Drutman makes an important and provocative contribution to a debate that American trade union progressives have long wrestled with: How should unions engage in politics? Should we work solely to advance the short-term interests of dues-paying members, or are the fortunes of union members best served when the working class as a whole rises? The answer matters for labor’s partisan posture. Should we be all in on the Democratic Party or seek some form of political independence? Drutman’s work helps answer these questions.
The early American Federation of Labor (AFL), under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, practiced what became known as political “voluntarism”—trying to legislate conditions that smoothed the way for affiliates to negotiate “voluntary” collective bargaining agreements with employers. The federation therefore prioritized what sociologist Robin Archer has called “negative goals”—basically, preventing the state from intervening against workers in bargaining disputes, commonly via injunctions and all too often, armed force.
These mostly craft unions believed that class-wide standards on wages, hours, and working conditions (except for women and children) would dilute the appeal of unionization. Improvements like old age pensions or health insurance should be won at the bargaining table, they argued, not in the legislature. And the AFL studiously avoided partisan alignment. In 1895 it enacted a resolution declaring that “party politics whether democratic, republican, socialistic, prohibition, or any other, should have no place in the convention of the A. F. of L.”
Radicals and labor militants of various stripes contested this approach, believing that labor needed independent political power. In the early 1890s, military interventions against steel strikers at Homestead and against Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union at Pullman confirmed that labor needed new levers to bend government to its needs. The Populist Party tried to bring together workers and small farmers later in that decade, and a number of Farmer-Labor parties were created at the state level in the years after World War I.
Ultimately, during the great crisis of the 1930s, a clear alternative to Gompersian voluntarism took shape within the rising industrial union movement: the social democratic or Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) orientation to politics. The industrial unions recognized that legislating minimum standards on wages and hours, as well as old age protection and unemployment, would make it harder for any employer to take the low road and sweat labor. Out of this second tradition emerged labor’s advocacy for the signature policies of the New Deal and the Great Society: Social Security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage and maximum hours laws, occupational safety and health standards, and ultimately, civil and voting rights for Black Americans.
In February 1936, the United Mine Workers journal explained the new approach:
Political action will . . . be increasingly necessary for two reasons: first to safeguard the fundamental principles and rights of industrial democracy; and second, in order to secure legislative and perhaps constitutional sanctions for its economic program.
The CIO won major shopfloor as well as political and legislative victories during the Depression years, and the labor movement began to see the Democrats as a labor party in spirit if not in name. Still, the impulse to independent politics didn’t vanish entirely. In 1936 the Clothing Workers and Ladies Garment Workers unions joined forces to found the American Labor Party (ALP) in New York, primarily to capture the votes of socialist-oriented immigrants who might not otherwise vote for major party nominees. That year, Roosevelt garnered almost 325,000 votes on the ALP line in the state. The next year, the ALP delivered nearly half a million votes—almost 22 percent of the total—to Republican-ALP Mayoral candidate, Fiorello La Guardia.
But by the end of World War II, labor was well integrated into the New Deal state and fully ensconced in the Democratic Party. Labor’s stature as the predominant “interest group” in the Democratic Party was symbolized by the quadrennial kickoff event of every Democratic presidential campaign through 1964, a massive rally in Detroit’s Cadillac Square.
In retrospect, however, labor’s power was never as secure as its leadership hoped. In 1947 an alliance of anti-union business interests (largely in the GOP) and anti-union segregationists (entirely in the Democratic Party) united to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, which the labor movement denounced as “slave-labor legislation.” The CIO’s broad social democratic ambitions were frozen. Union members enjoyed growing economic prosperity and retirement security, but these arrived via a collectively bargained “private welfare state.” Organized labor was able to win few class-wide victories. The one major exception—the creation of Medicare—only proved the general rule. Labor’s forward march was not halted, but it had slowed.
By the mid-1970s, labor’s subordinate role within the Democratic Party was painfully apparent. Carter abandoned labor law reform and deregulated the trucking and airline industries, with devastating consequences for workers and their unions. Reagan crushed the PATCO workers as a signal that it was open season on unions. Clinton administered the coup de grâce of NAFTA, promoted China’s admission to the WTO, and deregulated finance for good measure. Obama followed the advice of his neoliberal Treasury team, failing to jail a single banker after the financial fraud of 2008, and pushed for passage of a Pacific region version of NAFTA right through his final days in office.
All in all, this was evidence of what former UAW President Doug Fraser had called “a one-sided class war” after the scuttling of labor law reform back in 1978. In the last decades of the twentieth century, no sober observer of American politics could argue that the Democratic Party was a “labor party,” even in spirit. In this new context, the long-simmering question of labor’s political independence inevitably regained traction.
Which brings us back to Drutman and the crucial role of parties as vehicles for political change. New York state was not immune to global neoliberal trends, and by 1998 policymaking in Albany mimicked that of Washington: business-dominated and disdainful of more generous social provision, with just an occasional minor concession to organized labor. But New York’s unique fusion laws made possible the creation of a non-spoiler independent political organization, and a handful of progressive-minded labor and community leaders decided to launch a new effort in 1998. The New York Working Families Party (WFP) was born.
Our aim was to build a community-labor coalition party with the capacity to broadcast a pro–working-class political agenda and the power to hold Democrats accountable to it. That it turned out somewhat better than expected would be an understatement. The WFP anchored the transformation of state politics and governance over the next twenty-five years. The capacity to identify and train candidates, develop campaign staff, mount issue campaigns (like raising the minimum wage or increasing taxes on the wealthy), unite with Democrats to defeat reactionaries in general elections, maintain the capacity to challenge antilabor Democrats in primaries, build relationships of mutual respect with legislative leadership, raise money, and work the political press—it all added up to organization and power.
The party was able to do all of this for one reason alone: the rules in New York state kept us out of the wasted vote or spoiler boxes, allowing a multiracial, working-class, and highly competent political party to emerge and thrive on a year-round basis. Mistakes were made along the way, but having a permanent party organization allows the time and space for course correction.
Drutman’s advocacy for the centrality of parties is entirely correct. Politics is hard, and fusion is just one of the many reforms we need. But it solves one fundamental problem for unions and other organized groups of citizens: you can be both independent and relevant. It’s easy to be independent and irrelevant, but if you’re reading this, that’s not your bag. You need fusion voting.
