Labor and the Third-Party Route

Labor and the Third-Party Route

WorkingUSA—Summer 2000 49

WorkingUSA, vol. 4, no.1, Summer 2000, pp. 49–72.© 2000 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.ISSN 1089–7011 / 2000 $9.50 + 0.00.

DAVID REYNOLDS is a faculty member in the Labor Studies Center, Wayne State University. Heis author of Democracy Unbound: Progressive Challenges to the Two Party System (Boston:South End Press, 1997) and Living Wage Campaigns: An Activist’s Guide to Building theMovement for Economic Justice (Washington, DC: ACORN, 2000).

Labor and theThird-Party RouteDavid Reynolds

While there are great obstacles facing third-partyorganizing, several fledgling groups have developedeffective strategies for organizing in the U.S.environment, including the establishment of viablelocal projects linked to union support.

Frustrations with both Republican success and centrist Demo-crats have led to serious discussions as to whether organizedlabor should consider third-party options. At the local level

today, individual unions have become involved in groups like theNew Party, the Labor Party, the Greens, the Vermont Progressive Party,and New York’s Working Families Party. This paper will evaluate thepotential and limitations for these infant currents of third-party ac-tivism to help further organized labor’s political agenda. Are theysimply distractions or do they offer important tools for rebuildingworker political power?

Labor’s Political Crisis

The basic problem facing union political action is straightforward.Too many corporate-oriented politicians continue to be elected to

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50 WorkingUSA—Summer 2000

public office. Michigan, for example, is one of the most unionizedstates in the nation, with one out of four workers belonging to aunion. Yet, the Republican Party controls the governor’s office,both houses of the legislature, and the state supreme court. Cor-porate influence, however, is not restricted to the GOP. Faced witha triumphant Reaganism in the 1980s, the Democratic Party ex-perienced a fierce internal debate over how to respond to the re-surgent conservative movement. Jesse Jackson’s two bids for theDemocratic presidential nomination symbolized the social move-ment–oriented strategy. By moving to the Left around a socialdemocratic agenda, the party could mobilize the silent 50 per-cent of the American public that does not vote. The alternativestrategy, followed by Bill Clinton and other members of theDemocratic Leadership Council, aimed to win over the smallranks of swing voters by moving to the Right with a kinder, gen-tler version of the conservative agenda, purged of its ChristianRight influences.

Today, the Democratic Party presents labor with a complexmixture of political influences ranging from the most pro-laborto the most shameless embrace of corporate America’s agenda.The problems are even deeper, however. Even focusing upon thoseDemocratic officeholders with perfect pro-labor voting records,the party as a whole still fails to provide an adequate vehicle foreffective union politics. To roll back corporate politics and to re-establish momentum for a progressive reform agenda, organizedlabor needs three key elements: first, a clear and effective reformagenda that inspires popular support and political participation;second, a grass-roots mobilizing capacity for bringing the vastranks of nonvoters to the polls (generally speaking, nonvotershave more modest incomes and less professional jobs, and includea large portion of minorities and the young); third, labor needschannels for developing candidates from within its own ranks.

In each of these areas the American party system utterly fails



to provide effective tools. Even when congressional and stateDemocratic delegations vote overwhelmingly along labor’s lineson key votes, corporations and conservative activists continue toset the terms of the overall political agenda. Our nation contin-ues to debate about crime, welfare, tax cuts, and market-basedincentives for business. When official debates do center on labor’sissues—such as social security, Medicare and Medicaid, and edu-cation—the dominant pattern reveals labor and its allies fendingoff the latest conservative efforts to dismantle the public sphere.To recapture political momentum, labor needs to be able to put be-fore the public a clear set of new ideas that replaces corporate domi-nance with creative paths toward greater economic democracy andprivate wealth with public prosperity. Split into different tenden-cies, penetrated with corporate money, and fragmented organiza-tionally, the Democratic Party does not offer a vehicle forgenerating such an agenda. The agenda it does offer is primarilyshort-term. Labor needs a progressive policy vision that it canpush year round—electorally, legislatively, and in the streets. Yetmainstream politics organizes around fragmented, candidate-based issue appeal during the election season followed with policy-by-policy debates thereafter. Such a format does not lead to visionsof wholesale economic and political change. The closest agendaapproaching a decade-long reform project today is the conserva-tive attacks on “big government” and celebrations of the “freemarket.”

Nor do our current party structures provide much of a basisfor grass-roots activism. Over the course of the twentieth cen-tury, both the Republican and Democratic parties allowed theirgrass-roots structures to erode as they pursued a new money-driven, advertising style of politics. Today neither party offersthe organizational capacity for mobilizing the constant 80 and90 percent voter turnouts typical of elections during the nine-teenth century.

