Labor

“With a rank-and-file job, you’re making relationships you’re going to develop over decades. It’s a deeper kind of organizing.”

Socialists can be effective workplace organizers if they get a union job and organize alongside their coworkers. That’s what we’re doing at UPS.

I realized I didn’t want to support from the sidelines. I wanted to be immersed in workplace struggle as a rank-and-file worker. That’s where the power is.

The fight for union democracy is an essential part of the socialist movement. That’s why DSA members in the UAW should support a new effort to reform the union.

The Rank-and-File Strategy includes a ton of different ways for DSA members to get involved with rebuilding a labor movement that knows how to fight. It’s all about getting connected to workers in motion.

DSA’s labor work should prioritize developing and empowering a growing layer of rank-and-file workers to fight the bosses and transform our unions into militant and democratic vehicles for class struggle and organizing the unorganized.

The rank-and-file strategy is the most realistic approach to organizing the unorganized. Only transformed unions have the resources to do it on the scale we need.

For decades there’s been a disconnect between the organized Left and the working class. Those connections can be remade if we organize alongside those most willing and able to fight back.

Rank-and-file educators, not union officials, should decide who teachers unions support in 2020.