In August 2018, on the heels of nascent worker organizing, Bernie Sanders announced plans to tax businesses whose low wage employees rely on government programs. He singled out Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as one of the worst offenders. Amazon shot back, calling Sanders’s statements “inaccurate and misleading.” By the time Sanders introduced the bill in September, it had quite a name: Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act — the Stop BEZOS Act.

Just a few weeks later, in October, Amazon announced plans to raise its minimum wage to $15 and to lobby for an increase to the federal minimum.

This was a truly striking series of exchanges. Bernie used the bully pulpit to attack a multibillion-dollar corporation over their wages, and after a meek defense, they caved and raised their wages. Some debated the extent of the raise, but it was nevertheless a notable, unexpected, and positive outcome.

More recently, as a second-time presidential candidate, Bernie’s campaign created a truly new labor movement tactic. From 2015 to 2019, Bernie has built a database with many millions of supporters. Presidential candidates typically use such lists to raise money, find volunteers, and ultimately turn out voters. But this year the campaign used their lists to turn out potential voters — to a picket line of striking workers. They have since used the lists to warn of ICE attacks on immigrants.

Bernie is using his national profile both to negotiate with megacorporations and to encourage solidarity with workers who are in motion, fighting their bosses with the most powerful weapon they have, the strike. He is fighting for and with workers — regardless of where they were born — and he has a massive base of support. We must grapple with the meaning of this phenomenon if we are to develop a fully twenty-first-century labor strategy.

At the same time, true worker self-organization — not as mediated by, for example, a national political figure — is also on the rise. The West Virginia strike in 2018 is perhaps the most inspiring in recent years, so inspiring that it sparked a strike wave among education workers. But the private sector Market Basket strikes in 2014 were also compelling, even if their goals and rhetoric were less politically crisp. Both were concrete examples of workers organizing themselves — and, importantly, winning.

The Left often looks to the 1930s as a model of worker militancy and organization. And, indeed, strikes organized by workers themselves and with support from organizations like the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Communist Party, and others were central to producing the New Deal package of legislation, radically transforming life for millions of working people to this day.

But other elements of the 1930s were just as important in producing both the strike wave and the New Deal legislation that it, in turn, helped to generate. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, lifelong champions of ordinary people’s disruptive power, wrote in 1977, “Workers’ first large-scale expression of discontent was to occur not in the streets, but at the polls, in the dramatic electoral realignment of 1932 when masses of urban working-class voters turned against the Republican Party to vote for a president of ‘the forgotten man.’”

The 1932 presidential election had immediate consequences, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt swiftly moving a package of bills through Congress in the first months of his presidency. In June 1933, he signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) into law. The bill was soon invalidated by the Supreme Court, but Section 7a of the act had reverberations. It reads, “Employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents.”

Though the provision had no real mechanisms for enforcement, it is hard to overstate the sea change that Section 7a represented. Through the 1930s, the United States labor movement was exceptional in at least two regards: it was more militant than its counterparts in other industrialized nations, and it also faced particularly extreme violence from employers. However toothless the language was, institutionally speaking, Section 7a suggested the beginning of a new order. Unions and workers heard the words “free from interference . . . or coercion of employers,” and the words mattered.

Some of the most important strikes of the decade happened in 1934, after the passage of the NIRA, but before the passage of the much more powerful — if, in some ways, pacifying — National Labor Relations Act in 1935: the Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, the Minneapolis Teamsters, and San Francisco longshore workers, among others. Much ink has been spilled over the “causes” of the 1930s labor upsurge. A simple and likely assessment is that worker self-organization — with support from left forces in the workplace and the existing trade unions, on the one hand, and elections and legislation, with both material and inspirational effects, on the other — were mutually reinforcing.

As we develop new left labor strategies for the twenty-first century, we would do well to stay open to the notion that the labor movement is deeply inflected by (and in some instances has the power to cause) shifts in the electoral and legislative terrain. Today, workers and allies like Bernie Sanders are fighting the bosses in ways both consistent with and innovating on the past. Meanwhile, the organized left is growing at a clip that we haven’t seen in at least seventy-five years. We need an open-minded approach to developing left labor strategy commensurate with the new moment and the new conjuncture.