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This same organizational erosion means that the DemocraticParty offers poor partial channels for developing candidates fromwithin organized labor’s own ranks. The activities and supportsto recruit, train, and cultivate grass-roots candidates are weak atbest. Because of our nation’s underdeveloped party structures,candidates are forced to run individualized campaigns that re-quire a great deal of personal sacrifice—far more than if theycould tap into the support of a strong party-based politics cen-tered around party tickets, not individual candidates.

In short, organized labor needs access to strong party organi-zations. Indeed, the historical origins of mass membership, grass-roots, agenda-driven modern political parties came at the turn ofthe last century when labor movements in different parts of theworld formed political parties. In Europe, the old elite-centeredparties were then compelled to emulate their working-class ri-vals. In the United States, however, neither the Republicans northe Democrats can be accurately called “parties” in the classicorganizational sense of the term. They are instead loose candi-date-centered networks that come to life during election seasonsand then go largely dormant thereafter. Such political structuresare well suited to a corporate brand of politics centered on per-sonalities, image, and money. They are completely inadequate forunion politics.

The Obstacles to Third-Party Politics

The straightforward solution to labor’s political difficulties wouldbe for it to create its own party. Formed by a coalition of laborand other progressive groups, such a party could offer stronggrass-roots structure for mobilizing people and developing can-didates. Party debates and legislative experience could provide avehicle for articulating a comprehensive political agenda for chal-lenging corporate politics. Indeed, the relative strength of



Europe’s labor movement comes in no small part from its histori-cal ability to found successful working-class political parties. Eventoday, despite creeping pressures of “Americanization,” Europeanpolitics remains in its content and structures far more favorable tolabor than the U.S. version. However, can a new political party re-ally succeed? On the surface, the answer appears to be no.

In comparison to other liberal democracies, the U.S. electionsystem compromises the principles of representational democ-racy in several ways that undermine third-party movements. Ourcountry has some of the most restrictive ballot access laws in theworld. Requirements for official party ballot status are often setquite high, and state legislatures have a history of increasing re-quirements when faced with potential political challenges.1 Thesehurdles are in stark contrast to the often simple filing require-ments common in many other countries.

American-style elections are distinctly dominated by big money.Incumbents receive far more financial support than challengers, themajor parties qualify for matching funds far more easily than thirdparties, and wealthy individuals and corporations outspend progres-sive groups by wide margins. In 1992, fewer than 900,000 Ameri-cans gave a direct individual campaign contribution of $200 or more.Yet, that year 81 percent of congressional campaign money camefrom these high amounts.2 The power of money also translates intocontrol of the media. Even when a progressive candidate is able toforce the national media to acknowledge his or her campaign, thecoverage will, at best, get out fragments of a progressive agenda.When Jesse Jackson ran for president in 1984 and 1988, the corpo-rate media was unable to ignore him. However, the coverage largelyignored his agenda, instead informing voters day after day why hecould not seriously win.3 The United States is one of the few nationsto rely upon private funding and coverage of its elections. In Europeand Canada, for example, public financing and subsidized or freemedia time are standard features.

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The single greatest structural obstacle to third parties, how-ever, comes from our country’s winner-take-all, single-districtelections. Rather than choosing representatives through the kindof proportional systems that allow small, infant parties a voice instate and national legislatures, the United States is one of a hand-ful of countries that break representation down into separatesingle-member districts. Thus, for example, U.S. Greens cannotgain office by winning 5 to 10 percent of the general vote. In-stead, to actually elect anyone, they have to focus on specific geo-graphical districts where they can win the largest bloc of voters.By contrast, the German Greens made world headlines after theywon over 5 percent of the country’s voters because this thresholdqualified them for proportional seats in the national legislature.Not only has proportional representation provided the GermanGreens far greater public visibility, but for years they have beenpart of coalition governments in several state-level parliamentsand most recently in the national legislature.

Proportional representation is clearly a more democratic sys-tem than our winner-take-all methods. In the United States, thepreferences of only those voters lucky enough to back the win-ning candidate are represented. This fact, when coupled with datashowing that a majority of Americans do not vote, leads to alarm-ing statistics showing that only 12–35 percent of those registeredto vote actually chose the person who sat from their district inthe 1994–96 Congress.4 With its inability to represent a minorityof voters, the winner-take-all system is easily used to excludeblacks and other people of color. The shameful limitations of thewinner-take-all system are clearly reflected by the fact that onlytwo other countries, Jamaica and Canada, use it as the exclusivemechanism in their electoral systems.5

While proportional representation can also be used by the Right,the experience of every major industrial country makes clear thatsuch systems favor organized leftist parties. Indeed, a party whose



origins come out of the labor movement is a central political playerin all these countries. Furthermore, our two-party system is al-ready oriented so far to the right that the left side represents theclear growth area. Indeed, research over the years on voting inthe United States consistently reveals a class and race bias amongnonvoters that represents the Left’s natural constituency.

