The Labor Party's support for unions and organized labor is structural. It's built into the party's charter, its candidate requirements, its governing structure, and the specific policies it advocates. Understanding why requires understanding the argument the party is making about how economic and political power work together.

The Core Argument

The Labor Party exists because both major parties take corporate money and answer to corporate donors. That funding structure shapes what politicians will fight for and what they'll quietly let die. Drug prices stay high because pharmaceutical companies fund campaigns. Housing policy favors institutional investors because real estate money flows through both parties. Wages stagnate because the employer class has a seat at the table that organized labor has largely lost.

Unions are the primary organized institution representing workers' economic interests in the United States. They negotiate wages, fight for benefits, and provide a mechanism for workers to collectively resist the conditions that corporations would otherwise impose unilaterally. A party that claims to represent ordinary people against corporate power cannot be indifferent to the institutions that have historically been the main vehicle for worker economic power.

The Labor Party supports organized labor because the argument for the party and the argument for unions are the same argument: ordinary people have more power when they act together than when they're left to negotiate alone against employers and donors who hold most of the leverage.

How Support Is Built Into the Structure

The party's charter creates a formal role for the labor movement through the Labor Inclusion Organization, a congress of trade unions affiliated to the Labor Party. The LIO operates separately from the party but is structurally integrated into it. Trade union representatives from the LIO hold 15 of the seats on the National Executive Committee, giving organized labor real voice in the party's governance rather than the symbolic acknowledgment that the Democratic Party typically offers.

Candidates seeking the Labor Party's support must earn an endorsement from a union or worker cooperative participating in the LIO. This requirement does two things. It ensures that Labor Party candidates have genuine ties to the labor movement rather than just labor-friendly rhetoric. And it gives unions direct influence over who carries the party's banner, which is a fundamentally different relationship than unions endorsing a candidate after the fact and hoping for the best.

This structure was designed specifically to avoid the failure mode of the Democratic Party relationship: labor provides support, the party provides promises, the promises get watered down when corporate donor interests conflict, and labor keeps supporting the party anyway because it has nowhere else to go. The LIO structure gives the labor movement genuine decision-making power rather than the symbolic acknowledgment it typically receives from the Democratic Party.

What the Platform Calls For

The party's platform takes concrete positions on the major legislative fights that matter to organized labor.

Repealing the Taft-Hartley Act, which weakened unions in 1947 and authorized the right-to-work laws that have drained union finances across the country, is a direct commitment. Restoring the right to solidarity strikes and secondary boycotts would give unions tools that Taft-Hartley stripped. Guaranteeing automatic card-check recognition and first-contract bargaining within six months would close the gaps employers currently exploit to drag out the organizing and bargaining process until workers give up.

The platform supports sectoral bargaining, the system used in Germany and other countries where negotiations cover whole industries rather than individual employers. Sectoral bargaining would set wage floors that nonunion employers cannot undercut, extending the benefits of union bargaining to workers who haven't yet organized. It would fundamentally change the leverage dynamics of labor-management relations.

Unionization rights for gig and tech workers, protection of public sector unions from privatization, and strengthened pension security are all explicit commitments. These address specific structural vulnerabilities that have been used to weaken organized labor over the past decades.

Why This Matters for Workers Who Aren't in Unions

The Labor Party's support for organized labor matters for the 94 percent of private sector workers who currently have no union representation, not just the 6 percent who do.

The wage spillover effect means that high union density raises wages in surrounding regions and industries even in workplaces without unions, because employers have to compete for workers. When union membership was at 35 percent, that effect was large enough to raise wages broadly. Rebuilding it would raise wages for millions of people who may never personally join a union.

The legislative gains that unions fought for and won, the minimum wage, overtime pay, workplace safety laws, unemployment insurance, apply to all workers whether or not they're unionized. A political party that strengthens the labor movement is strengthening the political force that produced those protections and can potentially expand them.

And the basic dynamic of corporate political power applies to everyone. When pharmaceutical companies fund both parties and drug prices stay high, that affects insured and uninsured, union and nonunion workers alike. A party that answers to workers rather than corporate donors changes policy for everyone who depends on that policy.

The Honest Tension

Some unions are deeply tied to the Democratic Party and skeptical of independent labor politics. Their leaders have spent years building relationships within the Democratic coalition, and they worry that a third party will split labor's political power or hurt Democrats in competitive races.

The Labor Party's response to this is practical rather than ideological. The party is targeting races where Democrats aren't competing seriously, building from local races upward, and making the structural argument that the Democratic funding relationship has failed to deliver on the issues that matter most to workers. Card check legislation died in a Democratic Congress. The minimum wage hasn't been raised since 2009. A Democratic president intervened to break a railroad strike over paid sick leave.

The party's goal is a genuine partnership with the labor movement, building on existing relationships rather than displacing them. Individual union members can join the Labor Party without their union taking any official position. Unions can engage with the Labor Party's organizational work without endorsing candidates or abandoning existing relationships. The structure is designed to let that engagement develop organically over time rather than forcing an immediate break.

The labor movement built worker power in this country by organizing where the conditions were right and building from there. The Labor Party is trying to do the same thing in the political arena, and it sees the labor movement as the partner that makes that possible rather than an obstacle to work around.

Learn more at votelabor.org.