By Dave McKee
Jagmeet Sing’s recent decision to end the NDP’s confidence and supply agreement with the minority Liberal has ignited discussion of a new federal election and shone a light once again on the issue of politics and the labour movement.
Much of the labour movement in Canada – certainly in English-speaking Canada – has close links with the New Democratic Party. This tends to result in labour outsourcing its political work to the NDP, with right-wing social democratic union leadership generally eschewing mass struggle in favour of encouraging members’ support for the NDP caucus, which it describes as “labour’s friends in parliament.”
This tendency becomes especially pronounced as talk of elections increases. Independent labour campaigns typically get jettisoned or, increasingly, rebranded into an exercise to prioritize fundraising and building membership and volunteer lists for the NDP. Often, this narrow, electoralist style of political campaigning can dominate labour’s work for one or two years in the lead-up to an election, meaning that very little else gets done.
Sadly, labour’s reliance on the NDP, and much of the leadership’s willingness to suspend independent political action for months on end in order to get Dippers elected, has been repeatedly exposed as a failing strategy for working people.
At best, the incoming Parliament will have a minority core of solid working-class activists who will press hard for important priorities like job creation, better wages and pensions, expanded union rights, and advances in pay and employment equity. This is welcome, by all means, but it is hardly worth two years’ worth of a “no-politics-but-the-NDP” approach – in fact, the ability of said parliamentary core to fight strongly is immediately weakened by the suspension of labour’s independent political work.
At worst, working people end up with a band of political opportunists and careerists masquerading as progressives – faux-friends who quickly forget or even betray their labour backers.
But in either case – and usually the result is a mix of both situations – working people are more and more disengaged from politics, as the labour movement disarms itself under a banner of promises that are virtually never realized.
This situation and challenge are not unique to Canada. Throughout the world, working people are struggling to find a political path forward as economic, social and environmental crises close in upon them and their “traditional” parliamentary allies either fail to provide answers or abandon workers altogether.
Tragically, many are looking to far-right voices for solutions. But behind the lies spewed forth by the likes of Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump or Pierre Poilievre, working people will only find division, violence and misery.
Ironically, the political resurgence these same far-right forces, is often used as justification for labour’s even deeper reliance on increasingly enfeebled social democratic parties. Of course, sometimes circumstances make it necessary to block a right-wing threat – but is “lesser evilism” really the only political option left for working people?
This dilemma is perhaps nowhere as acutely felt as in the United States right now. On the verge of an election which carries the very real possibility of a second and likely much more ferocious Donald Trump presidency, the US labour movement is grappling openly with how to respond.
While some major unions, such as the Teamsters, are declining to make any endorsement by opportunistically flirting with both Trump and Kamala Harris, others are looking at how to build labour’s political voice as a necessary step to finding a way out of the ongoing impasse in US politics.
One of these unions is the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE). UE is a class struggle union built by left-wing workers including Communist Party members, whose militant contribution to the labour movement in the US and Canada (until it merged with the CAW in the early 1990s). The following is an excerpt from UE’s assessment of the US election and the path forward for working people.
*****
Needed: an independent, working-class labour party
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 US politics.
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 labour 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.
The growing strength of this movement is reflected in the new Democratic ticket. Electing a woman of colour 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 labour 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 labour 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 labour 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 labour 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 labour, and especially our ability to organize and build our strength.
Former President Donald Trump has a clear track record when it comes to labour: 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 colour and LGBTQ+ workers, most notably the Dobbs decision which revoked women’s right to obtain abortions.
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 US 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 labour 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.
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 labour movement, and our allies in other social movements to get serious about building a true political alternative, a labour party that can unite and speak for the working class.
[Photo of workers marching on Alberta legislature in solidarity with Gainer’s meatpacking strike, 1986: Alberta Labour History Institute]
Support working-class media!
If you found this article useful, please consider donating to People’s Voice or purchasing a subscription so that you get every issue of Canada’s leading socialist publication delivered to your door or inbox!
For over 100 years, we have been 100% reader-supported, with no corporate or government funding.
