climate.

In contrast to O’Brien, Shawn Fain typifies the class struggle reformer, seeking to transform the union movement more fundamentally. Class struggle reformers know that the fight against corporate America cannot be won without first winning the fight against corporate unionism. Fain himself is a leader of the UAWD reform caucus, which fought and won an open struggle to put membership and militancy back in the driver’s seat of the nation’s sixth largest union. Fain is the leader O’Brien plays on TV.

Young workers radicalized through the Bernie campaigns and social movements like BLM played an especially prominent role in the recent labor revival.

The reform movement has also been empowered by the active work of the socialists within it, including DSA members, who were instrumental in the Fain leadership and UAWD. In fact, all throughout the labor movement, as union staff, member-leaders, and community supporters, socialists have been carrying and driving forward the struggle.

Young workers radicalized through the Bernie campaigns, the BLM movement, and the other societal convulsions over the last decade have played an especially prominent role in the recent labor revival. Millennial and Gen Z workers, many of them organized socialists or sympathizers, have played a leading role in the organizing campaigns at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, REI, and countless other fights.

The radicalization of young workers is perhaps no more apparent than in the graduate and undergraduate labor movements. The student worker movement has won some of the largest new units, won by historic margins, and been more successful than other prominent campaigns in securing first contracts. The movement has also spread from campus to campus, taking on the entire industry, and has not shied away from militant strikes. Finally, the rank and file members and staff driving all this work are the most directly engaged in the intellectual debates on labor strategy, and also highly involved in the reform and socialist wings of the labor movement.

Off the campus, this phenomenon of young worker organizing has even bucked the established labor movement entirely, opting instead to establish independent unions, as at Amazon and Trader Joe’s. 

The labor intelligentsia of academics, journalists, and labor educators has also played a meaningful role.

Jane McAlevey’s organizing seminars have helped to reintroduce best-practice organizing into the labor movement, focused on the structured engagement of the entire membership through 1-on-1s, structure tests, and workplace mapping. The application of these techniques, especially in the teachers unions, have helped build the power for the militant mobilization of membership in contract fights, including the launching of illegal public sector teacher strikes.

But some, including Joe Burns, have criticized McAlevey’s approach as apolitical and therefore insufficient; McAlevey’s philosophy of organizing does not call for a fundamental overhaul of the labor leadership nor is it tied with a larger political project to transform capitalist society.

DSA members active in the labor movement, either independently or through DSA’s organized efforts, have increasingly become an important part of the labor movement.

It is not unreasonable to estimate that some 5,000 or more DSA members are union staff, elected leaders, or active union members. These comrades’ activities are often relatively independent from their participation in DSA, and may predate their membership. As individuals working diligently behind the scenes, they have played important roles in the UAWD reform campaign, the UC strikes, the Starbucks campaign, and many other labor struggles.

In addition to individual participation, DSA members are more and more active in a collective and organized way, especially in terms of organized labor solidarity. Our comrades are showing up at almost every major labor event to stand in solidarity with fighting workers, lending support at public actions, providing food and water, sharing worker stories, and lending hands in a variety of other creative ways. And in 2023 through the DSA’s #StrikeReady campaigns in support of the UPS and Big Three fights, this solidarity work took on a new level of national coordination and scope. 

Revival and Revolution: Prospects and Limitations

We should expect the labor movement’s revival to continue at least at its current pace this year. A number of major contract fights have the possibility to take center stage, including for more than 300,000 postal workers in the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association and the American Postal Workers Union, 28,000 UFCW grocery workers in Michigan, 60,000 IATSE film and television workers, 30,000 IAM Boeing mechanics in Washington state, and almost 40,000 combined educators in the Chicago and Philadelphia public schools. 

And with continued economic uncertainty, the continuation of two dangerous wars, and Donald Trump’s continued leadership of a powerful alliance between corporate radicals and the far right, there are plenty of forces which will impact the labor movement’s development in 2024. 

In new organizing, even with a friendly NLRB the major national campaigns at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and REI have mostly not been able to force management to bargain in a meaningful way.

But while developments in the labor movement over the past half-decade should undoubtedly provide optimism to every socialist, there are also a series of important limitations to this movement which can only be resolved by their being recognized and addressed by the organized socialist movement.

In new organizing, even with a friendly NLRB, the major national campaigns at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and REI have mostly not been able to force management to bargain in a meaningful way. The lack of these key victories exhausts worker-leaders, workers, and staff, causes leadership to second-guess their investment of resources, and introduces uncertainty in the minds of workers who are considering organizing their workplaces. There is no escaping the painful reality that to score serious victories will require strikes that shut down corporate profits in a decisive fashion, which the new workplace organizing has so far not done.

Three Tendencies in DSA Labor

As in the rest of our work, there are political differences within DSA on our orientation to the labor movement. 

On the right, the social democratic wing of DSA pushes for the unquestionable tailing of existing labor leaders, and downplays if not outright resists attempts to express or organize a critical wing in the labor movement. These comrades desire favorable relations to win labor to progressive policies such as the Green New Deal, essentially forming a popular front with all but the worst tendencies in the labor movement; supporting the reform movement threatens this alliance with Big Labor. 

This tendency was expressed at the 2023 convention by amendments offered by Groundwork to the labor consensus resolution, and the defeat of these motions seemingly marks the decline of this orientation within DSA. However, if the growing marginalization of the right in DSA’s labor orientation was evident in the defeat of these motions at Convention, this marginalization is evident to an even greater extent in DSA’s actual labor work. 

