The following text is based on a resolution approved unanimously by the Second National Congress of the RCA on June 1, 2025.

The deepening crisis of US capitalism has revived interest in trade unions. Millions of workers have watched their living standards decline, and a layer of the working class has begun to understand the need for an organized fight against the bosses.

Unions are the most basic unit of working-class organization, formed by workers in individual trades, workplaces, or industries to wage economic struggle against their bosses, and embracing as large of a layer of workers as possible.

By contrast, a working-class party would be formed to wage a political struggle against the capitalist class as a whole, and would be composed of the most advanced elements in the working class—though the US working class has not yet built its own party.

As of 2024, 70% of Americans approve of labor unions, up from 60% in 2007. Americans’ reported “desire for unions to have more influence in the country” rose from a record low 25% in 2009, to 43% in 2024. Attempts to unionize high-profile companies like Starbucks and Amazon have garnered the support of a wide layer of workers and youth.

Going beyond support for unions in the abstract, a significant portion of the working class would join a union if given the option. The Economic Policy Institute has estimated that in 2023, 60 million workers wanted to join a union, but couldn’t do so.

All of this is part of the molecular process of revolution percolating in US society, and is highly symptomatic of the period we’ve entered. Despite the US ruling class’s traditional ideology of “individualism,” millions of people are being forced to learn through experience that collective struggle will be needed if they are to improve their lives.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels identified the formation of trade unions as part of the broader process of the working class coming to understand its interests as a class:

The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

 

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union [organization] of the workers.

This is our baseline for understanding these important organs of working class self-defense. But as communists, we cannot adopt a simplistic or superficial understanding of this phenomenon. The liberals, the reformist left, and the trade union bureaucracy inject enormous confusion into this situation. We must understand what unions are and are not; the role they can play in the struggle for the socialist revolution; the role of communists in this process; and in particular, the role of the RCA at this stage of the process.

A short history of American unions

There are around 30 million companies in the US, but just the top 500, worth $33.6 trillion, account for 66% of the GDP. This wasn’t always the case. When American capitalism first began to consolidate its hold over the continent, there were many family farms and self-employed trades people. Now, only about 6% of the workforce is self-employed, the vast majority being wage and salary workers.

As unions started to organize before the US Civil War, the working class was a smaller proportion of the population, but capital was also smaller and more decentralized. The giant corporations of today were just seedlings. Trotsky explained that during the earlier period of capitalist development, the workers could use capitalist competition to their advantage and pit one business against another to win better wages.

Marx explained that over time, capital becomes increasingly concentrated. Larger companies drive their competitors out of business, buy them out, or, in some cases, force mergers. This is how monopolies develop. The concentration of capital is an inevitable part of the evolution of the capitalist system.

At every step of the process, the American bourgeois and petty bourgeois fought against unions, tooth and nail. As we know, American capitalism has a very violent past and present. In this context, there were various attempts to build unions, including the pioneering efforts of William Sylvis. Sylvis built the Iron Molders’ Union and the National Labor Union and established links with Karl Marx’s First International. After Sylvis died, this effort fell apart; but this was followed by another attempt at organizing workers more broadly, the Knights of Labor.

More permanent unions arose in the late 19th century, particularly among the skilled trades workers, eventually forming the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Many of these unions were founded by radicals; even AFL founder Samuel Gompers was once a socialist. However, his “pragmatic” outlook led him to become an arch-bureaucrat committed to policing the working class on behalf of the bosses.

Most of the AFL unions were organizations of skilled workers divided along craft lines, such as electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and cigar makers. They did make some gains for their members, but in a way that ultimately played into the ruling class’s efforts to keep the working class divided. The AFL thought that if they could control the supply of skilled labor, including limiting the number of these skilled workers, they could extract concessions from the bosses. Part of keeping the supply of workers down meant denying membership to Black people, Asians, women, and some immigrants. This meant that the AFL ultimately was cutting itself off from winning the support of broader layers of the working class.

The leaders of the socialist left at the time—Eugene Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, Daniel De Leon, and others—came together in 1905 to form the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the “Wobblies.” They correctly realized that industrial unionism was needed—that is, all workers, skilled and unskilled, together in one big union. They also believed that the unions should be open to all potential members: Black and white, immigrant and native born, men and women.

But there were major problems with the IWW. First, it lacked the resources of the much larger AFL to really engage in a major organizing campaign. Secondly, when they did lead and even win strikes, they did not stay with the workers to help fight the coming battles; rather, they left town and moved on to the next hot spot. Finally, the IWW was not clear about the nature of its own organization. Was it a mass industrial union, which includes all sorts of workers, including those with different political views? Or was it a vanguard political party? The IWW eventually collapsed after the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Communist Party (CP), with the best elements joining the CP.