While posing a major barrier, experience in other countries sug-gests that winner-take-all elections do not totally block third-partysuccess. In Canada, the lack of proportional representation didnot stop the New Democratic Party from bringing social democ-racy to that country. Even without ever taking national power,the New Democrats used their grass-roots organizing, provin-cial-level victories, and minority seats in the national legislatureto help put in place progressive reforms, such as a national health-care system. While valuable lessons can be learned from the cur-rent crisis of the New Democrats, we should not forget theirachievements. The contrast between Canada and the UnitedStates on this score is not structural but revolves more aroundthe past relative willingness of each country’s unions to supportthird-party organizing.

Strategies for Third-Party Organizing in anAmerican Context

While the undemocratic mechanisms built into the current U.S.election system pose serious challenges, the greatest obstacle fac-ing a progressive third party in the United States is not externalbut internal. Years of past frustration and a massive amount oftwo-party propaganda have convinced many would-be activistsand labor leaders that independent politics is simply a waste oftime. Yet, clear strategies exist for adapting third-party activityto the existing U.S. framework. The broad outlines of such ap-proaches contain six key ingredients: movement politics, bottom-

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up organizing, long-time horizons, coalition building, electoralflexibility, and popular economics.

Movement Politics

Political projects that simply copy the activities of the two majorparties are doomed to failure. It is a great myth, however, thatour current media-driven, advertising style of campaigns repre-sents the only way to conduct elections. The historical origins ofcurrent practices came not from technological innovations suchas television, as it is often assumed, but from political struggles.Indeed, historians have traced the first modern forms of election-eering to the turn of the twentieth century—an era prior to tele-vision and radio, in which the two-party system battled powerfulPopulist and Socialist challenges.6 In organizing for politicalchange, progressives must look toward their own social move-ment traditions, rather than professional campaign managers,for long-range models. The basic staple of progressive activismgenerally—door-to-door, round the year, grass-roots, issue-drivenorganizing—applies to electoral politics as well.

With a majority of Americans staying home on election day,the key to winning lasting political power in this country lies inremobilizing a demobilized electorate. The largest party in thiscountry is literally neither the Democrats nor the Republicansbut the party of nonvoters. Both scholarly research and practi-cal experience suggest that the advertising style of electionsgenerally fails to inspire increased voter turnout and may sim-ply increase apathy. Having an inspiring, positive candidate,however, is not enough. In 1988, Jesse Jackson won over 7 millionvotes not just because of his progressive message, but also be-cause literally tens of thousands of volunteers organized in theircommunities to get people to the polls using classic-style door-to-door campaigning.7



Movement politics can also transform structural obstacles intoorganizing tools. The major left-wing parties in Europe originallyorganized in a context of fighting for universal suffrage. In NewZealand, a coalition of small third parties helped win a recentpublic referendum changing the nation’s election system fromwinner-take-all to a German-style proportional representationmodel. In a similar vein, genuine campaign finance reform,through full public financing, has proven a popular cause suc-cessfully championed by groups such as the New Party in severallocal communities and labor-community coalitions in state bal-lot initiative wins in Maine, Massachusetts, and Arizona. TheVermont legislature also passed a public financing law. Becausethe Greens have repeatedly gained vote margins sufficient to denyDemocrats’ electoral victories, the New Mexico Democratic Partyhas expressed serious interest in establishing “instant runoff”–style representation. An alliance of Democrats, Republicans, andProgressives has introduced a similar reform in the Vermont leg-islature. Such elections would allow voters to choose, as their firstchoice, the party that they truly support, and then vote for the“lesser evil” as their second choice.

Build from the Ground Up

Ironically, today’s most successful progressive political projectsare the ones that receive the least attention. All too often,progressives follow the media’s lead in looking to national poli-tics as their focal point for political change. Yet, a long list of pro-gressive reforms—from women’s suffrage, to the minimum wage,to the abolition of slavery, to the two-day weekend—all beganwith victories at the local and state level. Right-wing groups suchas the Christian Coalition have well realized the effectiveness ofbuilding from the ground up by fostering active local groupsaround targeted issue and election campaigns.

