Tony Mazzocchi spent decades trying to convince union leaders of something they already knew but kept avoiding. "The labor movement," he said, "is the only movement where they'll give the Democrats money, get their asses kicked, and then give them more money."

Mazzocchi was a radical leader of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union who spent the last years of his career trying to build a Labor Party in the 1990s. He understood something that the labor movement has had to relearn repeatedly: organizing power at the workplace and political power in the legislature are not the same thing, and you cannot build one without the other. A union that wins excellent contracts at the bargaining table and then loses on the laws that govern the bargaining table has a shrinking foundation to stand on.

The history of the American labor movement is partly a history of what happens when that lesson gets forgotten.

What Political Power Built

The workplace rights that American workers take for granted were legislative achievements that required political power to win and political power to defend. The eight-hour workday came from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Organizing rights came from the Wagner Act of 1935. OSHA, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, the Family and Medical Leave Act: all required a labor movement strong enough to elect politicians who would pass them and hold politicians accountable when they didn't. FDR's New Deal was possible because the labor movement had built enough power from below to create political space for legislative action from above. The CIO was literally shaking capitalism at its core through sit-down strikes across the country, and Roosevelt responded with legislation that legalized and protected the movement making his presidency possible.

The relationship worked in both directions. Political power made organizing easier, which built more union members, which produced more political power. It was a compounding relationship while it lasted.

What Happened When It Broke Down

Taft-Hartley passed in 1947, over Truman's veto, with substantial Democratic support. The law restricted secondary strikes and boycotts, authorized right-to-work laws at the state level, and gave employers new tools to fight organizing campaigns. Labor leaders called it the slave labor act and spent decades trying to get it repealed.

It never happened. The political coalition that passed the Wagner Act in 1935 had fractured. Southern Democrats, who had supported the New Deal when it excluded most Black workers from its protections, began defecting on labor issues. The Cold War created pressure to purge leftists from unions, weakening the most militant organizing voices. And gradually, the labor movement's political strategy narrowed to supporting whatever Democrat was on the ballot and hoping for the best.

The results accumulated over decades. Card check legislation, which would have made it easier to form unions, failed to pass in 2009 despite a Democratic president and Democratic supermajorities in both chambers of Congress. The labor movement had spent years supporting those Democrats. When the moment came, the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, the stimulus, financial regulation, and let the Employee Free Choice Act die without a floor vote. Labor got thanked and moved on.

In 2022, when railroad workers threatened to strike over paid sick leave, a basic workplace protection that exists in almost every comparable wealthy country, President Biden and a Democratic Congress intervened to prevent the strike and impose a contract the workers had voted to reject. The administration framed it as protecting the economy. The railroad workers had endorsed Biden. They got their contract blocked by the president they'd voted for.

The Structural Problem

The pattern is structural, not a matter of individual Democrats being good or bad. A political party funded primarily by corporate donors answers to those donors when their interests conflict with workers' interests. Democrats take more money from the financial industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the tech sector, and real estate than they receive from unions. When a pharmaceutical company and a union disagree about drug pricing legislation, the money tells you which way the party will lean.

Mazzocchi's insight was that labor couldn't solve this from inside the Democratic Party. The party's funding structure meant that labor's interests would always be subordinated when a donor conflict arose. The only way to have a party that genuinely answers to workers is to build one that workers actually fund, which means a party that takes no corporate money and raises what it needs from members and small donors.

This is what a genuine labor party does, and it's what the Labor Party is trying to build. A political organization whose funding base matches its constituency, so that when labor and corporate interests conflict, there's no donor relationship pulling the politician in the wrong direction.

Why Unions Need a Labor Party

Unions build economic power at the workplace. They negotiate wages, defend workers from arbitrary firing, create grievance processes, and maintain the wage floor in the industries and regions where they operate. That economic power is real and valuable.

But the rules governing what unions can do, who they can organize, how elections are conducted, what constitutes an unfair labor practice, whether states can pass right-to-work laws, how the NLRB is staffed and funded: all of these are political questions settled by legislation and administration. A union that wins at the bargaining table and loses in the legislature is fighting on a shrinking piece of ground.

Conversely, a labor party that builds political power without organized workers behind it has no base to sustain the organizing between election cycles. The labor movement provides the membership infrastructure, the workplace presence, and the economic analysis that a political party needs to stay grounded in the actual conditions people are living. Each needs what the other builds.

The project files from the CWCP research put it directly: just as unions need a workers' political movement, a workers' political movement needs unions. Each is a good reason for the other, and both are strengthened by the partnership.

What This Means for the Labor Party

The Labor Party is building the political side of this equation, and it needs the labor movement as a partner. That means recruiting candidates with genuine labor backgrounds, supporting union organizing campaigns with political visibility, making the connections between workplace organizing and legislative fights explicit in everything the party communicates, and building a membership base where union members feel at home.

It also means being straightforward about what the Democratic Party has and hasn't delivered for labor, using practical arguments rather than ideological ones. The argument for independent labor politics is in the track record: the minimum wage hasn't been raised since 2009, card check died in a Democratic Congress, and a Democratic president broke a strike over paid sick leave. Tony Mazzocchi made this case thirty years ago. The current arrangement keeps failing. Building something that answers to different people is the alternative.

Learn more at votelabor.org.