The organization of mass industry was eventually accomplished in the 1930s, impelled by the shifts in consciousness that occurred as a consequence of the Great Depression. The AFL began to fracture along industrial lines in 1935, leading to the creation of a new federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It must be noted that the Trotskyists, left-wing socialists like the Musteites, and Communist Party militants were at the heart of these efforts. As we will see further down, American Trotskyists transformed the Teamsters union from a smaller skilled trades union into a much larger industrial union. Despite this split, the AFL and the CIO would remerge in 1955.

From 1933 to 1940, the trade unions more than tripled in membership. By 1945, more than three out of ten workers, mostly in the private sector, were in unions. The working class organized industrial unions and made modest gains in terms of wages and benefits during the 1930s and World War II. This was accomplished through plant occupations (“sit-down strikes”), mass picketing, and the threat of militant job actions.

However, time and again, CIO and United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis and his lieutenants, along with the Stalinist leadership in the CP and other reformists, directed the movement into channels acceptable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the bourgeois state. They brought an end to the sit-down strikes and adapted to the National Labor Relations Act. With the exception of Lewis, they all adhered to government wage controls and the “no-strike pledge” for the duration of the war. They even wanted to maintain this policy after the war had ended.

But the workers had other ideas, and the biggest wave of strikes in American history was precisely in 1945 and 1946. Art Preis explains in Labor’s Giant Step:

The tremendous advance of the class struggle during the postwar period can be seen by a comparison of the strike statistics for 1937 and 1945–46. In 1937, the epic year of the CIO’s rise, there were 4,740 strikes involving 1,861,000 strikers, for a total loss of 28,425,000 man-days of work. In 1945 the number of strikes was 4,750 with 3,470,000 on strike, almost double the 1937 figure, and a loss of 38,000,000 man-days. In 1946 the number of strikes reached 4,985 with 4,600,000 strikers and 116,000,000 man-days lost.

One of the factors that eventually undermined the Stalinists’ support in the labor movement during the Red Scare was the strikebreaking role they had played in World War II. They supported the war efforts of US imperialism, which filled the coffers of the bourgeois, to “aid the USSR” in its war against Hitler. Genuine communists know that the best way to help the USSR would have been to strengthen the American working class and bring it to power. Then, a healthy workers’ state could lead an anti-Nazi war of liberation. In the end, the USSR defeated Hitler, while the US government smuggled various Nazis to America to help them during the Cold War.

The forces of genuine Marxism were too weak at that time to take advantage of the immediate postwar class struggle, and Western capitalism was restabilized. A 30-year capitalist upswing followed, which was brilliantly analyzed by Ted Grant in “Will there be a Slump?” This was the material basis for reinforcing illusions in capitalism during this period.

In the 1930s, the leftist-led unions had achieved union recognition and small increases in pay and benefits, along with better working conditions. But it was during the postwar boom that living standards of large sections of the working class really began to rise in an absolute sense. The growth of US industry and labor shortages in those years allowed a softening of the class struggle. Added to this was the Truman Doctrine, which launched a cold war against the Soviet Union while housebreaking American labor. The passage of Taft-Hartley, which amended the National Labor Relations Act in 1947, placed further legal restrictions on the unions and proscribed communists from the ranks, a process which facilitated the eventual merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955. With the eager and active assistance of the union bureaucrats, Truman and the Democrats initiated the Red Scare, which only later came to be associated with the anticommunist campaign of Senator Joe McCarthy.

Labor still went on strike, but management usually did not go all out to defeat them, and they could come to an agreement more or less easily. With a growing mass of profits, the capitalists could afford to give up small crumbs to the workers. As a result, the union rank and file got complacent. After all, if things are getting incrementally better year after year, why go through the trouble of participating in the life of the unions? Over time, the union tops crawled even deeper under the covers with the bosses.

This period of relative stability came to an end following the worldwide slump of 1973–76. Beginning in the mid to late 1970s, the capitalist class started its onslaught, starting in the garment industry, then the auto unions, and public sector workers in New York City.

The defeat of the PATCO strike in 1981 marked a turning point. Ronald Reagan’s mass firing of these air traffic controllers sent a clear signal: the postwar period of milder relations between the bosses and labor was over. Ironically, PATCO had endorsed Reagan for president, since they had faced tough bargaining under Jimmy Carter. PATCO called a strike and Reagan gave them an ultimatum: return to work or you will be fired. They did not return to work, and Reagan ended the traffic-controller careers of 11,345 workers, for life.

