Organize! Why we need resolution #5 and the political approach that created it

By Russell Weiss-Irwin, Boston DSA Labor Working Group Co-Chair and Socialist Majority Caucus member

DSA, and in particular, our approach to labor, have come a long way since the first DSA convention I attended, in November 2015. At the time, I was an SEIU-represented food service worker in Central New Jersey, and couldn’t afford to take off the all the shifts necessary to attend the convention I’d been elected a delegate to in Bolivar, PA. So, I drove back and forth several times to attend convention sessions and vote and then return to work my shifts back in Jersey. A good number of DSAers at that convention were, like me, union members, and others were union staffers or retirees, but we had no coherent strategy for labor, or even a nation-wide network of DSAers active in labor, and creating something like that was not a central debate or discussion.

Fast forward four years, and by the 2019 convention, we had ten times as many members in DSA, an active Democratic Socialist Labor Commission, and a number of major breakthroughs in labor that DSA members played big roles in bringing about, from the 2018 teacher strike wave to a successful union drive at Anchor Brewing in San Francisco to the creation of the 30,000-member-strong Labor for Bernie national network to NYC DSA’s program to place members in strategic sectors. In this transformed DSA, there was an active— even acrimonious!— debate about what our labor strategy should be.

The Bread and Roses Caucus advocated an updated version of “The Rank and File Strategy”— the classic socialist idea that committed socialist activists should close the gap between the organized Left and organized labor by getting jobs in strategic workplaces and organizing to fight the boss, transform established unions, and, through workplace struggle, bring other workers into the socialist movement. The Collective Power Network strongly opposed B&R’s labor resolution, and instead advocated what they called “A Clear Multifaceted Strategy for Labor,” (scroll down to page 12 in that link) based on building local labor groups in DSA chapters, providing training for all DSA members to do effective labor work, and prioritizing inclusion of traditionally excluded workers-- people of color, lower-wage workers, marginalized job titles, and so on.

At the time, I (and my caucus, Socialist Majority) took the attitude of the little girl in the taco shell commercial: “Why not both?” I published a short blog post right before the convention explaining why I thought there was no contradiction between the two positions at all. In aggregate, the delegates must have agreed with me and SMC, because we the delegates voted as a body to adopt both resolutions.

And… DSAers did amazing labor work in the subsequent two years! DSA comrades across the country revived Labor for Bernie and helped create serious conversations about Bernie’s platform in unions across the country. San Francisco DSA continued its partnership with the ILWU and organized two more workplaces: Tartine Bakery and Dandelion Chocolate. NYC DSA’s Labor Branch developed its rank and file strategy further, and other chapters began to replicate it. YDSAers dove fully into the rank and file strategy, and began to get jobs as teachers and nurses. More and more chapters began to actively support workplace organizing at Amazon fulfillment centers. In response to the pandemic, the DSLC partnered with the United Electrical Workers (UE) to create the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), created the Restaurant Organizing Project, and built on DSA’s existing national network of public education workers to coordinate around the fight for safe schooling during the pandemic. Perhaps most impressively, the DSLC and the national DSA Ecosocialists  created the “Workers and the World, Unite! Pass the PRO Act!” campaign, which organized DSAers across the country to make over a million phone calls, trained hundreds of comrades in workplace organizing skills, flipped the votes of two US Senators, and may yet result in the most progressive change in US federal labor law since 1935. Not too shabby!

With those successes as context, this year, I felt strongly that we did not need to have another convention with dueling labor resolutions, and that our energy would be better spent finding common ground. As I reached out to my comrades in Socialist Majority, Bread & Roses, Collective Power Network, and some unaffiliated folks in the early spring, it became clear that they all felt the same. While we still have real differences of emphasis and analysis, we recognized that we have all learned major lessons from the past two years of socialist labor work and substantially agree about the next steps for moving forward in the two years to come. We developed a document over a few weeks, editing and revising and discussing, with some of the same people who had argued against each other on the 2019 convention floor in Atlanta affirming each other’s ideas in email threads and Google Doc comments. This is the approach that Socialist Majority wants DSA to take in more and more areas of work: comrades talking across tendencies to analyze successes and failures, and collectively find agreement about best strategies for the future. As the deadline for resolutions approached in April, we finalized the text, and l sent it to the DSLC, which made a few changes and then endorsed it unanimously. It went live, and within a few hours, easily surpassed the number of signatures needed.

