Stand together and build a new political party for working people
Image: ISG members and other supporters at the Teamsters picketline outside an Amazon warehouse in Norwood, Massachusetts (October 2023)
In the last few years, our unions have made important gains in organizing and contract struggles. Public support for unions is up to 71%, but union density dropped 0.1% and only 1 in 10 U.S. workers are in unions. Layoffs are hitting workers in many sectors, we’re facing cuts as state and city budgets are capped by corporate politicians claiming “the money isn’t there.” There are still no first contracts at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and other companies organized in recent years.
We need a real breakthrough and to unite like never before as a labor movement. We can build a union-led social movement for workers rights and organize millions of workers into our unions. Organizing some of the largest, wealthiest companies in history means no one union can go it alone. If we want to win, we need to coordinate actions across different workplaces and unions at the same time, organize mass rallies, and initiate public media campaigns. We need to bring non-union working-class people into the fight, and build union-community solidarity committees that can support mass rallies, walkouts, and picket lines.
Our unions can’t avoid politics. When we take on the major corporations, we also take on their two political parties. Whatever union activity we do, whether it’s organizing non-union workers into unions, striking, winning first contracts or renewing them, we are held back by laws made in favor of the rich and big corporations. The capitalist class is always ready to back up their anti-union laws with police and national guard.
In 2022, Biden and both corporate parties blocked rail workers from striking by using the Railway Labor Act (RLA) to impose a contract voted down by union workers. Transportation workers and many public-sector workers are banned from striking. The courts have fined teachers’ unions that strike. Even so, many of these strikes won important wage increases for teachers and other public-sector workers, like in LA and West Virginia.
The Republican and Democratic parties are bought and paid for by the corporate owners and capitalist class. Both parties bail out corporations and give them massive subsidies. They let companies jack up prices while keeping our wages down; offshore our jobs; bring back child labor; and misclassify workers as “independent contractors.” The broken promises of EFCA and the PRO Act when the Democrats controlled the presidency and Congress should put to rest the lie that either corporate party is a “friend of labor.” Using our union dues and staff to promote the politicians of the Democratic and Republican parties is slow suicide for the labor movement. There’s no decent future for us or our children in a country where unions and workers have no political representation independent of corporate interests.
In the 2024 elections, neither party offers anything to us workers. The corporate class is unified against us, and we need to be unified against them. We need to unite unions and the broader working class to begin building a political party independent from corporate interests and funding. Through building this new party, we can fight for the right to strike for all unions and bring back labor’s most effective weapons of solidarity: general strikes and workplace occupations. With working class political power we can win a $25/hr minimum wage, a mass jobs program to build public housing, free healthcare for all, and public ownership of railroads and mass transit.
The Independent Socialist Group (ISG) is an organization of union members, workers, and youth fighting for these demands. For more about building a workers party and the need for socialist ideas in the labor movement, check out our paper, Socialism Today. Contact us to discuss these ideas and organize with ISG.
Independent Socialist Group 