Scandalously, the AFL-CIO leadership did not lift a finger in defense of these workers. They had no intention of calling a general strike in solidarity with PATCO because, after all, that would be against the law. This would have forced them to oppose the state power rather than seek its “protection,” which went against their mindset of class collaboration. The disastrous policy of the leadership accelerated the hemorrhaging of union membership even further, leading to the present situation.

Still, to this day, union workers as a whole make better wages and enjoy greater job protection than nonunion workers. Some of this is simply a function of the skilled sectors that are organized, but much of it is based on residual benefits from class struggles of the past. However, in a declining capitalist system, these workers are also losing ground.

In 1946, about one-third of the labor force was unionized, mostly in the private sector. From the 1950s through the 1970s, there was large-scale organizing of public sector workers, especially public school teachers, but the overall unionization rate fell to 23% in 1980, and to a mere 10% today. By 2024, just 6% of private-sector workers were in unions. This, and the many givebacks that have been conceded to the bosses, has led to a decline in the living conditions of the working class.

In the private sector, even among union employees, defined benefit pensions have mostly been eliminated. Defined benefit pensions are income streams for life, where the monthly benefit is based on how long a worker worked for the company. Compared to 401(k) or 403(b) plans, the risk of investments for the pension fund are borne by the company. As an example, look at the IAM (machinists’ union) at Boeing or the UAW (United Auto Workers) at the Big Three car companies. The UAW gave up defined benefit pensions for workers hired after 2007. The IAM gave them up in 2014. Both unions had demanded the return of pensions in their recent strikes, but they did not come close to achieving this.

Communists disagree with reformists and trade unionists that simply organizing more workers into struggle and being more militant will bring back the relative bounty of the 1950s and 60s. Both US and world capitalism are in decline. There is no shortage of commodities or of increasingly skilled labor on a world scale. On the contrary, there is a simmering crisis of overcapacity and overproduction. Every capitalist power is trying to shift the crisis to their rivals, giving rise to trade blocs and protectionism.

The relative class peace of 1946–73 is ruled out for the next period. The not-too-distant future will look more like the pre–World War II period, when titanic struggles were needed to organize and win even modest gains. The sharpening of the class struggle will eventually lead to a prerevolutionary period and then to a contest for power.

Trade unions in the epoch of US imperialist decay

The present policy of the union leadership is based on the delusion that the conditions that prevailed during the postwar capitalist boom are the normal state of capitalist society, and that the “Golden Age of Labor” can be resurrected if only the employers can be made to see reason and the federal government can be convinced to adopt the right policies. This idea is false to the core.

In his exceptional unfinished article, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” Trotsky explained the historical development and tendency for these organizations to surrender to capital. He highlighted the massive limitations faced by trade unions run by leaders who keep the unions subordinated to the capitalist legal framework and the “partnership” concept of “labor-management relations.”

There is one common feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their drawing closely to and growing together with state power [our emphasis].

This process is evident in the AFL-CIO leadership’s tacit endorsement of the Vietnam War and other imperialist adventures, and their failure to fully throw their resources behind the Civil Rights Movement and other social movements since then.

Throughout its history, capitalism has increasingly centralized economic power, which is a function of the growing concentration of capital in the hands of the monopolies. Flowing from this, it centralized political power in the form of the capitalist state, which includes federal and state-level agencies, the courts, and prisons, all backed by the police and armed forces. The many laws, agency “rulings,” and court decisions are intended to keep industry running by compelling workers to accept the status quo, with little room for maneuver.

Two federal agencies, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the National Mediation Board (NMB), play a major role in limiting how workers may legally organize themselves into unions, which workers “are allowed” to be organized, which ones are barred from union membership because they count as “management,” and what constitutes an “unfair labor practice.” Significantly, “unfair labor practices” can be alleged by labor against management—and vice versa. Ultimately, these federal agencies are subject to the bourgeois courts, who are generally even more reactionary and less willing to make any concessions to the working class. Anything going through this process takes time, as nothing gets through a government agency or a court very quickly.

The reformists essentially see the NLRB as a neutral platform they can appeal to for union rights. In reality, it was formed by the capitalist state to define the bounds and means of “acceptable” struggle. It was an attempt by the FDR administration to get ahead of the rising class struggle, which intensified during the Great Depression. Ultimately, the decisions of the NLRB reflect the interests of the bourgeois state and serve to defend the interests of the system as a whole, if not of individual capitalists.

