No Class is an op-ed column by writer and radical organizer Kim Kelly that connects worker struggles and the current state of the American labor movement with its storied — and sometimes bloodied — past.
Labor has always held electoral power, especially when wielded by women. Former Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins’s lifelong dedication to workers’ rights was sparked by witnessing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, in which 146 people — predominantly young Jewish immigrant women — died, most as a result of locked factory doors. Though they shunned the ballot box, legendary political radicals like Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were all labor organizers. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull — the first woman to run for president (with abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her running mate) — supported workers’ rights and trade unionism. Much more recently, a 28-year-old, union-friendly avowed socialist and organizer from the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, beat an establishment Democratic incumbent in the New York state representative primary race.
Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s transformative presidency, America’s labor movement has been intertwined with electoral politics, and its influence has seen major workers’ rights reforms, such as the establishment of the eight-hour workday, the end of child labor, and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which strengthened workers’ right to organize. The labor movement is also responsible for establishing a federal minimum wage and laws that ban wage discrimination based on gender and race at work, as well as those that regulate safety standards to protect workers on the job.
It’s heartening to see that so many of the progressive women leading the expected “Blue Wave” of Democratic candidates this midterm season come from strong union backgrounds. Their very existence mounts a challenge to the omnipresence of the “white working class” trope and the whitewashing of the modern working class, which, in contrast to the stereotypical “white guy in a hard hat," is actually predominantly made up of women and people of color. According to the AFL-CIO, women make up 46% of union members, and they are projected to be a majority by 2025. More than a third — about 36% — of union members are people of color, and many are immigrants.
Liz Shuler of the AFL-CIO, the highest-ranking woman officer in the labor organization’s history, tells Teen Vogue that union women have “far more” equitable pay than their nonunion counterparts do. “For LGBTQ workers in many states, a union contract is the only legal protection they have on the job. For people of color, a union card means protection from discrimination at work and an opportunity to thrive. The labor movement is strongest when it embodies real solidarity,” she says.
A record number of first-time women candidates are running for office in 2018, the majority of them on Democratic or progressive tickets. Shuler wants to see that translate to the labor movement.
“We've been at the center of every major electoral victory over the last year and a half; it's clear that the path to power runs through labor, and you're going to see that on an even bigger scale in November,” she says.
According to AFL-CIO Deputy Press Secretary John Weber, a number of former and current union members and labor organizers are currently running for seats in Congress and locally, including Nevada’s Jacky Rosen, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, Minnesota’s Julie Blaha, Connecticut’s Julie Kushner, and Oregon’s Val Hoyle.