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Local elections should provide the bread and butter of progres-sive activism. The vast majority of all these contests are nonpar-tisan. With no party label on the ballot, a candidacy can hardlybe stigmatized as “hopeless” simply because it comes from a thirdparty. Local contests generally are the most readily open to grass-roots organizing by fledgling groups. And these offices hold powerover decisions in such areas as school curriculum, zoning, laborstandards, civil rights, and economic development that have amajor impact on people’s lives.

Long-Term Strategy

While social movements may experience periods in which theyappear to explode onto the scene, the historical details of suchmass events as the great labor organizing wave of 1936–1937 orthe mushrooming civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s re-veal many years of slow, often only partially successful organiz-ing that laid the seeds for the mass awakenings that followed. Toremobilize the apathetic majority, a progressive political projectmust reestablish grass-roots channels for people to experience poli-tics. This bottom-up, movement-oriented political strategy requirespatient step-by-step efforts aimed at fostering an ever-growing ar-ray of active local groups. Our winner-take-all election system helpsensure that most electoral expressions of progressive third-partystrength will come as periods of patient organizing followed byseemingly sudden breakthroughs once progressives cross thethreshold into electoral pluralities.

A long-term strategy compels organizers to rethink their defi-nitions of success. Conventional political wisdom does not takeany political project seriously that does not contest for nationalpolitical power. Yet, between where progressives are situated nowand sitting in the Oval Office is a wide spectrum of potential po-litical gains. Local and state governments set policies that have a



major impact on people’s lives. Furthermore, a political projectdoes not have to govern outright in order to impact public policyand debate. Electing a few people to a local or state legislativebody may not establish a progressive majority, but it does giveactivists clear champions who can provide critical support tomovement-style issue campaigns seeking to change publicpolicy.

Coalition Building

To be seen as serious and to gain access to the resources needed tosustain ongoing grass-roots organizing, progressive politicalprojects must draw in a broad spectrum of local progressivegroups. Most progressives are quite frustrated with the state ofAmerican electoral politics. The key to gaining their active sup-port is offering believable projects that do not waste their time.Organizers must understand where different groups are in theirstrategic understanding. A political project must, in turn, offerthese groups a course of action that represents a next logical stepin their political development.

Political Flexibility

The tasks of coalition building and patient, bottom-up organiz-ing require a level of political flexibility that has proven quitecontroversial. Many activists seek to declare their political inde-pendence first, draw up a detailed political platform next, andthen go out to try to organize mass support. Very often such astraightforward approach fails, however, because it does not fitwith local conditions. Ultimately, the goal of overthrowing thetwo-party system is best served by strategies that successfully pro-mote active movement building, rather than those that dogmati-cally draw the clearest political battle lines.

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Because of the distinct nature of the U.S. political system, inde-pendent progressive politics must have an evolving relationshipwith the Democratic Party—one that adapts to local situations.In some cases, the best course of action is to run candidates asindependents or on a third-party ballot line. In other cases, how-ever, the winner-take-all system may compel activists to capturethe Democratic ballot line tactically for situations in whichblurred electoral success proves far more valuable than indepen-dent failure. Fledgling groups, for example, can benefit enormouslyfrom the experience of simply running a successful election cam-paign. Placing progressive third-party champions in public of-fice, regardless of the ballot line on which they ran, also canprovide a crucial tool for pushing a grass-roots issue agenda thatreceives public attention. Furthermore, political organizers musthave a strategy for interacting with those genuinely committedprogressive individuals and groups, many with strong connec-tions to labor, who have operated within the Democratic Partysimply because it traditionally has been the only game in town.Throwing down a one-dimensional “us-or-them” gauntlet willsimply marginalize third-party organizers.

Popular Economics

While a progressive political agenda must span many issues, theproblem of corporate power and the call for economic democ-racy provide the unifying rallying cry of progressive politics. It isno accident that both major parties have agreed to keep corpo-rate power the best-kept secret in the official national debate.Challenging corporate power offers the common issue for unit-ing a broad majority. A 1998 poll by the Preamble Institute re-vealed public sentiment of 70 percent or higher in favor of publiccontrols over corporate behavior.

Organized labor’s traditional top priorities—decent jobs, less



corporate downsizing, a living wage, national health care, pro-tecting workers’ right to organize—all figure as prominent as-pects of popular economics. However, the problem of corporatepower touches many other aspects of life as well. American capi-talism is utterly incapable of valuing any aspects of life that donot have a price tag. As a result, economic issues encompass awide set of questions, including our nation’s treatment of childrearing, retirement, the natural environment, the manmade en-vironment, and the overall quality of life and basic happiness ofthe population.