The tendency of the reformist labor leaders to limit union activity to the straitjacket of federal and state labor law, loyally abiding by reactionary court decisions, undercuts the power of the working class and weakens the unions in the face of employer attacks on their living standards and conditions of work.

This means that today, whenever the union leaders attempt to organize the unorganized, or initiate a fight for higher wages, better benefits, and improved working conditions, they usually fall far short of what is needed.

What is a contract? It is a legal agreement between two parties that is enforceable by the courts—that is, the bourgeois state. For organized workers, winning a first contract is a double-edged sword. Locking gains into a legally binding document underlines the fact that the workers have forced a change in the relationship of forces: the employer no longer enjoys complete command over the wages and conditions of employment. But by submitting their demands to contractual agreement, the workers also leave themselves open to the inclusion of terms that restrict the free exercise of their collective strength and weaken their unity in action.

Once a contract has been won, a renewed struggle between employer and workers begins, with each side striving to improve their position ahead of the next round of contract negotiations. For example, it is to the workers’ benefit if they can resolve disputes over contract violations on the spot, with the threat of a work stoppage. Not only does this give the union an advantage insofar as contract terms are enforced immediately, it also reinforces the unity of the workforce in action and makes them more conscious of their strength. For their part, employers would prefer to have language in the contract that undermines workers’ control over grievance procedures, and are instead tied up in a lengthy bureaucratic process, controlled by the employer, with the final say given to an “impartial” arbitrator.

In the 1930s, as the CIO arose out of the AFL and mass industry was organized, the recognition of unions and negotiation of contracts led to the establishment of “no-strike clauses” in contracts. This means employees contractually cannot engage in strikes or work slowdowns during the term of the collective bargaining agreement. In the United States today, it is extremely rare for a contract to not include this reactionary addendum.

Flowing from his analysis, Trotsky explains that, during an earlier period of capitalist development, reformist unions could play a positive role, leading to improvements for the working class. But under monopoly rule, this is no longer the case. The only kinds of unions that can play a genuinely progressive role in a period of systemic decline are those led by revolutionary communists.

However, before we can engage in serious work in the unions, we must first win the advanced workers to the party and train them as communists.

The Marxist approach vs. the reformist approach

The labor leaders and liberal-reformist left, including the leadership of DSA and Labor Notes, accept all sorts of false assumptions about trade union activity. They promote the idea that organizing is a relatively peaceful process that simply requires convincing workers to sign union cards, hold and win union representation votes, and negotiate contracts that guarantee higher wages and improved benefits. Sure, it might require a demonstrative protest or two, but they don’t tell the workers they will likely have to withhold their labor by going on strike—or that it will be a long, uphill battle.

They see unionization as a more or less straightforward process, as long as you play by the rules written by the capitalists. But the real world of class struggle is quite different from the myopic vision of the reformists.

The American bourgeois has always fought unions aggressively and violently. In struggles to organize the unorganized, workers have been maimed and killed. The 1892 Homestead steel strike, the 1929 Gastonia textile strike, and the “Little Steel” strike in 1937 provide just three examples. During the 1934 national textile strike, strikers were actually confined in a former POW camp that had held German soldiers captured during World War I. Nothing has been handed to the working class on a platter. Every step forward has been paid for with blood, sweat, and hardship.

However, the massive postwar strike wave convinced the dominant wing of the American capitalists that it was too risky to try to take the workers’ organizations head-on at that time. Instead, they cultivated agreements with the very willing reformist bureaucracy to whip up an anticommunist campaign within the unions. They succeeded in isolating and expelling from leadership positions all the radical elements who had built the labor movement from nothing in the decades prior. The class-struggle methods that had been necessary to establish union power in the 1930s and 40s were lost to living memory. New generations of workers entered the workplace with very little understanding of that history, and little appreciation for the ruthless intent of the enemy class.

We must never forget: the capitalist ruling class is a determined adversary! Unfortunately, many union activists who “organize” today do not understand this, and continue to harbor illusions in the neutrality of the bourgeois state.

A successful approach to union work starts with recognizing reality. What do workers need to do to beat the bosses in an organizing drive? Is it simply a process of getting coworkers to sign union cards and hold an NLRB vote, followed by collective bargaining with the individual employer? This has been the approach of union organizers at Starbucks and Amazon, as well as other workplaces. Federal labor law mandates that union organizing and contract negotiation has to go shop by shop, unless both sides agree otherwise. This greatly favors the capitalists, so Starbucks has no reason to agree to allow company-wide organizing. What are the results?