There are a number of key tools in the left labor kit, which can be combined in various ways to build a twenty-first-century strategy.

Leftists can get jobs in workplaces covered by a collective bargaining agreement. From this position, they can help to cohere the “militant minority,” fight the boss as directly as possible, and turn that minority into a majority. This work is at the core of the much discussed “rank-and-file strategy.”

Leftists can take control of unions. For many reasons, groups of unionized workers — some of them of the Left — may want to take formal power within their organization. Perhaps the leadership has allowed the organization to weaken, or perhaps the organization is powerful, but its leadership has narrow politics.

Perhaps some of the leaders are good and others are not, and so workers may want to aim for some elected positions and not others. In any case, taking charge of powerful and well-funded union organizations is a key tool of the Left.

Leftists can work in union staff positions. Unions that are run by the Left need staffers who will help to design and execute their programs. Though it is possible for these hires to come from the membership of the union itself, it can also be important to keep a firm line between elected and hired positions. Left-led unions are likely to need workplace organizers, opposition researchers, political organizers, policy experts, communications staff, and more.

In addition, organizations like the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) are likely to have union staff in their ranks who are not working for particularly progressive unions. Unions are one of the places young leftists have gone to seek work in the past decades, and not all of the organizations they work for are aligned with their politics.

People in such positions may be able to identify opportunities for pushing their union employers to the left, and even may be able to help build or support a cohort of leaders in the bargaining unit. There are also a substantial number of union locals in the United States with dwindling membership but substantial assets from bygone eras. Staffers of such locals might be able to play an outsize role in a radicalization process.

Leftists can salt among the unorganized. Barely 10 percent of US workers are represented by labor unions today, and the numbers are even bleaker in the private sector. Left organizations can identify strategic industries and corporations that are not unionized and help members to get jobs there. This is a difficult path for those individuals, far harder than salting a unionized shop, where pay and benefits are likely to be much higher.

Barry Eidlin argues, rightly in my view, that we cannot think of organizing the unorganized without also thinking of taking power in existing unions and using those resources to support new organizing. But this is not to say that we do not also need leftists on the shop floor in key unorganized industries and corporations now, finding existing leaders, mapping workplaces, and assessing weak points where collective action would be most effective.

DSA is perhaps the only organization on the US left right now that could imagine supporting its members to take on such work in a systematic way. The organization could even, for example, explore purchasing or renting homes near targeted facilities and providing free or subsidized rent for salts. I have very modestly supported DSA salts to buy a car that they share, but we can be much more thorough in our support of people willing to take on this grueling, vital work.

We should also be actively assessing the willingness of existing left-led unions — even ones where the target industry or company is not a perfect fit — in their willingness to support such efforts. That is, we don’t just need to wait until new activists who are targeting unions for takeover have success — there are already unions that have a vibrant, left-wing, democratic culture.

Leftists can build relationships with left-led unions. To the point above, some unions already experience the vibrant and militant internal life that is the goal for many on the Left to achieve when they get jobs on the shop floor of existing bargaining units. We could be building relationships with such unions to assess opportunities for collaboration — on new organizing, working-class legislative goals (like the new rent laws in New York), solidarity in the midst of pitched industrial battles, and much more.

Leftists can support or build workers centers. Workers centers are one of the more creative organizational forms generated in the recent decades of general labor movement decline. At their inception, they did not aim to negotiate collective bargaining agreements like traditional unions, but rather they organized low-wage workers to fight the boss, often using wage-and-hour violations as leverage.

More recently, groups like the Retail Action Project, formed by and aligned with RWDSU (Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union), have contributed to more traditional union organizing drives. Left labor activists should map the workers centers in their region and assess ways to support the best of their work. In some cases, there may be good reason to create a workers center from scratch.