Today’s Third Parties and Organized Labor

The New Party

Founded in 1992, the New Party won roughly two hundred vic-tories out of three hundred races entered. The party has estab-lished active chapters in Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland,Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New York, Oregon, andWisconsin.

The New Party’s relative success is rooted in the six strategicelements outlined above. New Party activity centers not on can-didates but on developing grass-roots structures through whichordinary people can organize in their own communities. Orga-nizers aim to recruit effective leadership at a block-by-block levelthat will sustain ongoing and active neighborhood organizations.In several cities, for example, New Party activists used living wagecampaigns to speak with residents, build support for local livingwage ordinances, and identify new volunteers and members.

Issue work has figured as prominent as electoral campaigningin New Party activity. The New Party has benefited from the lead-ership role it exercised in fostering living-wage campaigns in sev-eral communities. Through such issue campaigns, New Partyactivists have built solid relationships with other local progres-

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sive groups. In Chicago, for example, the New Party scored amajor victory in 1999 when its chair, Ted Thomas, won electionto the city’s board of aldermen. Several years of living-wage ac-tivism had built relations with several unions and communityorganizations that proved key in mustering the people powernecessary to defeat the powerful Democratic machine. Those samerelationships had helped the New Party in 1998 to elect WillieDelgado to the Illinois state assembly and Michael Chandler asan alderman.

In Little Rock, years of informal cooperation between the localAssociation of Community Organizations for Reform Now(ACORN) and the central labor council have been transformedinto a formal partnership for campaigning around living wages,fair and affordable housing, worker justice, and so on. Havingbeen involved in these issues for several years and having devel-oped candidates committed to them, the local New Party has beenable to tie into this cooperation—winning four out of ten seats onthe city’s board of directors with ACORN and labor support.Across the country, New Party chapters have played leading rolesin battles over police accountability, campaign finance reform,local spending priorities, land use and control over sprawl, andpublic school reform.

The New Party rejects election campaigns that are seen as pri-marily educational, preferring to focus on races and campaignsthat it has a credible chance of winning on delivering a strongshowing. This is why the New Party has run few candidates fornational office and did not support Ralph Nader’s 1996 presi-dential bid.

The New Party has drawn a fair degree of criticism on the Leftbecause of its advocacy of legalizing fusion and its willingness torun candidates on the Democratic ballot line. Most New Partycampaigns have been for local nonpartisan offices, and in Wis-consin and Minnesota the New Party has sought an independent



ballot line. However, roughly one out of five candidates have beeninvolved in partisan contests in which local chapters enteredDemocratic primaries. Since such tactics blur political distinc-tions, they come with a price and therefore have to be continu-ally reevaluated. For both partisan and nonpartisan offices, localchapters have shown a willingness, for example, to cancel theirsupport for elected candidates who the group feels have not re-mained true to their grass-roots base.

However, thus far ballot flexibility has clearly aided New Partysuccess in building growing chapters that local progressivegroups have taken seriously. For example, through its electoralflexibility, the New Party has been able to go to local unions andask them to support specific winnable candidacies, rather thanmaking a wholesale break with their traditional Democratic po-litical action work. As local New Party chapters gain success af-ter success, they build stronger ties and credibility with localunions—becoming increasingly relevant vehicles for union po-litical work. Roughly two out of five New Party members are ei-ther in unions or in some way connected to the labor movement.In particular, local chapters have built strong working relation-ships with unions such as the Service Employees InternationalUnion (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County, andMunicipal Employees (AFSCME), and the National EducationAssociation (NEA).

The New Party’s electoral flexibility has also helped it build agenuine multiracial organization. At least a third of the NewParty’s candidates and membership are people of color. New Partyorganizers target issues, candidates, and geographical areas thatwill produce multiracial organizing. Furthermore, a significantnumber of the New Party candidates elected as Democrats havebeen people of color. They include Danny Davis, elected as thefirst New Party member of Congress. While Davis joined the NewParty and agreed to promote it, he ran as a Democrat. In the one-

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party system of Chicago, challenging the machine-endorsed can-didate in a Democratic primary was in itself a bold undertaking.Running independently at the current stage would have been al-together political suicide. By having the flexibility to go with thelogic of the local situation, the New Party won a major upset inChicago politics and furthered its grass-roots organizing withinthe black community.

It is only because it is seen as a serious political player that theNew Party has been able to raise the resources necessary to sup-port local organizing with paid staff. Dedicated volunteers mayprovide a movement’s energy. However, grass-roots groups canbest sustain themselves over the long term when they are sup-ported by full- and part-time activists.