There are more than 16,000 Starbucks stores in the US employing over 200,000 workers. As of early 2026, approximately 15,000 employees at 700 locations have voted for a union over the course of four or so years. But not one of these wins has yielded a negotiated contract. If there is a contract negotiated in the future, we can predict it will not bring about major changes in wages, benefits, and working conditions.

The reason is simple. If Starbucks were to negotiate a contract with one store that gives the workers real concessions, then the tens of thousands of as-yet unorganized workers in the remaining 699 locations will demand the same agreement. Starbucks knows this very well. This is why they continue to stall and stonewall. The longer they can drag things out, the more likely the leading union activists will become demoralized and just quit. Given the high rate of workforce turnover in workplaces like this, conditions for a new NLRB election to get rid of the union can eventually materialize. We can hear the company’s campaign pitch already: “What did the union ever do for you?” 

Under this pressure, the union called for a nationwide boycott starting on August 25, with the slogan “No Contract, No Coffee.” Comrades of the RCA support this campaign. But the new tactic has its limits. Consumer boycotts can be a supplement to an organizing drive, but the real power of the workers lies in shutting down production. It is clear the boycott is not the product of powerful pro-union momentum; it is a recognition of the stalemate between the union and the bosses. 

The only way to escape this self-defeating loop is to launch a massive, nationwide movement, organizing a much larger part of the company, with workers determined to shut it down for as long as it takes. 

We must also be clear that in the midst of the historic decline of the capitalist system, a victory in this struggle would not lead to a “wonderful life” for the workers. The capitalists might make temporary concessions, but this will be followed quickly by counterattacks. Think about the situation in Germany from 1918 through the 1920s. The German ruling class made concessions when they were in the midst of a revolution, but they counterattacked once the revolution was defeated and the movement ebbed. The most important part of the struggle of the unions is how it educates the workers on the need for the socialist transformation of society.

There is a similar situation at Amazon, which has roughly 110 fulfillment centers in the US. The strategy of the RWDSU,  Amazon Labor Union, and Teamsters—with whom the ALU has merged—is to try to organize one warehouse at a time. They won the vote at one of the Staten Island facilities in April 2022. But has Amazon negotiated a contract or made any concessions to the ALU? Unsurprisingly, Jeff Bezos has fought them tooth and nail. He knows that if he concedes ALU a victory here, it will spur workers at the other 109 workplaces to go union. Therefore, it simply will not happen without a truly titanic struggle, with the collective labor movement shutting down at least a large part of Amazon’s operations. Until Amazon is convinced that the organized workers have the power and the determination to shut it all down, no concessions will be granted.

As the RCA has explained in our materials aimed at Amazon and Starbucks workers:

• The only path to victory is one that mobilizes the working class and tells them the unvarnished truth—there are no shortcuts!
• A union is not a monthly meeting, office, or a group of paid or unpaid officials. A union is all of the workers, united together.
• Establishing a union is not about winning an NLRB election, but about organizing a force that the bosses must recognize and deal with.
• We can have no trust or confidence in labor laws, courts, and agencies. However, this does not mean we simply ignore these laws and agencies. When and how we use them depends on the specific situation. Our task is to expose the entire system of labor control as an operation of the enemy class, not to foster illusions in its susceptibility to union influence.
• Workers have to shut down the company until the bosses make concessions. How far are the workers willing and able to go? Correctly gauging the relationship of forces and morale at each stage of the struggle is a requirement for success.
• This will be a long, hard struggle. The alternative is to accept that conditions will continue to deteriorate for the working class.
• Beating a large corporation like Amazon or Starbucks requires many experienced cadres. The RCA is not yet big enough to seriously take on such a task. We must build our forces, deepen our study of history and theory, and temper ourselves in action in preparation for these future fights.
• As we acquire and develop seasoned cadres, leading fights to improve the conditions for one set of workers will be but a step towards taking on a major struggle and attempting to generalize it.
• The same basic kinds of attacks on working conditions are occurring at all workplaces in our era—whether they’re unionized or not—because the declining capitalist system itself is the fundamental problem. Stable and high-quality jobs, housing, healthcare, and more can only be achieved on the basis of a socialist revolution. Ultimately, we should see workplace struggles and union organizing campaigns as just one part of the broader struggle to overthrow capitalism.

The Marxist method of trade union work

The first rule of thumb communists must follow when engaged in trade union work is simple: We are communists who engage in trade union activity—not “unionists” who happen to be communists. The basic guidelines for communist work are put forward in the Transitional Program. As Trotsky writes:

Trade unions do not offer, and in line with their task, composition and manner of recruiting membership, cannot offer a finished revolutionary program; in consequence, they cannot replace the party. The building of national revolutionary parties as sections of the Fourth International is the central task of the transitional epoch … Trade unions are not ends in themselves; they are but means along the road to proletarian revolution.

