In Pennsylvania, Democrats have passed bills in the state House to raise the minimum wage and enshrine the right to collective bargaining in the state constitution. They were able to do so in part because DSA and the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO joined forces to elect legislators like Elizabeth Fiedler; unions, teachers, and pro-choice groups also came together to back Lindsay Powell. What Maurice Mitchell, national director of the WFP, called “the broader movement left” and labor also united to elect Brandon Johnson mayor of Chicago and send Greg Casar of Texas to Congress in 2022. Alexa Avilés, a New York City council member in Brooklyn, won her 2021 race with strong support from unions, the WFP, and DSA—thanks, she said, to a shared focus on prioritizing the needs of “people over profit.”
The language left-leaning groups use today—people over profits, workers over bosses, ordinary or working people over elites—has clear antecedents in left-wing movements like Occupy and political campaigns like Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs. Now a number of prominent labor leaders have adopted this language as well, signaling a return to labor’s radical roots. The UAW’s Shawn Fain has described the autoworkers’ strike as a struggle between the “billionaire class” and the “working class;” Stacy Davis Gates, who heads the Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, recently vowed to prioritize “the voices of the many” by fighting “tooth and nail” to ensure that supporters of school choice and privatization do not infect Chicago’s board of education with “fascism and racism;” and Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, spoke in 2021 about the transformative power of having the legal standing, via a union, to “make capital have to respond to working people.”
Thanks to the renewed vigor of each, the left and labor are now on the cusp of forging a more durable alliance. Olivia Killingsworth, a DSA organizer and SAG-AFTRA member, said it’s been heartening to see how coordinated and supportive of each other’s campaigns New York City unions have been, “from the bottom to the top.” More tempered in his read of the landscape was Jesse Sharkey, former president of the CTU. He acknowledged some “bright spots” but said that overall, he doesn’t see “the kind of risk taking and confrontation with capital that we’re going to need in order to win.” Meanwhile, Wuchinich believes that labor’s biggest opportunity to build power lies in bringing more people into the movement. “We build real power when people make the decision to stand up and fight their bosses,” she said, and when they “expect more from themselves than the rest of the world has been expecting from them.”