Unlike many other third parties, the New Party has deliber-ately avoided drafting a detailed political platform, preferringto wait until grass-roots activity has developed to a point wherenational conventions can bring together experienced local ac-tivists with a wealth of experiences. In the meantime, a gen-eral set of principles and locally based platforms support localorganizing. The party frames its activities in terms of challeng-ing corporate power, developing economic and political democ-racy, and uniting the nation’s cities with their surroundinginner-ring suburbs.

The Greens

The diversity of Green groups highlights the importance of oursix elements. Generally speaking, the most successful of theGreen groups have followed the common elements we haveoutlined.

For example, seeking ballot access and running candidates forthe “big name” races has not by itself been the key to Green partybuilding. Several fledgling state Green Parties have won state-wide ballot status only to lose it in subsequent elections. Efforts



to gain an official ballot line were not accompanied by system-atic efforts to expand active grass-roots groups through targeted,and more winnable, local electoral contests and issue campaigns.The most successful Green parties, such as the California and NewMexico Greens, have run slates that include electing activists tolocal office, built coalitions with progressive groups, and fosteredactive local chapters.

While Ralph Nader’s 1996 campaign on a Green Party ballotline drew some new activists into the movement, many Greengroups face the ongoing risk of sacrificing success in more viablelocal contests by devoting their scarce energy to marginal cam-paigns for president, governor, Congress, etc. By contrast, theCalifornia Greens elected the first third-party candidate to thestate legislature since 1917 because a foundation had been laidover several years. Today, the Greens have thirty-five local officeholders throughout California.

Green politics combines environmental issues and social jus-tice by critiquing corporate power. Following the election of aGreen council majority in 1996, Arcata, California, became thefirst city in the nation to pass popular referenda on corporatepower. The new law established two town meetings around thetheme of “Can we have democracy when large corporations wieldso much power and wealth under the law?” and mandated that thecity council pursue mechanisms for increasing public control overcorporate activity within the city.

Despite the potential for substantial common ground, Greenactivism reflects the general separation between the environmen-tal movement and the labor movement. Green activists come outof the environmental, peace, women’s, and other New Left move-ments. They are generally as unfamiliar with unions as unionsare with them. However, where local Green chapters have becomeserious political players, Green candidates have been able to pick uplabor support.

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The Labor Party

When the question of third-party politics is raised, the organiza-tion most readily identified with unions is the Labor Party. Its listof endorsing unions does indeed show a clear base for indepen-dent political action within the U.S. labor movement. By May 1998,almost 250 local unions and regional labor bodies had endorsedthe Labor Party. Its membership totals more than 1 million unionmembers. The list includes the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Work-ers, the United Electrical Workers, the Longshoremen, the Broth-erhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, the United MineWorkers, the American Federation of Government Employees, theFarm Labor Organizing Committee, the California State NursesAssociation, the UNITE Midwest Regional Joint Board, severalcentral labor councils, and several smaller national unions. Unionssuch as the Service Employees have not formally endorsed theLabor Party but have lent financial and other support.

The Labor Party’s success in attracting institutional support,however, has been matched by the checkered record of on-the-ground activism. Generally, local chapters have not grown intoactive groups recognized in local politics. Until the end of 1998,the party’s strategy was strictly nonelectoral, and even today ithas yet to mount an electoral campaign. Understandably, the partyhas not wanted to present unions with electoral contests thatunion leaders would accurately view as hopeless. However, lay-ing the foundation for serious candidacies requires cultivatingactive local chapters and networks. Either the party has to offersmall-scale electoral projects that are within viable reach of fledg-ling local groups, or it must generate issue campaigns that builda similar momentum. Thus far, the party has developed neither.The Labor Party’s blanket commitment not to touch the Demo-cratic ballot line or any candidates who use it makes the thresh-old for serious electoral work all the higher. It also prevents localchapters from formally participating in any of the AFL-CIO’s



current efforts to recruit union activists to run for local publicoffice.

A two-year educational campaign around an amendment tothe U.S. Constitution recognizing a right to a job at a decent wagefailed to provide local groups a mechanism for serious coalitionbuilding or sustained membership recruitment. A new Just HealthCare campaign similarly appears to be maintaining the LaborParty’s preference for largely educational work unconnected toefforts to enact actual policies.

Indeed, official Labor Party strategies remain remarkably dis-connected from the many currents of progressive activism de-veloping across the country—such as living-wage campaigns,corporate accountability efforts, and progressive election cam-paign finance reform. These efforts offer opportunities to com-bine specific winnable reforms with broad coalition building.Along the key dimensions of agenda setting, grass-roots mobili-zation, and candidate development, the Labor Party has yet tolive up to its potential for offering organized labor opportunitiesbeyond those available through its conventional political work.

