Laying the Groundwork for a Class Alignment Labor Strategy, part 2: Tasks and Reflection
By Daniel C, Louisville DSA; Lyra S, Chicago DSA; Sumter A, Atlanta DSA
October 19th, 2025
The following is the second part of a four-part series on the Class Alignment strategy. You can read the first part here. This is not Groundwork’s official stance as of now, but it will be put forward at the caucus convening in early 2026 for a membership vote. In this part, the authors describe the task facing DSA in the labor movement and reflect on the successes and disappointments of DSA’s labor strategy thus far. - Ed.
The Task
Given these axes, a socialist’s goal should be to make existing unions more militant, more democratic, and more left. To get them to fight for better contracts with more radical demands, to directly elect their leaders, and to align as closely as possible with the party. This is part of a wider process of Class Alignment. Unfortunately, there’s the question of what to prioritize with limited resources, and what to do if our goals are occasionally contradictory. What should the party do if democratic reforms don’t immediately lead to more left-wing leadership? What if a militant union is led by a cadre of disciplined staff organizers who are seeking an alliance? What should DSA do if a closely aligned left-wing union is accepting bad contracts or falling into the hands of a self-selecting leadership? While the answers to these questions may all differ according to the local balance of forces, ongoing campaigns, and the relative value of the DSA’s relationship with each union, without a cohesive set of principles from which to answer these questions, we are bound to act indecisively and inconsistently.
So far, our efforts have been focused on making unions more militant and more democratic; it is clear that making unions more militant and democratic does not automatically lead to more left-wing unions.
What has been done
For most of our organization’s recent history, only one framework has provided answers to our previous questions. The Rank-and-File Strategy (RnFS) is an orientation towards labor that prioritizes the identification and development of a militant minority of shop floor organizers as an independent locus of power from labor leadership and bureaucracy. This is to be accomplished by continuing the industrialization tactics of the 1980s through the purposeful recruitment of socialists into strategic sectors, including education, logistics, and nursing.
To give the Rank-and-File Strategy and its adherents credit, through disciplined stewardship of the NLC, the development of an industrial YDSA to Strategic Sector pipeline, and investment in the Rank & File Project outside of DSA, they have been able to build powerful militant, democratic reform caucuses and maintain influence within those caucuses in both the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers, while simultaneously building a bench of disciplined socialists in urban teachers’ unions around the country. Through a protracted campaign of internal reform in both the Teamsters and the UAW, a completely corrupt, captured, and discredited leadership has been routed by insurgent democratic workers’ movements. The Teamsters have adopted “One Member, One Vote,” and invested in organizing Amazon. The UAW has elected a president who openly says “eat the rich,” and its graduate student locals have aligned decisively with insurgent left-wing electoral campaigns and student protest movements against imperialism.
Hitting the Wall
However, the Rank-and-File Strategy has not proven itself capable of moving beyond the demand for more militant and democratic unions towards bringing those unions on board for a project of social transformation. While the UAW’s new leadership is a definite qualitative improvement, triangulation around tariffs shows room for improvement, and Sean O’Brien’s dramatic betrayals of working-class solidarity through aligning with both reactionary forces in the Democratic party and the Republicans has disorganized our forces with anti-immigrant rhetoric and thrown a wrench into the project of creating a left-labor bloc.
There is a limit to what militant shop floor organizing centered on better contracts and a more democratic union can achieve on its own. The limitations of shop floor organizing divorced from socialist politics are best articulated by this passage in Vladimir Lenin’s What Is To Be Done:
“The question arises, what should political education consist of? Can it be confined to the propaganda of working-class hostility to the autocracy? Of course not. It is not enough to explain to the workers that they are politically oppressed (any more than it is to explain to them that their interests are antagonistic to the interests of the employers). Agitation must be conducted with regard to every concrete example of this oppression (as we have begun to carry on agitation around concrete examples of economic oppression). Inasmuch as this oppression affects the most diverse classes of society, inasmuch as it manifests itself in the most varied spheres of life and activity — vocational, civic, personal, family, religious, scientific, etc., etc. — is it not evident that we shall not be fulfilling our task of developing the political consciousness of the workers if we do not undertake the organisation of the political exposure of the autocracy in all its aspects? In order to carry on agitation around concrete instances of oppression, these instances must be exposed (as it is necessary to expose factory abuses in order to carry on economic agitation).”
In this passage, Lenin articulates one of the key shortcomings of the RnFS, which is its lack of politicization of workers, outside of the narrow demands of conditions on the shop floor, and its failure to connect rank-and-file shop floor organizers to leftist politics. Because of this, the Rank-and-file Strategy hits a wall; it cannot itself answer the question of what to do when a militant union refuses to move left or democratize. It cannot answer that question because it requires a move away from political agnosticism and towards engagement with vectors of influence outside the shop floor. Developed in a period when left-wing formations were limited to a constellation of sects, the Rank-and-File Strategy does not envision the role of a party surrogate, the state, and staff in bringing a union into alignment. Damningly, the Rank-and-File Strategy leaves power on the table.
Attempts to bridge the gap – through organizing the unorganized and by establishing informal industrial sections within the NLC – have fallen short, either due to haphazard planning or inadequate investment. EWOC, a joint DSA-UE project, has proven moderately successful in reaching and training new layers of workplace activists to organize new workplaces; however, it has not resulted in the major groundswell of union activity and membership density needed to turn the tide. Labor scholars and journalists have noted that it will require significant investment from existing unions – the only institutions capable of marshalling the necessary resources and experience – to increase union density meaningfully.
On the other hand, DSA’s sporadic attempts at industrial sections have hit barrier after barrier, including the most difficult of them all – asking more of already-taxed organizers. Valiant but short-lived efforts to connect postal workers, restaurant workers, public school educators, and other DSA members in unions have ultimately petered out, without sustained attention from organizers or a compelling campaign plan. It is challenging to determine the contours of such a unified campaign across varied unions, state legal codes, workplace conditions, and political terrains. Attempts to provide mentorship to or connect DSA members, even those working in “strategic industries,” have had limited success; therefore, the Rank-and-File Strategy has seen uneven development across states and unions. For example, the NEA still lacks a coherent rank-and-file caucus at the national level or a network of caucuses at the local level. The best approximation is UCORE, which persists completely independently of DSA. Volunteer-led efforts have thus fallen short of cohering a true DSA-led effort to analyze our unions and propose policy reforms, as well as organized efforts to change our unions.
This series will continue this coming week with an inventory of DSA’s vectors of influence in the labor movement as well as a description of the current political conjuncture.
