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Organic rank-and-file labor activity is on the rise. I recently attended a workers town hall organized by the Democratic Socialists of America in Chicago. A community college instructor, three nurses, a music teacher, a teamster, a charter-school teacher and a federal government worker told harrowing and inspiring stories of their struggles to form unions and win contracts from arrogant employers who treat their workers “like commodities” at the expense of both their employees and the public they claim to serve. The federal worker spoke movingly of how the air-traffic controllers forced Trump’s hand and helped “awaken the sleeping giant of worker power.”
Could this growing working class insurgency beneath the headlines take a meaningfully independent electoral form beyond the reach of capital? Yes, with time—and with smart, patient local organizing.
A new movement for a real people’s party is forming in the U.S. Led by a group of young former Sanders staffers, who learned from experience that the Democrats offer a hopelessly flawed vehicle, the Movement for a People’s Party (MPP) stakes its hopes not on national candidates and celebrities but rather on grassroots organizing that connects the labor movement to local communities around issues that matter to everyday working people.
The heart and soul of the MPP is its Labor Community Campaign for an Independent Politics (LCCIP), an effort to put real organizing meat on the bones of two resolutions passed at the 2017 AFL-CIO Convention. “Whether the candidates are elected from the Republican or Democratic Party,” the first resolution stated, “the interests of Wall Street have been protected and advanced, while the interests of labor and working people have generally been set back.” The second resolution concluded that “the time has passed when we can passively settle for the lesser of two evils politics.”
full: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/beyond-the-2020-electoral-circus-a-workers-rebellion-is-brewing/
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