Communist work in the trade unions is one of many possible ways of building our forces and expanding our overall influence in the working class. How and when we conduct political work in the trade unions and what our aims are with this work flows from the goals of the party. This is a concrete question. It depends on what resources the party has at its disposal—including the number of experienced and trained cadres—and what opportunities we see before us.

At all times, this must be connected with the present stage of party building and our overall priorities. In a country of 340 million people that spans from the Atlantic to the Pacific and beyond, our organization is still primarily working to assemble the first core of Marxist cadres, which will form the foundation of what will become a significantly larger communist party in the US, and eventually, a mass party. When and where we decide to engage in trade union work at this stage—only after a full discussion and always under the direction of the party’s elected leadership—we must seek to be militant organizers, guided by the need to build maximum unity within the working class.

Presently, we are not the leaders of the labor movement, and there is an established bureaucracy in command. How should communists frame our demands and criticism of the union leaders? Simply “denouncing” the trade union bureaucracy would not be an effective approach. We must, in clear view of the workers, call on the leaders to fight for a series of concrete demands to meet the workers’ needs. We call on the labor leaders to organize a real fight. If they take some of our demands, this will advance the struggle and increase our authority. If they ignore and continue on their class collaborationist path, this will expose them and win people to our side.

Communists must always approach the working class with a clear program. We want to address all of the issues facing the workers, but we don’t leave anything merely at the trade union level, as did the “Economists,” with whom Lenin battled over party perspectives in tsarist Russia. We want to elevate the level and make it clear that the class struggle is, above all, a political struggle.

Once we have built up sufficient numbers and we decide to initiate a particular project or campaign in the labor movement, we will need a banner that connects the workers directly to the communists. We can learn a lot from the American Trotskyists of the 1930s. The Teamsters (IBT) had just 82,000 members nationally in 1932, but they grew to 530,000 strong by 1941. The credit for this goes to the Trotskyists, who turned the IBT from a small craft union into a larger and more powerful industrial union.

However, although those early Trotskyists did exemplary trade union work, they were not clear that the priority was to build the revolutionary party. Much of the influence they built in the Teamsters was under the banner of the IBT, rather than that of the revolutionary Marxists. This distorted the effort to build the party at the time and undermined their potential political influence among the workers, making it easier for the government and the Teamsters bureaucracy to purge them in the 1940s.

The root of the problem was the theoretical weakness of the American Trotskyists and their lack of understanding of the Marxist method, which is exactly why we emphasize this so much today. The goal of Marxists is not to simply “build unions.” When and where we do help build unions, it is to use this work to build the party in terms of membership and influence, using the experience of struggle to train our comrades for the big battles ahead—culminating in the socialist transformation of society.

Comrades must be clear: we cannot have real influence in the labor movement without a real party foundation. There are times when the political vacuum, plus the acute anger of the workers, can allow a few communists to have a disproportionate influence on events. But unless a solid party is built, this “influence” will wither as quickly as it mushroomed up in the first place.

Even with 100% correct ideas, strategy, and tactics, there is no way we can do meaningful work in the labor movement without numbers and cadres. This is especially true in a massive country with 14 million union members. Our comrades may be tenacious and spirited fighters, but premature battles only play into the hands of the class enemy. We must patiently build up a solid foundation and increase our numbers. This will give us the resources to take advantage of the many opportunities that will arise in the future.

Imagine if we lead an important strike. Along with moral support and solidarity, these strikers and their families will also need material support. A large national organization can raise money and other donations from the broader labor movement to support their effort. But a small organization is limited by definition.

For example, in the early 1930s, the CPUSA led a coal miners’ strike in Pennsylvania. At the time, the CP had around 8,000 members. One reason the strike was defeated was the lack of organized support for the strikers. A significantly larger party could have built extensive solidarity and turned defeat into success. The same was true in the 1926 Passaic textile strike.

We must be especially careful when it comes to small businesses, whose owners have even less room to maneuver than the big corporations. With only a tiny portion of the market share, they can easily be squeezed by the competition; giant corporate customers can always find other vendors. So, while it may be easier to organize small groups of workers against a weaker employer, in the end, what have we achieved? Again, what we put in and what we get out of any project must always be weighed against other opportunities.

How should the RCA approach union work?

