In this era of capitalist decay, labor unions have reached a fork in the road. They can either take the path of militant class struggle and become a weapon for the workers and oppressed against the bosses and their state, or they can choose the path of pathetic compromise. This means trying in vain to prop up a dying system and begging the bosses for ever-diminishing table scraps.
More than ever before, American workers can see the wheels coming off the political system and they want a fighting alternative to the two capitalist parties. Despite this, unions are poised to spend record amounts to back the parties and politicians of the class enemy. This fall, hundreds of thousands of union workers will mobilize—not to fight, but to door knock and drum up votes for the bosses’ loyal servants.
The scale of union support for the bourgeois parties is shocking—and sickening. In 2020, American unions spent $1.8 billion to help elect mostly Democratic politicians. Public sector unions alone spent over $700 million on the 2022 midterm elections, dwarfing the $116 million all unions spent on strikes that year.
SEIU has pledged to spend $200 million in 2024. What are they spending it on? Their president, April Verrett, says workers, “Will take our energy from the strike lines to the ballot box to support candidates who side with us instead of price-gouging, union-busting corporations.” In his 2020 campaign, Wall Street’s champion, Joe Biden, benefited from $2.9 billion of largesses from financial executives and employees! He’s more than repaid their favor; four years on, union density is at a record low. This year, most unions are lining up behind his handpicked successor, Kamala Harris.
Compared with the pitiful sums invested in organizing, this heinous misuse of union dues is even more enraging. Tens of millions of American workers want to join a union right now but are unable to. In 2023, unions won a record 76% of NLRB elections. The prevailing pro-union mood calls for a militant mass unionization campaign. But labor leaders are stingy with organizing drives.
UAW president Shawn Fain made headlines by pledging just $40 million to organize the battery and electric vehicle industry. Workers United, whose parent union is SEIU, spent only $11.3 million last year on their flagship Starbucks organizing campaign. It’s not for lack of funds. America’s union tops are much better businessmen than class fighters. Net union assets increased an average of $1.5 billion per year in the decade following 2010, sitting at $32.7 billion in 2022.
Sean O’Brien, head of the Teamsters, is hedging his bets by courting Donald Trump and spoke at last month’s Republican National Convention.
Why do union leaders try to foster hope in failing two-party politics rather than class struggle? The trade union bureaucracy is a layer apart from the workers they represent, making a fine living off our dues. Take Mark McManus, president of the United Association of Pipe Trades; he made $428,000 in 2022. Douglas McCarron, leader of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, raked in over half a million! These officials share an interest with the capitalists in keeping workers working, which ensures the flow of union dues to the bureaucrats and profits to the bosses. They are wined and dined by pro-capitalist politicians who make promises and offer scraps in return for electoral support.
The new labor “left” is no better. Sean O’Brien, head of the Teamsters, is hedging his bets by courting Donald Trump and spoke at last month’s Republican National Convention. Scott Houldieson Sr., Steering Committee chair of the ruling UAWD faction in the UAW, asked the crowd at a Labor Notes talk in April, “Who here wants a labor party? Raise your hand if you want a labor party.” Nearly everyone did amid loud cheers. “Okay,” he said, “but we don’t have one yet. We have to build class consciousness, right? We have political education to do before we’re in that position. So right now, we work within the system that we have, and we try and build that class consciousness so that we can one day achieve our goals of having working class representation.”
This statement perfectly exemplifies how the current “left” of the labor movement sees politics: disdain for workers matched by narrow-minded pragmatism. Founding a labor party with the backing of several major trade unions would be an absolutely enormous step forward for the American working class. If the labor leadership won’t break from the Democrats in the face of major bipartisan attacks from the Supreme Court or the Democrats’ failure to pass the PRO Act, it is they who are in need of political education, not the workers!
Enormous attacks against labor are coming no matter who wins in November. The labor leaders won’t save us—they’re backing the class enemy with our money. We need to organize communist cells in our unions, fight for leadership, and mobilize the rank and file in a massive struggle against the bosses and the state.