Instead, the National Labor Commission and much of DSA’s labor work is currently led by an alliance of Bread & Roses and Communist Caucus, and represents the continuation of the politics of Solidarity and Labor Notes. This tendency embraces the fight against the conservative bureaucracy which continues to dominate the labor movement. 

While backing the labor movement as a whole in fights against corporate America, under the banner of “The Rank and File Strategy,” these comrades seek to partner with the reformist wing in internal union contests and prioritizes industrialization by comrades in order to grow this movement.

However, this politics sometimes tends towards an uncritical orientation to the union reform movement. This was evident in the tendency of some to take an uncritical attitude to Sean O’Brien’s leadership of the Teamsters’ UPS strike-that-was-not. Some also downplay the need to raise open socialist critiques in the labor movement or to recruit in the unions directly on a socialist basis. These comrades adopt a stagist approach, in which socialists first act as auxiliaries to rebuild the labor movement, which then makes it possible to openly fight for socialism in the labor movement at some indefinite point in the future. From this political conception, it is primarily through trust building and leading by example that the socialists in the labor movement can win over their non-socialist union siblings.

In essence, this tendency adopts a popular front with the reform movement, failing to distinguish between the partial advances of the reform movement and the greater tasks of the socialist labor movement. The effect is the reduction of the socialist movement to the level of the progressive reform movement.

Despite the almost hegemonic character of this centrist approach to labor work within DSA, there is a third tendency which seeks to reorient DSA’s labor work.

This left tendency links the day-to-day struggles on the shop floor with the struggle against the billionaire class in general and puts forward a vision of a socialist society. If we organize in labor from this angle, connecting today’s struggles for reforms with the goal of revolution, we can build the labor unions as one part of the struggle for a socialist revolution against the capitalist class. This tendency respects and supports the work of solidarity campaigns and union reform movements, but it also distinguishes the full and future tasks of socialists in the labor movement from the existing non-socialist forces and from what is possible today. The left-wing tendency looks to historical lessons from the Bolsheviks in the labor movement and the work of early American communists in the labor movement in the 1920s and 1930s as a model. This history shows that it has only been active intervention by socialists, both organizationally and politically, which has historically allowed for the flourishing of healthy labor movements.

The left wing adopts a united front with non-socialist forces in the labor movement. It distinguishes the advantages of O’Brien over Hoffa, of Fain over O’Brien, but also of a fully socialist approach over Fain.

The left wing adopts a united front with non-socialist forces in the labor movement, including the progressive elements of the reform movement. It distinguishes the advantages of O’Brien over Hoffa, of Fain over O’Brien, but also of a fully socialist approach over Fain; it offers both praise and criticism in the proportion that they are warranted. Without abandoning the task of building a broader class-struggle reform movement, the left wing raises independent socialist analysis and seeks to lay out a socialist strategy for labor organizing, sets out to organize uniquely socialist fractions in all the major unions, and, in the immediate future if not today, to run open socialist candidates in united fronts with the progressive elements.

Without opposing industrialization or “leading by example,” the left wing raises the potential for open socialist engagement with the radical layers of the labor movement, and the prospect of recruiting large numbers of union workers to the socialist movement on a purely political basis. While rejecting sectarian or indelicate approaches, it opposes opportunist attempts to downplay socialism within the labor movement.

The left-wing tendency recognizes that the job of socialists in the labor movement is not just to do “best-practice” union organizing. From the start of this labor resurgence, It was visible in the educators “Red State revolt” that at the core a number of socialist organizers, many of them in DSA, had a vision that went beyond the framework of capitalism, of budget cuts, and of limiting the struggle to the battle with Republicans. They combined this with an agenda for democracy and self-empowerment in their union, if need be with social media and informal organizing. These are methods of pushing for radical and militant tactics which extend the battle lines of the labor movement deeper into society. 

These methods raise the awareness for the labor movement to break from the corporate Democrats. The way that Fein has used the so-far non-endorsement of the UAW for Biden at least points in the direction to end the endless trailing of the Democrats and start to push for unions to take militant action not only for the purpose of securing new, better contracts but to confront the billionaire class  at the workplace, on the political plane, and ideologically. 

The left wing develops these trends more thoroughly, calling explicitly for the reform movement to fight for the establishment of a new political party, and pointing to the need to unite the national reform movement into a unified national organization. 

Tasks of DSA Labor’s Left Wing

The foundation for reorienting DSA’s labor work is fostering political discussion and debate within the DSA labor movement. Such debate and discussion would be greatly facilitated by the reorganization of DSA’s National Labor Commission and local labor branches. An annual DSA labor conference would be a powerful tool to encourage debate and the development of strategy and structure. In addition, there is a need for the greater integration of the NLC and local labor branches, as right now there is no representational relationship between these two levels.

Developing DSA’s independent political analysis and presence within the labor movement would be greatly facilitated by the development of a national DSA labor publication. Such a publication would immediately be a significant voice on the labor left and could draw on and highlight the existing work of local labor branches. Working within larger reform movements, DSA socialist fractions should be formed in every major national union on a clear political basis, and these fractions could then use the national labor publication to comment on developments within their specific unions and industries. This work would quickly attract the best layers of the US labor movement and lead to a growth in the recruitment of trade union activists to DSA.

Overall, it is necessary that socialists’ work in the labor movement be part of, or even the central stage for, a battle to overthrow the existing order of capitalist society and in its place establish a fundamentally new society, a socialist society. By developing revolutionary ambition and enthusiasm, without for a second losing our grounding in the everyday struggles, the socialist movement will win over an ever greater section of the workers’ movement.