Challenging and Changing Union Decisions About Politics Takes Rank-And-File Action

The experience of seeing fellow union members fall for the faux populism of Donald Trump in 2024 has led to much soul-searching about why working-class people vote for billionaire-backed candidates—or don’t vote at all.

In 2016 and 2020, unlike last year, labor voters had a chance to rally around a candidate for the presidency who campaigned against the “billionaire class” (and is still doing so as part of his current “Fighting the Oligarchy” tour).

Within organized labor, a grassroots network of union activists strongly supported Bernie Sanders’ two bids for the White House. Campaigning under the banner of “Labor for Bernie” (L4B), they helped shape rank-and-file opinion for the better, put pressure on the national AFL-CIO and its affiliates to make political endorsements more democratically, and, in Democratic presidential primaries, helped boost turn-out for a candidate actually worthy of the union label.

Rank-and-filers trying to make their voices heard, in such oppositional fashion in the future, will face similar difficulty challenging and changing leadership decisions about what politicians to back or not. 

Those hoping to launch more labor-backed independent candidacies, outside a corporate-dominated Democratic Party, will get even more push-back from the AFL-CIO and its affiliates—if their past levels of support for Sanders are any guide. 

Yet the political and economic upheavals triggered by Trump’s second presidency will inevitably create cross-union insurgencies and internal union ones, leading, in some cases, to greater receptiveness to the idea of doing politics differently. That’s why the lessons of two rounds of L4B campaigning, as recalled below, remain timely and relevant at the moment.

Labor for Bernie, 2016

Bernie Sanders’ announcement in March, 2015 that he was running for president was initially regarded by supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton as just a minor irritant. Corporate Democrats viewed the then U.S. Senator, former Congressman, and ex-mayor of Burlington, Vt. with particular resentment as a party crasher. 

For the previous 45 years, he had been a frequent critic of both major parties. He also proudly maintained his ballot line brand as an “Independent,” rather than become a Democrat (while he caucused with them in the House and Senate).  Most Clintonites viewed the anti-war socialist as a marginal protest candidate of the Dennis Kucinich sort, who wouldn’t win a single state primary (other than possibly Vermont’s).

Unfortunately for Clinton and a national AFL-CIO eager to endorse her, Sanders started out with a few more out-of-state friends than they realized—and quickly attracted hundreds of thousands more. Among them were union activists in the northeast with much past personal experience working with Bernie on key labor causes, locally, regionally, and nationally. Sanders’ working-class orientation, political independence, and rejection of corporate money was a major selling point for them, not a personal liability. 

As Don Trementozzi, leader of a Communications Workers of America (CWA) local based in New Hampshire, pointed out: “Bernie was not on the fence or the wrong side, like Hillary Clinton, when our union was campaigning against the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). He was helping us lead the fight against that job killing free trade deal back by Democrats and Republicans alike.” 

John Murphy, a Carpenters Local 40 steward in Lowell, Mass., favored Sanders because of his “long record of supporting workers and their right to unionize.” When some fellow building trades members questioned whether Bernie could win, Murphy told them: “That’s up to us!”

On June 25, 2015, Trementozzi and Murphy joined 1,000 other local union elected officers, shop stewards, organizers and rank-and-file members from 50 states and 57 different unions who kicked off “Labor for Bernie 2016.”

They urged their respective national unions and the AL-CIO to get behind the only presidential candidate “who challenges the billionaires who are trying to steal our pensions, our jobs, our homes, and what’s left of our democracy.”

In a letter sent the same day to then AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, Labor for Bernie (L4B) supporters strongly objected to any “premature endorsement” made without “the broadest possible membership participation in the electoral process.”

Instead, they urged the labor federation and its affiliates to sponsor grassroots candidate forums and debates, throughout the primary season, and forego making any presidential pick until the 2016 primaries were over.

Not Feeling the Bern?

This was definitely not the preferred time-table of the Clinton campaign or top union officials. So Trumka, John Podesta, Clinton’s Campaign Manager, and Nikki Budzinski, her Labor Outreach Director, began conferring about how to overcome any delay in the AFL-CIO executive council’s endorsement of Clinton by the required 2/3 vote.

