Portside

A UE Guide to Democratic Practice

Rank-and-file autoworkers democratized their union, elected president Shawn Fain, and won a landmark strike. Now they will have to win local officer positions, dominated by the old guard, to hold bosses to their word and maintain a fighting union.

Faye Guenther’s multiyear plan to revolutionize the grocery workers union.

Union democracy shouldn’t be seen as an abstract good separate from more important strategic considerations about rebuilding labor. Without democratizing labor, we can’t rebuild labor.

By recruiting young radicals to the labor movement, the Rank & File Project hopes to build the base for a politics that can unify the working class around shared interests, & prioritize solidarity & workers’ rights within the workplace & outside it.

An essential thread uniting recent winning campaigns is that the top union officers were all directly elected by the members, a basic democratic right denied to many union members in the United States.

Within the labor movement, all of the bright ideas and strategic insights in the world won’t amount to much if the democratic rights of union members themselves aren’t respected, restored, and expanded.

Officers—recently elected on promises of greater transparency and militancy, in the union’s first-ever direct election for top posts—established what could become a new tradition.

More than a year after the Amazon Labor Union’s landmark victory at a Staten Island warehouse, Amazon still refuses to bargain with the union. Meanwhile, a reform caucus is pushing for the ALU to hold leadership elections.