The class-collaborationist history of American labor explains the failure to organize workers on a mass scale even though 70% of Americans polled in 2024 said they approved of unions. It also explains why the capitalists have been able to almost eliminate pensions and force other concessions down the throats of workers without sparking a massive fightback. The lack of a mass workers’ party of any type, whether reformist or revolutionary, is another factor.

Needless to say, building a communist party is a complex task. At each stage of party building we face different challenges. Comrades must not take an individualistic approach to this. Everything we do on this front needs to be thoroughly discussed with the cell and with leading comrades in the area and the regions. Many of our activities will have wider implications, and should be brought to the attention of the National Center for coordination of efforts.

When we are considering interventions in the trade unions, we should be guided by the following considerations:

• Is there a radicalized layer of workers, sufficiently large and influential enough to form the basis for a campaign of action?
• What forces do we have available to conduct this intervention? Do we have comrades working at a particular workplace or not? How we intervene can vary dramatically depending on the answer—we must be seen as supporters of the workers’ struggle and not as outsiders giving them orders.
• Have we already built up the forces and political authority to lead or influence this struggle? If not, what are our specific goals?
• And last but not least: how does engaging in this work help win new members for the RCA to build the revolutionary party? What activities will we have to set aside if we do decide this is a priority?

Our comrades are serious, knowledgeable, courageous, and disciplined. Because of this, some of us will be asked to become shop stewards or to run for other union positions. Comrades might want to run to be a delegate to a union convention or other union body. How should we approach the question of taking paid or unpaid union positions?

First of all, here are some general considerations:

• Shop stewards usually administer the grievance process, which is controlled by the boss at every step except the last one—binding arbitration—under the control of the enemy class as a whole. Grievances should be negotiated and the workers should be able to use their collective power to force concessions from the bosses. In almost 100% of contracts, there are no-strike clauses. How would being in this position affect our ability to operate first and foremost as a communist, and not as a run-of-the-mill union activist?
  
• If our comrade is elected to a union position, will they end up being identified with the hated union leadership, for example, if we are pressured to vote for a bad contract? How will this help us to build up our support? Will we be compromised in the eyes of our coworkers?
  
• If a comrade is elected a delegate to a union convention, will other comrades be present as well? In union conventions or other elected bodies, only those with credentials are allowed in, so we may not be able not send comrades in from the outside to supplement the intervention, thus increasing the chances of isolation and marginalization.

Comrades should be crystal clear that the trade union bureaucracy has many years of experience co-opting and demoralizing enthusiastic left-wing activists. They are experts at this! Our comrades should have no illusions, and must approach such questions with both eyes open—supported by their cells and comrades with more experience in this work. If the party decides to run a comrade—or they are appointed—to any union position, including steward or delegates, we must do so on a program, even if it is just a few bullet points. The workers or those who appoint us must be made aware of our political views, particularly our opposition to class collaboration.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the CPUSA gained many leadership positions in a number of unions—they even led eleven CIO international unions. But many hid their CP affiliations, and this was used against them during the Red Scare. The ruling class argued that “the communists are secretly gaining positions to manipulate the union”—and there was more than an element of truth in what they said. This is also a concrete question. If we hide our politics, how can we hope to mobilize the workers to achieve anything substantial? If we don’t build political authority on the basis of a Marxist program, we will never achieve more than trade union authority—and that simply isn’t enough if we’re serious about overthrowing capitalism.

Labor perspectives: how will we build up a force of communists in the unions?

In our brief review of US labor history, we saw that every wave of mass upsurge was preceded by the emergence of a vanguard layer of self-sacrificing, working-class militants dedicated to taking on the enemy class and fighting to the end. That layer is still small today, but as it grows, the task of our party is to establish ties with it and win the best elements to our program and perspectives. Before we can win over the masses of the working class, we must first win over the advanced layer to communism.

In the immediate period, the most effective way for us to eventually build influence in the unions and the broader working class is by winning over the youth, training them, and building up our forces. After all, today’s students are tomorrow’s workers! Young people are the most open to communist ideas, and we can recruit and educate them at a much faster pace. A comrade who enters the workforce with years of Marxist training under their belt, and with hundreds of comrades in their city at their back, will be much better equipped to conduct systematic work in the labor movement, resisting the pressures from the bosses and reformist union bureaucrats, than a comrade trying to learn the fundamentals of Marxism in the middle of a union organizing campaign.

Comrades will naturally get jobs, and some of those jobs will be in union workplaces or places that will engage in organizing campaigns. There will come a time when we will need comrades to direct their job-seeking efforts to specific workplaces and sectors. We will eventually build up a core of communist cadres in the key workplaces and unions, and launch campaigns as we strengthen our forces. That being said, everything else being equal, comrades shouldn’t pass up a unionized job over a non-unionized job if the opportunity arises.

