Following President Joe Biden’s debate performance on June 27, the Democratic Party scrambled to figure out how to deal with his rapidly falling poll numbers. This was a welcome development: polls had long shown the majority of working people unhappy with the choice between Biden or Trump.
However, the manner in which party leaders engineered Biden’s replacement at the top of the ticket with Vice President Kamala Harris was thoroughly undemocratic, and bereft of any meaningful discussion of the issues driving large numbers of the party’s potential voters to abandon Biden — most notably, revulsion at his administration’s financial and moral support for Israel’s brutal attack on Gaza and the ongoing shift of income and wealth from working people to the rich and corporations. Also absent was any kind of debate about the kinds of policies that the Democratic Party must stand for and campaign on if it hopes to win votes from working people.
These are precisely the kinds of debates that the presidential primary process, however flawed, encourages. Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020, waged on a platform that largely reflected UE policy, brought the issues of workers’ rights, livable wages, and universal healthcare to the center of U.S. politics. This scared the corporate power brokers who hold institutional power in the Democratic Party. In 2020, they coalesced around Joe Biden — a weak candidate who was barely able to beat Trump in the general election — in order to blunt Sanders’ momentum, and in 2024 they ensured that there would be no primary challenge to Biden.
The effective control of the “Democratic” Party at the national level by an unelected and unaccountable set of fundraisers, operatives, and retired politicians has resulted in working people being faced with worse and worse choices in the electoral arena. As the Republican Party has become ever more rabidly anti-worker, the Democrats have been content to cobble together thin majorities based entirely on “lesser-evilism,” rather than on any positive platform for working people. As a result, corporations become ever more powerful and working people become ever more disillusioned and cynical about democracy.
Working people desperately need an independent political organization, based on a political program that can unite us, which can fight for that platform in the electoral arena — in short, a labor party.
The base for such a party exists. Millions of working people are still in unions, and unions are more popular today than they have been in decades — with higher approval ratings than either major party. During the recent primary season, nearly three-quarters of a million voters cast their votes for “uncommitted” delegates in protest of the Biden administration’s policy towards Gaza. In Nebraska, union leader Dan Osborn, running as an independent, has a fighting chance of unseating an incumbent Republican Senator. Sanders’ presidential campaigns have inspired a new wave of strongly pro-worker candidates to run and win office across the country. In Pittsburgh and Chicago, Congresswoman Summer Lee’s UNITE PAC and the United Working Families, respectively, have successfully taken on the Democratic Party machine and elected solidly pro-worker candidates at all levels, including mayors of both cities and, in Allegheny County including Pittsburgh, the county executive.
The growing strength of this movement is reflected in the new Democratic ticket. Electing a woman of color as president would be a historic development, an important symbolic breaking of the kind of barriers that have been an obstacle to working-class unity. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was selected as Harris’s running mate because he would be more acceptable to working-class voters, unions, and people angry about Biden's Gaza policy. The labor movement in Minnesota has generally been very pleased with the pro-worker policies that he has supported as governor.
However, merely influencing the face that the Democratic Party shows to voters is not enough. We need an organization that can fight for bold pro-worker policies, mobilize people in the streets — and win elections.
The formation of an effective, independent, working-class labor party will be no easy task; it cannot simply be wished into existence. The extreme polarization among working people, our country’s “first-past-the-post” elections, laws that severely hamper third-party candidates, and the influence of big money in politics all buttress the two-party system. Building an effective labor party will require challenging these structural obstacles to democracy.
In the face of these obstacles, many of our closest allies, including Summer Lee and UNITE PAC, United Working Families, and Bernie Sanders, have sought to strategically use the Democratic Party ballot line. Nonetheless, if we do not aim for the goal of a truly independent political party, and begin to take steps towards that goal, we will be trapped in our existing, corrupt system forever.
While we move towards our ultimate goal of a labor party, we have to remain conscious of the fact that elections continue to take place and their outcomes impact workers. There remain real differences between the existing two parties, especially when it comes to labor, and especially our ability to organize and build our strength.
Former President Donald Trump has a clear track record when it comes to labor: his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board did all that they could to make it harder for workers to organize unions, and harder for unions to engage in aggressive struggle to improve our conditions. His appointments to the Supreme Court were the deciding votes in the Janus case, which imposed “right-to-work” conditions on public-sector unions across the country, and in a variety of cases attacking the rights of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ workers, most notably the Dobbs decision which revoked women’s right to obtain abortions. As his running mate, Trump selected J.D. Vance, an extreme right-wing lawyer and venture capitalist who has been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Big Oil and Big Tech in the Senate.
Perhaps most disturbingly, the “Project 2025” blueprint for a second Trump presidency put together by the conservative Heritage Foundation lays out a clear program of busting unions and rolling back legal protections for workers. Project 2025 proposes a vast increase in the power and politicization of the executive branch — essentially, if Trump is elected, the most extreme anti-union forces in the country will be running the federal government.
Biden has been a disappointment on many fronts, including the fact that on his watch U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has initiated the layoff of hundreds of UE members at service centers in three states. However, his National Labor Relations Board has been the most worker-friendly board in decades. His administration’s economic policy has helped maintain the low unemployment that has given workers the confidence to take on their employers in a more militant way. While Harris has little in the way of a record to judge her on, if elected we can reasonably expect her to continue to appoint pro-worker members to the NLRB and judges who are less overtly hostile to worker interests.
We therefore reaffirm, as we stated in June, our belief that “[a] second Trump presidency would make it far more difficult to organize — and to build the labor party we need and deserve.” We also reaffirm our recommendation that workers strategically vote against Trump by voting for the only viable candidate running against him — which is now Kamala Harris. We encourage our locals and members to have conversations about the real dangers that a second Trump presidency poses to labor, and to ensure that UE members are educated about the issues and registered to vote.
However, we recognize that, in the long run, merely voting for the lesser of two evils is incapable of producing any kind of positive good for working people. Working people need an independent political organization to fight for our interests against the corrupt two-party system, and we call upon our locals and members, the rest of the labor movement, and our allies in other social movements to get serious about building a true political alternative, a labor party that can unite and speak for the working class.