One such conversation with Trumka on this matter was held four months after L4B was launched. As WikiLeaks later disclosed, the AFL-CIO president, in Podesta’s words, was very “keen on convincing union members that they could trust HRC to fight for them.” According to Trumka, as recounted by Podesta, few unions were “feeling the Bern,” “only APWU was likely to endorse him” and, if “pushed hard,” Larry Hanley, then president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) “might end up endorsing HRC.” 

Podesta informed fellow Clinton campaign staffers that Trumka “didn’t think CWA was likely to go with Bernie” either and that “Larry Cohen [its recently retired national president] wasn’t playing that well at his surrogate appearances” in front of other labor audiences.

At the time of this exchange, CWA was–as recommended by the AFL-CIO itself—in the middle of a three-month process of membership meetings, telephone town halls, and other forms of information sharing about the 2016 presidential candidates, both Democrat and Republican. 

The results of a binding on-line CWA membership poll, released in early December, 2015, were not what Trumka predicted. Thanks to Cohen’s high-profile work as Sanders’ main emissary to the labor movement and voter turn-out efforts, within CWA, by L4B supporters and their locals, CWA did “go with Bernie.” As CWA spokesperson Candice Johnson told The Intercept. “Tens of thousands of members voted in the poll, with Sanders getting a decisive majority.” 

Headaches for Hillary

By this point in 2015, ten other national unions had, via their usual top-down decision-making, endorsed Clinton as fast as they could. But, as a headline in Bloomberg News warned: “Labor for Bernie Means Headaches for Hillary,” that were just beginning. Contrary to Trumka’s forecast, Cohen worked successfully with several other former AFL-CIO executive council colleagues whose unions became Bernie backers—including Hanley at the ATU, RoseAnn DeMoro at National Nurses United (NNU), and Mark Dimondstein, who is still president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU).

Before the 2016 primary season was over, the total membership of national unions in the Labor for Bernie camp reached one million (although only CWA backed him as a result of membership voting, as opposed to a leadership decision). L4B backers included both AFL-CIO affiliates and independents like the United Electrical Workers (UE) and International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).

Plus, Sanders won the backing of more than 100 local unions around the country, including many affiliated with national unions backing Clinton. Vocal minorities raised hell in the building trades, SEIU, AFSCME, and both major teachers’ unions when their top officials ignored membership advocacy on Sanders’ behalf.

Through grassroots organizing and on-line signature gathering, funded with a budget of less than $5,000, L4Bdeveloped a mailing list of 50,000 activists. They pledged to work, within their own unions and communities, to help Sanders win Democratic primaries in their respective states. As Donald Trump emerged as the likely Republican presidential nominee, Sanders continued to argue that he, not Hillary Clinton, was the general election candidate best positioned to counter Trump’s appeal to working-class voters, disenchanted with business as usual. 

During the June, 2016 Democratic primary in New York, while losing to Clinton there, Sanders even challenged Trump to a debate—an invitation the latter wisely declined—to prove this point. The national AFL-CIO did not officially endorse his opponent until that same month, long after the late February executive council meeting at which Trumka originally hoped to confirm the federation’s backing of Clinton.

Before she became the party’s nominee, with critical backing from un-elected Democratic National Convention “super-delegates,” union activists helped Sanders win primary elections in 23 states and amass 13 million votes overall. About 250 Labor for Bernie supporters won delegate slots at the DNC in August, 2016, where they continued to rally other Democrats against free trade and for Medicare for All.

A Hard Act to Follow?

After the fall general election campaign, Labor for Bernie co-founder Rand Wilson and former ILWU Organizing Director Peter Olney were optimistic that Sanders supporters would remain part of an on-going, cross-union formation. All that was needed, they argued, was “sufficient union resources to coordinate our work” and labor leadership willing to “form a coordinating body and staff to begin implementing a unifying program in selected campaigns at the state and national level.”

