Laying the Groundwork for a Class Alignment Labor Strategy, part 3: Vectors and Through-Lines

By Daniel C, Louisville DSA; Lyra S, Chicago DSA; Sumter A, Atlanta DSA
October 21st, 2025

The following is the third part of a four-part series on the Class Alignment strategy. You can read the first part here and the second 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 make an inventory of DSA’s vectors of influence in the labor movement as well as a description of the current political conjuncture. - Ed.

Vectors of Influence:

So, how do we as socialists align unions and bring them into the left-labor bloc? First, we need to survey our points of influence over union policy, then determine how to best utilize those points of influence according to our current circumstances. As it stands, there are four main points of leverage we can use to make unions more militant, democratic, and left-wing.

1st: Members

The rank-and-file members must be central to any change in a union’s alignment since, as discussed earlier, insurgent movements of rank-and-file union members are the most significant point of leverage for making unions more militant and democratic. Rank-and-file members control the strike weapon, can give and take away a union leadership’s legitimacy (and ideally their positions), and provide the constituency from which we intend to grow a left-labor political base. The rank-and-file tactic should be the most important, but not the sole component of a wider Class Alignment Strategy. To be clear, when we say “most important,” we mean it. One of our movement’s defining goals is developing the political protagonism of the working class through struggle. We believe workers need to beat their boss to believe that we can beat the bosses as a class. The rank-and-file tactic is essential to unleash strikes, not only for better working conditions and to resolve grievances, but also to develop workers’ self-confidence, experience with democracy, and political consciousness. The vast majority of DSA members involved with the labor movement should be rank-and-file members, and engagement with the organic demands and desires of rank-and-file members is a prerequisite to organizing any change whatsoever within a union.

It is members who are the most useful at moving a union in a positive direction along any of the previously listed axes. While a cadre of staff organizers can make a union more militant, more left-wing, and even more democratic through representing the organic desires of the membership more effectively, the changes that they carry out will not be as effective, lasting, or as broad-based as a transformation from below. We reject permeationism because it is a shortcut that does not involve the vast majority of the membership in the educational process of transforming their own union or developing its politics. We believe everyone is a legislator and everyone is an organizer. We believe that, whenever possible, ordinary people should be shown that they can transform the world. The best place to start is their own union.

2nd: Staff

Second to the membership, but still very influential, is a union’s staff. The role of staff can vary from union to union, but typically, staffers assist with bargaining contracts, conduct recruitment drives, represent workers in employer disputes, develop leaders, and support political efforts. In democratic unions, staff supercharge member-designed and driven campaigns through their expertise, hours on the job, and organizing connections. In undemocratic unions, staff make vital political, personnel, and bargaining decisions without the input or oversight of membership. Staffers are often members’ first contact with their union and have a fair amount of autonomy when it comes to organizing their turf.

Socialists have a key role to play as staff within the labor movement. In an ideal scenario, socialist staffers can help bolster workplace democracy. They can empower members to be the decision-makers on the shop floor and to take collective action. They can teach workers how to hold effective meetings in which democratic decision-making can happen. Socialist staffers can foster an environment of member-to-member organizing, providing rank-and-file members with the training to sign up their coworkers, represent them in labor disputes, and move their coworkers to collective action against their boss. Socialist staffers can also connect these workers’ struggles to the history of the broader socialist and labor movement, and provide key material context for their struggles.

While socialist staffers can provide this important context, it is DSA members in particular who can connect workers to current political struggles happening outside of the shop floor. This is especially true for ongoing chapter work that might be of particular interest to that worker’s segment of the working class. For instance, migrant workers or their family members might take interest in a chapter’s anti-ICE work, or a queer-heavy workforce might take interest in trans rights and bodily autonomy work. Many times, these issues overlap directly with shop floor issues. In Chicago DSA, INA staffers have been able to connect nurses they represent to the chapter's efforts to restore gender-affirming care to minors. This is an issue that directly affects INA nurses in terms of how their labor is allocated, as well as the patients they care for. INA workers getting involved with Chicago DSA’s gender-affirming care campaign helps amplify the plight of these workers and adds much-needed volunteer capacity to the campaign.

A socialist staffer’s role in an undemocratic union becomes trickier. While a staffer in an undemocratic union may have more say over campaigns and resources, situations might arise when the will of the members is in direct contrast to the actions of leadership. Socialist staffers are often closest to membership and hear their concerns daily. In a union where leadership often acts in opposition to members’ wants and needs, this can put socialist staffers in a difficult situation. In the past, DSA labor thinkers have suggested that staff can do nothing in these situations, and that it’s up to the workers themselves to address these grievances through democratic means.  Although this would be ideal, some unions have truly flawed democracies, making it hard to hold unions accountable through democratic means, especially if there isn’t an ongoing rank-and-file reform effort within that union.

