A New Era of Labor Organizing

By: Sarah Leonard

Jonah Furman (@JonahFurman) is a labor organizer who worked with the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, and, later, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s successful primary campaign. Last month, we spoke about how Sanders’ campaign shook up American labor politics and created a fresh campaign organizing model to coordinate its masses of newly politicized volunteers. Here’s what you need to know.

When being prolabor isn’t enough

Sanders’s class-struggle rhetoric and socialist platform was polarizing – which allowed people to pick sides and cohere around a radical platform for the first time in a generation. 

But though he was the most prolabor candidate in the 2020 presidential campaign and had a strong base of support among rank-and-file union members (and some support among union leadership) Sanders didn’t have the official support of many unions. 

One example, says Furman, was “the culinary workers in Las Vegas – you had a very vocal union leadership actively pushing against Bernie in particular and Medicare for All.” But when it came time to vote, union members supported him and broke decisively with their leadership. 

Why didn’t union leaders support Sanders?

Because, says Furman, many of the most powerful unions today position the labor movement as a “junior partner to the Democratic Party,” betting that the surest way to protect their members interests is maintaining a warm relationship with Democrats, even as Democrats also accept money from business owners, billionaires, and bosses, delivering corporate-friendly policies in return. “We see union leaders acting more like high ranking officials in the [Democratic] party instead of independent political institutions that are based on policies and needs of their members,” Furman told me. 

This is very different from the traditional notion of a labor party in which ”you don’t see labor movements being the base for a nonlabor party with totally antagonistic interests occupying places in the party.” (This was the model for the British Labour Party, for example, an organizing principle that was slowly abandoned after the 1970s and then thrown overboard by Tony Blair’s government in the 1990s.) He points to employer criticisms of the $600/week stimulus checks, which they disliked because employees were getting more from the government than they were being paid at work. “This is a direct problem with being in a party with your boss,” Furman said. 

Going straight to the grassroots

In order to organize with workers, Furman says, the Sanders campaign decided not to restrict itself to appealing to formal union leadership. He describes an inside-outside strategy for labor. The campaign built relationships with [union] leadership, but also “anyone who wanted to be part of the campaign, we wanted a way to make that meaningful for them even if their union was not going to endorse [Sanders].”

 Furman says he worked on “distributed organizing” which involved:

• Giving members digital tools which helped them “host events, power map, and use their working class networks to bring people into the campaign.”

• In-person meetings between Bernie supporters and their colleagues. Furman said the campaign facilitated more than 1,000 of these. “People were doing things like going outside of their workplace to talk to people as they come off their shift about Bernie,” or talking at their union halls, trying to get people involved in the campaign.

Furman says that many of the volunteers for the Bernie campaign came away understanding that people’s working conditions are the starting point for organizing them, and that workplaces are essential sites of political resistance over which traditional labor hierarchies no longer hold a monopoly. 

Bernie’s army of volunteers also revealed something about organizing – a campaign based in a mass movement grows faster on a distributed organizing model rather than on a top-down one. The campaign’s experiments laid the groundwork for a post-Bernie era of left-wing organizing, which Furman and I discussed in part II of our interview - look out for that in an upcoming issue of subtext.