Another way we build up support in the working class is by becoming more generally well known and building up our political authority. As the Revolutionary Communists of America grows in numbers and reputation, and as the Revolutionary Communist International does the same, there will come a time when militant workers, including future leaders, will come toward us. This will create opportunities for growth that simply don’t exist right now.

Above all, we can never forget one of the key lessons of history: it is the communist party, not the trade unions, that constitutes the decisive factor in the socialist revolution. There were large and powerful trade unions in Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, and France during the revolutionary wave in the 1920s and 30s—but it was the lack of a communist party with correct policies that led to lost opportunities and defeat. Even today, some Scandinavian countries enjoy unionization rates of 70% or higher. In Iceland it stands at 91%! But without class-struggle leaders linked with a mass communist party, they have done next to nothing to stop the austerity and attacks coming down on the working class there.

The crisis of American and world capitalism will force the working class into struggle. The pressure to lower wages, benefits, and working conditions will only intensify. Tariffs will not magically turn this around, but only aggravate the situation.

When the working class moves, the labor leaders will need to adapt to the new situation—or they will be thrown to the side and replaced by others willing to mobilize the full power of our class. New workers’ leaders will emerge and be tested by events. Serious workers who want not only to fight, but to win, will be drawn to the only ideas that can achieve lasting victory—the ideas of Marxism.

Appendix: Trade Unions in the Transitional Epoch
From The Transitional Program (1938) by Leon Trotsky

In the struggle for partial and transitional demands, the workers now more than ever before need mass organizations, principally trade unions. The powerful growth of trade unionism in France and the United States is the best refutation of the preachments of those ultra-left doctrinaires who have been teaching that trade unions have “outlived their usefulness.”

The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the frontline trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class. He takes active part in mass trade unions for the purpose of strengthening them and raising their spirit of militancy. He fights uncompromisingly against any attempt to subordinate the unions to the bourgeois state and bind the proletariat to “compulsory arbitration” and every other form of police guardianship—not only fascist but also “democratic.” Only on the basis of such work within the trade unions is a successful struggle possible against the reformists, including those of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Sectarian attempts to build or preserve small “revolutionary” unions, as a second edition of the party, signify in actuality the renouncing of the struggle for leadership of the working class. It is necessary to establish this firm rule: self-isolation of the capitulationist variety from mass trade unions, which is tantamount to a betrayal of the revolution, is incompatible with membership in the Fourth International.

At the same time, the Fourth International resolutely rejects and condemns trade union fetishism, equally characteristic of trade unionists and syndicalists.

• Trade unions do not offer, and in line with their task, composition and manner of recruiting membership, cannot offer a finished revolutionary program; in consequence, they cannot replace the party. The building of national revolutionary parties as sections of the Fourth International is the central task of the transitional epoch.
  
• Trade unions, even the most powerful, embrace no more than 20 to 25 percent of the working class, and at that, predominantly the more skilled and better paid layers. The more oppressed majority of the working class is drawn only episodically into the struggle, during a period of exceptional upsurges in the labor movement. During such moments it is necessary to create organizations ad hoc, embracing the whole fighting mass: strike committees, factory committees, and finally, soviets.
  
• As organizations expressive of the top layers of the proletariat, trade unions, as witnessed by all past historical experience, including the fresh experience of the anarcho-syndicalist unions in Spain, developed powerful tendencies toward compromise with the bourgeois-democratic regime. In periods of acute class struggle, the leading bodies of the trade unions aim to become masters of the mass movement in order to render it harmless. This is already occurring during the period of simple strikes, especially in the case of the mass sit-down strikes which shake the principle of bourgeois property. In times of war or revolution, when the bourgeoisie is plunged into exceptional difficulties, trade union leaders usually become bourgeois ministers.

Therefore, the sections of the Fourth International should always strive not only to renew the top leadership of the trade unions, boldly and resolutely in critical moments advancing new militant leaders in place of routine functionaries and careerists, but also to create in all possible instances independent militant organizations corresponding more closely to the tasks of mass struggle against bourgeois society; and, if necessary, not flinching even in the face of a direct break with the conservative apparatus of the trade unions. If it be criminal to turn one’s back on mass organizations for the sake of fostering sectarian factions, it is no less so passively to tolerate subordination of the revolutionary mass movement to the control of openly reactionary or disguised conservative (“progressive”) bureaucratic cliques. Trade unions are not ends in themselves; they are but means along the road to proletarian revolution.