Progressive Vermont

In 1981, by a plurality of only ten votes, independent and social-ist Bernie Sanders became Burlington’s new mayor in what hadbeen a staunch Democratic town. Nineteen years later, Burling-ton’s Progressive Coalition continues to govern, four Progressivessit in the state house, and Sanders is serving his fifth term in theU.S. Congress. Unfortunately, all too many commentaries havewritten off Bernie Sanders and the Progressives as a phenomenonunique to college towns and the “hippie” aspects of Vermont.However, the progressive vote has been rooted in class politics.In Burlington, the Progressive Coalition’s dominance came bydisplacing the Democrats in the poorest and most neglected parts

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of the town. Sanders’s statewide vote similarly reveals a strongclass pattern.

Sanders shored up union support in 1988 when he ran for Con-gress. Although he did not win, he relegated the Democratic can-didate to 3 percent of the vote. Running in 1990 with full laborendorsements, he won by 16 percentage points and has remainedin Congress despite concerted Republican efforts to unseat him.Sanders has used his resources as a member of Congress to en-courage networking among Vermont’s unions and to link themwith other progressive groups. Today, Vermont’s unions will facefurther political choices. After years of networking and electionwork, progressive electoral activists launched a new politicalparty last November. The Progressive Party of Vermont has al-ready chosen long-time activist Anthony Pollina to run for gov-ernor in 2000. Thanks to Vermont’s new public finance law,Pollina’s campaign will likely receive public funds to run at lev-els comparable to the Democrats and Republicans.

New York’s Working Families Party

The New Party had hoped to revive an old fusion strategy of cross-endorsements between parties. In 1998 these hopes received amajor setback when the U.S. Supreme Court shamelessly upheldthe two-party system by declaring laws banning fusion in a ma-jority of states to be constitutional. New York, however, not onlyis one of the few states that allow fusion, but has an active his-tory of minor parties that use cross-endorsements. The 1998founding of a new New York Working Families Party illustratedwhat the New Party had hoped to open up throughout the coun-try. With key support from the Communications Workers ofAmerica (CWA), the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Teamsters,the Buffalo Teachers Federation, ACORN, and the New Party, theWorking Families Party (WFP) won ballot status when over 50,000



voters selected the Democratic Party’s nominee for governor onthe WFP ballot line.

The Working Families Party aims to build up an organizationalpolitical voice for working people, while avoiding asking its sup-porters to endorse spoiler candidates that allow Republicans towin. When Democrats are elected by margins that come from theWFP ballot line, the party gains leverage. A progressive voice be-comes even stronger when the joint candidate comes from withinthe WFP’s coalition. The Working Families Party also provides aframework for unions and other groups to engage in authenticand independent party work: developing an agenda, mobilizingthe grass roots, and fostering candidates. In 1999, the party cross-endorsed 226 candidates. In two New York City council races,the WFP received 10 and 12 percent of the vote, helping elect EvaMoskowitz and Christine Quinn. The WFP also provided mar-gins of victory in races in Hempstead, Woodstock, Nassau County,and Dutchess County. The party also gained 14 percent of thevote along with the Greens in a common cross-endorsed candi-date who ran against an entrenched Democratic incumbent inBrooklyn.

Labor and the Third-Party Path

The above overview suggests that third-party organizing withlabor support is possible today under the right conditions. Indeed,it can provide a valuable option in the labor movement’s politi-cal toolbox. Obviously, other options are also available. As thearticles on LEAP and Working Partnerships USA in this issue sug-gest, unions can develop agendas, recruit candidates, and fostergrass-roots activism using various party-within-a-party strate-gies. For the foreseeable future, these will likely be the more domi-nant channels through which the labor movement will seek torevitalize its political action. While they have many advantages,

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especially in terms of gaining union support, party-within-a-partystrategies risk shaky public visibility as the media and the politi-cal establishment subsume the group’s candidates, activities, andagenda under the rubric of conventional two-party politics. Aseparate political party makes a project’s organizational exist-ence and agenda clearer to both the outside world and would-besupporters.

