There are few things as frustrating for the trade unionist as electoral politics. As UE policy notes, “Neither of the two largest and most dominant political parties in the U.S. today are representative of or willing to stand for working people.” It is tempting to simply wash one’s hands of the constant barrage of lesser-evil-dom, in which both the lesser and the greater evil seem to get more and more evil with every election cycle.
Yet elections have consequences. The politicians we elect make funding decisions that affect our ability to access healthcare, housing, and education, and pass laws that restrict or expand our rights. They influence the regulatory agencies that are supposed to keep our food safe and our water and air clean, and to make corporations play by the rules so we don’t get scammed or ripped off. They appoint the members of the National Labor Relations Board, who are supposed to enforce our rights at work, and can exercise control over nearly every aspect of public-sector workers’ jobs. The working class ignores elections at our own peril.
In his new booklet The Fundamentals of Electoral Organizing, longtime community organizer Tomás Garduño has provided a clear and accessible how-to guide for working people who want to make electoral politics better through organizing. As he writes in the introduction, “I have written this booklet for working-class people who want to organize other working-class people in our shared interests of building political power.”
Garduño recounts an anecdote about when he was “a 20-something organizer who got politicized in college and never missed an opportunity to criticize every politician under the sun,” and was first asked to do electoral organizing:
I was the statewide organizer for a 25-year-old organizing group founded by veterans of the ‘60s and ‘70s Chicano and American Indian movements. The director at the time called me into his office and told me he wanted me to run our electoral get-out-the-vote program. But surely he knew that I couldn’t stand politicians and that I thought the electoral system was created to benefit rich white men over the rest of us.
When I said this to him, his response was perfect: "That's exactly why I want you to develop the program, because I know you'll bring that critical analysis.”
That critical analysis has made Garduño less interested in party labels than in winning and wielding power, and he breaks down how to do that in chapters titled “Scale,” “Voters/Electorate,” “Political Parties,” “Districts,” “Election Laws,” and so forth. He explains the nuts and bolts of electoral organizing in plain language and with metaphors drawn from real life.
Although it differs from labor organizing in significant ways, working-class electoral organizing is based on similar principles: building a majority which is willing to take action around a program. Anyone who has gone through a union representation election, or done the organizational work to build a credible strike threat, will recognize the process Garduño describes of contacting voters, getting them to commit to vote for a candidate or ballot initiative, and repeating the process until enough commitments are secured to win.
The booklet squarely and soberly addresses the question of how the working class can engage in meaningful political action when electoral politics in this country is dominated by two corporate parties. “[I]t’s important not to assume our long-term political agenda is wedded to any any particular political party,” Garduño writes, concluding that while current election laws make the two major parties “necessary vehicles” for accessing political power, the working class needs to act like “a party within a party.” Although he does not address the question of building an independent labor party, as UE has long advocated, any serious effort to build such a working-class party will require tens or even hundreds of thousands of working people schooled in the discipline that Garduño has so clearly and eloquently described.
The booklet’s one weakness is that it does not address the specific legal restrictions on what unions can and cannot do in the realm of electoral organizing. Unions are missing from an otherwise comprehensive section called “Vehicles Galore,” in which Garduño discusses the pros and cons of different kinds of organizations: 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) nonprofits, political action committees (PACs), and unincorporated volunteer grassroots groups. Unions, which are incorporated as 501(c)(5) nonprofits, are free to engage in political activity so long as it is not their primary purpose, but cannot use nonmembers’ dues money to do so if they object to such use. However, unions should be aware of any state laws that govern lobbying. Unions can also set up PACs, and union members can form unincorporated volunteer groups.
The Fundamentals of Electoral Organizing is a valuable contribution to the working-class movement, and every local union interested in building working-class electoral power in their area should get their hands on at least one copy.
- Print and digital copies of The Fundamentals of Electoral Organizing, along with other resources including a Digital Toolkit and Operator’s Manual and the With Many Hands Electoral Organizing App, can be purchased at fundamentalsofelectoralorganizing.org.