This “new force for a democratic economy would also tackle issues like climate change and “our permanent war economy and militarized foreign policy.”

Such ambitious post-election goals proved hard to achieve, despite the promising June, 2017 launch of Labor for Our Revolution., which tried to steer trade unionists toward the 300 local or state committees then rallying former Sanders supporters under the banner of Our Revolution (OR).

Six months before, a surprising number of recent Labor for Bernie veterans had already detached themselves from its national mailing list, after they received a general election appeal to elect Clinton. And, without the unifying focus of the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, even pro-Bernie national unions “soon reverted to doing their own thing in politics,” Wilson recalls.

OR remains a key organizational advocate for Democratic Party rules reform, foe of big money in politics, and backer of progressive candidates, many of whom were inspired by Sanders’s first race. Chaired by Larry Cohen, OR aided Sanders’ second presidential campaign and continues to champion workers’ rights and grassroots opposition to the wide-ranging Republican attacks on democracy, unleashed after Jan. 20 of this year. 

The difficulty of fostering a durable vehicle for independent political initiatives, rooted in unions, was the subject of a recent phone conversation with now retired California Nurses Association/NNU leader RoseAnn DeMoro, a key Labor for Bernie advocate in 2016.  As DeMoro lamented, “The hold of the Democratic Party on organized labor is something to behold.” And the truth of that was definitely on display in 2019-20.

Labor for Bernie, 2020

Three years after the Electoral College put Trump, rather than Clinton, in the White House, the Democratic presidential primary field for 2020 looked, initially, nothing like the eventual two-person duel between Sanders and Clinton in 2016. Nearly 20 Democrats—including two of Trump’s fellow billionaires—competed to replace him.

This created far more difficult terrain for the second iteration of Labor for Bernie. Sanders now faced competition not just from a plethora of corporate Democrats but also from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, long identified with many progressive causes. As a result, recalls one Sanders advisor, his pandemic disrupted second run for the presidency “didn’t have the same magic” or single galvanizing primary opponent, with a questionable record of support for labor.

L4B was officially re-launched in May, 2019. With an eventual budget of $35,000, it was able to hire some full-time help, a departure from the all-volunteer effort three years before. Local committees became active again in LA, the Bay Area, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities. As in 2016, they circulated petitions seeking labor voter pledges to support Sanders in the primaries. They organized debate parties, spoke on Bernie’s behalf at local union meetings, and marched in Labor Day parades.

According to Paul Prescod, then a teacher’s union activist in Philly, L4B lobbied the local labor council to host a “Workers Presidential Summit,” featuring seven candidates, and then turned out supporters for the event. Hundreds of union members attended but, Prescod recalls, it ended up having “a sleepy feeling,” particularly when Joe Biden spoke. Bernie, per usual, got the most cheers—when he called for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and a Workplace Democracy Act.

In a crowded primary field, rank-and-file cheering did not translate into as much official labor backing as Bernie received four years before. In late September, 2019, Jonah Furman, the labor outreach coordinator for Sanders’ second campaign, reported that its only national union endorser so far was the UE. That smaller union was later joined by two larger organizational backers of Bernie in 2016– the APWU and NNU. 

The latter, whose independent spending on Sanders behalf reached $1 million, according to one former staff member, devoted only a fraction of those resources the second time around. After a post-2016 change in presidents, neither the ILWU and ATU endorsed Sanders again.

Members Demand A Voice!

In a September, 2019, article for Labor Notes entitled “Members Demand a Voice in Their Unions’ Presidential Endorsements,” Furman reported that “several national unions had revised their presidential endorsement processes, in response to members’ dissatisfaction with the procedures used in 2016”—that were widely protested by labor backers of Bernie’s first campaign.

The largest union that backed Sanders first race—CWA—changed its endorsement process too, but not for the better. While Sanders was in the process of garnering 9.5 million votes and placing first in 8 primary elections, CWA headquarters officials refused to conduct another binding membership poll to determine its 2020 presidential endorsement, since that is not a requirement of the CWA constitution (or any other union’s).