The third party route, however, must overcome the reluctanceof labor and other groups to step outside the strict Democraticbox. This does not always happen. For example, when formed in1991, the New Party’s Milwaukee chapter had a great deal of po-tential. Its leadership included the then secretary-treasurer of theMilwaukee AFL-CIO and the president of the Transit WorkersUnion. It succeeded in electing candidates to the county board,one to the state legislature, and several to the school board. Citycouncillor Don Richards also officially joined the New Party. How-ever, the local chapter was never able to grow past these initialsuccesses. In nearby Madison, the New Party succeeded in estab-lishing progressive voting blocs large enough to help set the localpolitical agenda and decide the balance of power at the city andcounty levels. Thus the New Party became a vehicle for localunions and other progressive groups to advance their own politi-cal goals. By contrast, the Milwaukee local chapter was never ableto make this leap. Activists voted to disband the stagnant chap-ter in 1998.

Such successes and failures highlight the conditions that makesuch an option viable. Is the local Democratic Party weak—ei-ther by alienating core union and other supporters through con-servative leanings or by proving unable to defeat Republicans?Are there opportunities for establishing a progressive alternativethrough which unions and other groups can fulfill their goals?Would a fledgling organization have the opportunities to cap-ture a meaningful presence on local elected bodies? Alternatively,



does a vacuum exist in local union and progressive politics intowhich a third-party organization could provide agenda devel-opment, grass-roots projects, or candidates? The most viable third-party projects are those that offer unions and other groupspossibilities for expanding their current political activities, ratherthan forcing them to choose between the Democrats and a fledg-ling experiment.

Discussions about progressive political often conjure up images ofstorming the White House or simply gaining national attention. Thepotential for such a large-scale political shift is not entirely beyondthe capacity of this country. Indeed, one hundred years ago the po-litical revolt that gave birth to the People’s Party and the SocialistParty did come close to breaking the two-party monopoly in a na-tion divided over fundamental economic questions. The strength ofthese movements is apparent from the blatantly undemocratic andoften illegal methods the major parties used to defeat them.8 How-ever, today such potential represents a long-range possibility requir-ing the further development of social and economic conditions. Forexample, the current political and economic contradictions alreadyfostering third parties will be magnified many times once the cur-rent boom cycle hits the inevitable economic downturn.

In the meantime, a modest focus on today’s possibilities does sug-gest valuable and doable ways in which third-party activism canbecome part of rebuilding a progressive movement in this country.Indeed, American history is filled with examples of how indepen-dent political action helped foster social activism. Throughout thenineteenth century the American labor movement engaged in inde-pendent political work fostering active local political power in work-ing-class communities across the country. For groups such as theKnights of Labor, this political action could even be more importantthan bargaining with employers. In 1911, more than 1,200 SocialistParty members held office throughout the country. In such socialistcities as Milwaukee and Reading, third-party political strength and

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union strength went hand in hand—mutually reinforcing each other.The general working-class upheavals that compelled the passage ofNew Deal legislation in the 1930s also included vibrant local andstate third-party activities.

The same possibilities exist today and will continue to grow inthe future. Third-party activity does not have to be a “pie in thesky” leap of faith, but a realistic path for beginning to rebuildlabor political power. The next decade should see continuedgrowth in both third-party work and party-within-a-party ac-tivity. Both have the same immediate goals of raising a progres-sive agenda, developing activist candidates, and remobilizingAmerica’s political grass roots. It is through this patient long-term political work that local bases of progressive power are es-tablished, inroads into state legislatures are made, and thepossibilities for wholesale national change are moved from therealm of hopeful dreams to practical reality.

Notes

1. Edited by Richard Winger, the newsletter Ballot Access News is devoted to detail-ing these obstacles and profiling efforts by groups to overcome and change them.Ballot Access News, Box 470296, San Francisco, CA 94147, (415) 922–9779.

2. John Bonifaz, “Losing Our Vote in the Wealth Primary” (Center for Voting andDemocracy, 1995), pp. 130–31.

3. David Reynolds, Democracy Unbound: Progressive Challenges to the Two-PartySystem (Boston: South End Press, 1997), pp. 114–19.

4. “Representation Index” for the 1994 election is compiled by the Center for Vot-ing and Democracy, 6905 Fifth St., NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20012.

5. In Great Britain, the delegation to the European Parliament and the Scottishlegislative body are selected by proportional representation. In 1997, Tony Blair cam-paigned on the possibility for switching elections to the national Parliament to pro-portional representation as well.

6. Robert Dinkins, Campaigning in America: A History of Election Politics (New York:Greenwood Press, 1991).

7. For documented evidence of how grass-roots activity, and not simply Jackson’scandidacy, raised voter turnout, see Reynolds, Democracy Unbound, chap. 4.

8. Reynolds, Democracy Unbound, chap. 2.

To order reprints, call 1-800-352-2210; outside the United States, call 717-632-3535.

Documents

Labor and the Third-Party Route