This was the case with the UAW, where federal intervention caused by corrupt leadership led the union to implement “one member, one vote.” In undemocratic unions, there is no culture of collective decision-making, no real efforts for member-to-member organizing, and all decisions are made apart from the rank and file. In these types of unions, workers often view their union as a service provider, and much like other service providers workers dislike, they stop paying for it and abstain from participation in the union as a political space. When workers do not perceive their union as something they collectively own, this plays right into the hands of corrupt leadership. So what is a socialist staffer to do in this situation?

In undemocratic unions, the role of a socialist staffer is especially significant; it is up to the workers of the union and their staff union to echo and amplify demands they are hearing from the rank and file. Just as we wish to guide unions in general away from a narrow economistic understanding of power, staff unions must go beyond just asking for better wages and working conditions for their organizers and leverage their power to democratize and radicalize their unions. It’s also up to these staffers to create democratic structures where they don't exist, and it is even more vital for them to train and empower the rank and file to take initiative. Socialist staffers can provide an alternative to the typical service model workers are accustomed to, and empower workers to take their collective liberation into their own hands. Although staffers shouldn’t be openly involved in organizing reform caucuses, they can lay the groundwork for the environment and conditions that would allow such a caucus to form. In more top-down, but left-wing unions, staff can pitch DSA campaigns and initiatives to both membership and leaders, and make appeals to get resourcing behind our initiatives and campaigns. In both democratic and undemocratic unions, staff are a vital point of influence that we would be foolish to ignore.

3rd: State

The state dispenses contracts, sets the terms of struggle on which labor and capital fight, and arbitrates disputes. Currently, there are many laws at the federal, state, and local levels that weaken labor power, restrict labor’s militancy, and limit the movement's ability to grow and participate in political struggle. Right-to-work laws, the ban on secondary strikes and boycotts, captive audience meetings, low fines for violating labor laws, and an overly burdensome election process are all barriers that can only be overcome by contesting and winning state power, or through winning concessions from the state via campaigns. DSA chapters should seek to win reforms that shift the terrain of worker struggle away from the boss and towards workers. These reforms could include passing the PRO Act, overturning right-to-work laws, providing unemployment pay for striking workers, or moving toward sectoral bargaining.

In the long term, we intend to remake the state’s relationship with organized labor. Rather than considering organized labor as one of many interest groups to which the state should respond, we aim to revive the claims made by the radical unions of the 1930s and 1940s to represent the interests of society as a whole. To achieve this, we must roll back federal Taft-Hartley regulations that ban political, sympathy, and solidarity strikes, as well as end carveouts that prevent the unionization of foremen, lower-level managers, agricultural, and domestic employees. Federal government intervention in the form of the National War Labor Board, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and the Wagner Act-era NLRB were all vital preconditions for the largest upsurge in union density in American history. Vital personal and institutional linkages existed between state labor agencies and the radical left of the labor movement; we must restore those linkages and rebuild the state’s ability and capacity to intervene in favor of the working class.

Given the state's crucial role in setting the terrain of struggle between worker and boss, our electoral strategy should not be thought of as separate from our labor strategy. When contesting state power, it is essential that we further align the labor and socialist movements, rather than viewing them as distinct. In Chicago, a left-labor coalition with DSA in a subordinate role carried Brandon Johnson to victory. However, without socialists leading it, the coalition lacked a unified political vision and a truly mass working-class base behind it, as seen in Zohran and NYC-DSA. Chicago shows us that labor within the US, divorced from a socialist movement, isn’t cohesive enough on its own to effectively wield power. A relationship between DSA and labor can be mutually beneficial. DSA can provide political vision and an army of mobilized seasoned volunteers, while labor can provide financial resources and volunteers from the elements of the multiracial working class that we have not yet systematically recruited. By working with labor to run socialist candidates, we can help cohere and align the labor movement behind a broad-based working-class agenda that reaches beyond the trade union consciousness of each individual union.

Running candidates with labor’s backing isn’t the only way to align the labor and socialist movements. Sometimes, running effective campaigns that win elections can bring unions into alignment. The vacillations of SEIU Local 1199 in New York, which shifted from endorsing Cuomo in the primary to Zohran in the general, show that the credible threat of contesting state power forces labor unions to realign towards socialist priorities and allows progressive forces within existing unions room to maneuver. Another way to move towards alignment is for DSA members within a union to organize internally to get their union to back socialist candidates and causes. The most recent example of this was NYC-DSA members within the UAW engaging in internal organizing to get the UAW to support Zohran in the primary.

In summary, we should utilize state power through contracts, access, and labor law to incentivize the alignment of labor unions with the socialist project. We should also leverage union power in the form of its membership and financial resources to support both socialist electoral campaigns and issues, as well as to recruit socialist candidates. This mutually reinforcing positive feedback loop is a vital component of the Class Alignment Strategy.