Leftists can support or build supplemental labor organizations. Labor Notes is a media outlet and organizing network for left trade unionists. It has done outstanding work at various turns, including providing support as the West Virginia–inspired strike wave unfolded. Association for Union Democracy has long counseled union members on how to win office in their unions. Such organizations have relatively few staff and punch well above their weight.

Left organizations with significant membership could well think of creative ways to support them, financially, practically, and otherwise. And there may be other “supplemental” organizational models that don’t exist, but that should — again, a left organization oriented to the labor movement would be well positioned to identify such gaps and help fill them.

Leftists can build social movement and community ties. The approach that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) took in its 2012 strike — building alliances with community members and striking, in part, for their demands — is an essential tool for the left labor movement. Today this approach to contract negotiations is often called “Bargaining for the Common Good.”

Such systematic approaches to building community alliances are much easier when the Left is in full control of the union. However, even before the CORE caucus won office in CTU, they began building alliances with parents and students. It is never too early to start this work.

In the private sector, UNITE HERE began noticing that hotels were not hiring black workers at the same rate as in the past, so they negotiated for increased hires in this racial category. Fight for $15 dovetailed with the Black Lives Matter movement in recent years. The labor left, whether in formal power or member-leader roles, should seek to strengthen relationships between unions and social movements, and ideally position their organization to leverage their disruptive, economic power for broadly popular political ends.

This is especially important with respect to the looming environmental crisis — if we cannot pivot the bulk of the existing labor movement to a coordinated approach to transitioning to a sustainable economy, there will be no labor movement because there will be no humans to populate it.

Leftists can run campaigns and win elections. If it weren’t for Bernie Sanders bringing democratic socialism to the millions through a Democratic Party presidential primary, we would not have the current scale of organized left to even host the discussion we’re having right now about labor strategy. There are stakes to this debate in part because there is an organization with nearly sixty thousand members that could really take a crack at deep and serious involvement in the labor movement. At this level alone, elections matter and should be understood as an essential tactical element of left labor strategy.

Projects like Labor for Bernie suggest further possibilities — leverage high-profile elections to build connections with and among regular workers who have politics to the left of their unions. Such projects are another potential path to identifying and cohering shop floor leaders, even if they don’t fit the typical mold.

In the current moment, an array of new tactics at the intersection of labor and elections may well be possible. Just the other day, I offhandedly posted on Facebook, “The Sanders campaign announced that more of his donors work for Walmart than any other company. First of all, great that the campaign thinks to publicize stuff like this . . . If I were running the UFCW/RW and/or the Teamsters, I might ask the Sanders campaign to host a tele-town hall for Walmart workers to discuss the power of unions. I bet dollars to donuts they’d do it.” Within minutes, a union staffer in my social network put the idea in front of two Bernie staffers.

Those of us on the left of the labor movement are accustomed to thinking of electoral politics as something that, at best, takes time from core union work but that we do in order to move forward organizational goals. But if we seriously look at what has unfolded in the past two years — at the role Bernie, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and many local candidates have played in building our movement — we should be able to find ways for electoral work to enhance union work, and build the Left in the process.

There are very likely tools available to the labor left that are not in this list, though I have tried to capture what strike me as those that are key. Strategy is, in part, the blending and sequencing of such tools, given specific goals. And, there are levels of strategy. Democratic socialists seek to create a democratized, sustainable economy. At this level, building the labor movement is but a tactic, if an important one. But at another level, the Left must develop strategic approaches to the labor movement — the subject of this piece.

And at yet another level, there must be a strategy for a particular fight — say, the Communications Workers of America’s battle with Verizon — but that entire strategy is just one tactic in a single union’s arsenal. (This helps to explain how the “rank-and-file strategy” (RFS) can be understood as both strategy, as Eidlin and Kim Moody have argued, and tactic, as Andrew D and I have argued). Below, I put forward a strategic approach to the labor movement that presumes agreement with the broad goals of democratic socialists.