Sanders contributed to this setback by informing CWA, via his 2020 presidential candidate questionnaire, that he favored anti-trust action in the telecom industry.  In an accompanying message, Sanders called his otherwise very pro-labor positions “a snapshot of our great history together — and a glimpse of how promising and bold our future together will be, with your support.” When informed that anti-trust action harmful to several hundred thousand unionized workers and their customers would mainly be a boon for non-union competitors to AT&T and Verizon, Sanders stubbornly refused to withdraw his ill-advised campaign plank.

Then, in the Spring of 2020, Covid-19 made further in-person campaigning very difficult. As other candidates dropped out and threw their support to Biden, he became the last corporate Democrat standing between Bernie and the nomination. Faced with another convention delegate count deficit he could not overcome, Sanders withdrew from the race, at which point the CWA executive board backed Biden, as labor’s best bet for defeating Trump. 

While the CWA national union reverted to form, 10,000-member UPTE-CWA, its largest west coast affiliate, ignored instructions from headquarters not to endorse a Democratic Primary candidate on its own. This active pro-Bernie local in 2016 put the choice of Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the rest of the 2020 field before its own members. Sanders won again with 66 percent, with Warren coming in second with 22 percent of those voting.

Another 2016 Labor for Bernie backer was the California-based National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). This statewide labor organization invited Sanders, Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and others in the field to address its 2019 stewards conference. NUHW then empowered members of that body, plus rank-and-filers voting on-line, to choose among them, based on their live video presentations and candidate questionnaire responses. 

The result was a joint endorsement of Sanders and Warren, reflecting membership sentiment that was about evenly split. Sanders went on win the California primary in March, 2020 with help from these and other labor supporters more enthusiastic about his candidacy than the already failed one of their own U.S. Senator Kamala Harris.

Conclusion

Last year, there was another big blue-collar union, also with new leadership, that weighed in differently on the presidential election, but not by deepening its own recent process of internal democratization, The United Auto Workers entered 2024 with the great momentum of just having held a first-ever direct election of its own top officers. That resulted in leading members of the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) slate becoming an executive board majority.

It was no easy task for new UAW President Shawn Fain to rally members who felt cynical and disengaged because of the corruption and dysfunction of the prior leadership. Yet, during national contract talks two years ago, the UAW’s use of membership education and mobilization, unprecedented bargaining table transparency, and a selective strike strategy produced major auto industry gains, after years of divisive and demoralizing concessions.

A logical next step, in 2024, might have been changing the union’s approach to political action. If “one member/one vote” was a good way to get UAWD candidates elected and restore confidence in the union, why not also let the rank-and-file decide who the UAW should back for president, since that might add greater legitimacy to the union’s preferred candidate. 

This was not the course taken by the new leadership. The UAW’s 400,000 members had the same limited and indirect voice last year that they had before UAWD’s victory. The question of who to endorse was decided by the union’s 15-member national executive board.

The much harder and politically riskier approach of empowering the membership gained popularity amid widespread enthusiasm for Sanders’ candidacies and L4B’s organizing around them. A decade later, using a more democratic method to endorse politicians is still the exception, not the rule. 

That’s because a politically desirable outcome is not guaranteed, as demonstrated by the results of last year’s Teamster polling on Harris vs. Trump. Instead, it is dependent on internal political education and the degree to which rank-and-filers get out the vote for their favored candidate, which CWA supporters of Sanders did successfully ten years ago.

CWA’s own subsequent backtracking from giving members the final say in 2000 and 2024 would not have been possible if the union’s constitution required it to conduct a binding membership vote on presidential candidate endorsements. In the absence of such a mandate, more local unions can follow the best practices of UPTE-CWA or NUHW. 

They should find ways to empower their members at the local or state level to vet candidates and choose among them—based on union-provided information and advice–but without always giving the officialdom the final say. Over time, this greater willingness to trust an informed and engaged rank-and-file, might even prove to be as contagious as “feeling the Bern” was in the heyday of Labor for Bernie.

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