4th: New Organizing

In the 1930s, the American Federation of Labor did not charter industrial sections or engage in all-out new organizing drives until the Congress of Industrial Organizations outpaced them in organizing the previously unorganized. More recently, despite their limiting labor liberalism, the new organizing undertaken by SEIU and its former compatriots in the Change to Win Federation pressured older unions into embracing new organizing and the militant democratic currents necessary to engage in it. We should purposefully seek to organize new militant, democratic, and left-wing unions through projects like the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, and whenever possible, organize workers into existing unions that have already been brought into class alignment.

In addition to the pressure it puts on complacent unions, new organizing is a transformative process for the workers who engage in it. DSA should champion tactics that develop lifelong organizers, from strikes for recognition to escalating pre-majority actions, since militant tactics are more likely to develop skilled organizers who win and become future shop stewards and staffers. In our new organizing efforts, we should be explicitly recruiting organic leaders not just into the unionization effort, but also, if practicable, into DSA. One part of this is making it clear that EWOC is a DSA project, but even more important is ensuring that the shops and sectors we organize move to align their unions and labor federations.

Shops organized by DSA organizers, whether rank-and-file members or staffers, should not only be organized into their unions; their advanced worker-leaders should also be aligned and brought into the struggle to fight for a class-struggle orientation within their union. This is a delicate balancing act, and while the first priority should be to build a union, which is challenging enough, the additional task of joining DSA should not be abandoned. Organic leadership should not be left to develop its own orientation towards its union’s internal politics without being offered political education and a wider class struggle orientation by socialist organizers. DSA organizers should work to ensure that successful campaigns result not just in a unionized workplace, but a unionized workplace whose organic worker-leaders have joined DSA and are involved in the DSA section for their union (elaborated on later).  

Through-Lines:

Now that we have a good sense of the points of leverage the socialist movement has to align the labor movement, it is essential to keep in mind several through-lines that define the current conjuncture, which should inform our choices when determining which points to leverage.

1st: The Decline of the Labor Movement

The actual influence of militant, democratic left-wing unions is dependent on the number of their members and overall union density While the current distribution of union density across the country indicates that warding off right-to-work laws, repealing them when they’re passed, and keeping union busters out of government has a positive effect on union density, we should keep the current low density and weakness of the labor movement in mind, not as an excuse not to take risks or to limit our horizon, but to encourage us, wherever we are, to ask if a labor campaign is creating more unionized workers, not just changing the orientation of existing ones.

2nd: The Left’s Historical Isolation and the Need for New Hegemonic Logic

The left has not had broad credibility in the labor movement since the Red Scare and the purge of the left-wing CIO unions. Decades of sectarian infighting and entryism have left a bad taste in the mouth of union leadership and the rank and file. However, that does not change the fact that a broad psychological shift is needed in both rank-and-file workers and union leaders, away from a defensive, economistic mindset and towards the possibility of mass redistribution and social transformation.

Only the left can effectuate that change, but it cannot do so through sloganeering and a recitation of ideological priors; we must prove that a better world is possible through deeds, not words. We must prove that, in Sara Nelson’s words, “solidarity is a muscle” that is built when we flex it; that labor is not an interest group in a zero-sum game of expending “political capital” and turf wars with “competing organizations,” but is instead a machine that builds power through concerted efforts to win. When utilizing the Class Alignment Strategy, we should consistently ask: Does this campaign articulate a socialist vision through concrete goals that are clear and accessible to the rank-and-file? Does it prove socialists can win?

3rd: Rising Fascism

Labor unions, along with every other hard-won victory for social and economic justice in the 20th century, are under assault. We should explicitly connect our defense of labor unions to our defense of America’s multiracial democracy. One of the easiest ways to articulate our differences from business unionists, labor liberals, and conservative unionists is by following in the footsteps of the Communist Party in the 1930s. We must be militantly inclusive and advance an anti-racist, industrial, feminist, pro-immigrant, and pro-trans orientation at every point of leverage. This is an orientation that is possible without alienating all but the most bigoted sectors of the unionized white working-class population, through the use of constructive politics and redirecting anger away from the marginalized and towards the billionaires, oligarchs, and hatemongers.

Uniting all these through-lines is the reality that unions will not become more left-wing simply through salting in more left-wing members and staffers, reforming labor law, and organizing new unions. Though all of these tactics will certainly help, class alignment at its core must be an organic process in the consciousness of the workers and their leaders, a process that is best abetted by socialists demonstrating that we are the most effective resistance to resurgent fascism, that we are effective in bringing millions of new workers into the labor movement, and that we are capable of governing in a way that meets labor’s needs more effectively than the Democrats.

This series will conclude in a few days with four proposed modifications to DSA’s labor institutions as well as a five-point plan for immediate action.