So, what is the consensus this resolution expresses?

Fundamentally, the US working class is overwhelmingly not yet organized into unions, and DSA needs to continue to develop and expand the existing successful projects that we have started that chip away at that: EWOC, which puts us in partnership with the UE to help organize workers around pandemic-related concerns and hopefully eventually unionize; the campaign to pass the PRO Act and reverse some of the worst legal barriers to unionization; the many efforts by DSAers to organize at Amazon; and local models, as exemplified by the three SFDSA/ ILWU campaigns. But it’s also crucial to change unions, and the resolution reaffirms our support for DSAers’ efforts to democratize their unions, through reform caucuses and other structures. There certainly can be an uncomfortable tension between a desire to change unions and challenge existing leadership, and to partner with unions to win strikes and organize new workers! This resolution recognizes that and suggests that local chapters and labor groups, as well as national networks of comrades in certain industries or unions are best positioned to find the right balance case-by-case when facing that dilemma.

Accordingly, another important part of the resolution is our commitment to supporting and expanding our existing industry networks, like the DSA Teachers network and the Restaurant Organizing Project, and creating new networks in other sectors and unions. When socialists in the same unions or sectors, but in different parts of the country or different roles within their unions-- retirees, young workers just entering the sector, union officers, union staffers, newer and more seasoned rank and file activists, and not yet organized non-union workers-- come together to learn and strategize, the potential is almost unlimited. Today, there are around 10,000 DSAers who are union members or labor activists, but most are not actively engaged in DSA, or are not actively engaged in their union. Building stronger industry networks is crucial to fully engage our comrades.

All of these kinds of work need broad participation, resources to support them, and transparent, well-functioning structures to support them in order to be successful. Therefore, the resolution also mandates that the DSLC have regular, open, deliberative meetings; that it support all DSA chapters in mapping their local labor movements and developing their capacity to do labor work; and finally, that DSA hire a full-time staffer focused exclusively on supporting all these ambitious labor projects and goals.

In stark contrast to the broad, consensus-oriented, inclusive, multi-tendency approach that resulted in this popular resolution informed by shared experiences and critical reflection on recent successes and failures, the only proposed amendment comes from the very narrow perspective of Socialist Alternative and seeks changes to this overall document that are not at all rooted in DSAers’ actual work in the labor movement. Socialist Alternative’s proposed amendment starts with an incorrect and anti-union political statement, calling existing union leadership “the main barrier” to a stronger labor movement, rather than the capitalist class’ war on workers and anti-union laws like Right to Work, Taft-Hartley, public sector strike bans, and public sector collective bargaining bans. Who is really the main barrier to worker power— UNITE HERE or Marriott? RWDSU or Amazon? ILWU or Anchor Brewery? CWA or Verizon? In a time-honored union phrase, which side are you on?

One of the great thinkers of the rank and file strategy, Farrell Dobbs, said that socialist labor militants should aim our metaphorical fire at the bosses, and catch conservative union leaders in the crossfire if they get in the way. Socialist Alternative’s amendment gets this exactly backwards, by aiming first at union leaders— some of whom are our partners or even our comrades— as a precondition for fighting the boss. This is a strategic error DSAers who have been doing labor work for years and decades know from experience that we can’t afford to make.

Then, from that wrong political premise, Socialist Alternative trots out a series of well-worn, one-size-fits-all political prescriptions about union officer compensation and procedural issues in unions. Some of these proposals already exist in unions that still manage to do little effective organizing; in others, they are worthy things to fight for, and DSAers are already leading those kinds of campaigns; in still others, they are not applicable at all. Last of all, they slide in a point about “breaking with the Democratic Party”, which is not the crux of our labor work, and is better debated around electoral resolutions. All these proposals are united by the fact that they do not flow from lessons learned from actual DSA labor work and they do not put us in a better position to organize workers and beat bosses.

Please vote for Resolution #5, “Building Worker  Power to Win Democratic Socialism: A Labor Strategy for DSA in 2021-2023,” and against the proposed amendment. This resolution represents an exciting shared vision for how we can build on four years of good work in labor and push forward to even greater successes. But more importantly, after you vote, please go back to your chapter and implement this resolution! Partner with local unions! Organize your workplace, and help your comrade build a caucus in their union! Join the campaign to pass the PRO Act! Workers of DSA, organize and unite the rest of our class! We have nothing to lose but our chains!