‘You wouldn’t invite your boss to a union meeting. Why invite them into your party?’
An interview with Rosa Pepper-Macias on the fight for a workers’ party
Rosa Pepper-Macias, a socialist and Workers’ Voice member running for a state senate seat in Connecticut, starts with a simple question: If workers would never let the boss run their union, why let the bosses run their politics? We spoke about workplace retaliation, the Democratic Party, the limits of electoral reform, and what it would take to build a workers’ party with real muscle. — WORKERS’ VOICE EDITORS
Q. What do you mean by a labor or workers’ party?
Rosa: Consider what working people must do to exercise power on the most elementary level—on the shop floor. Bosses use threats and promises to fragment workers and keep them under management’s thumb. There are lost hours, demotion, firing, black-listing, and sometimes deportation and imprisonment on one side, and special privileges granted in exchange for loyalty on the other.
Bosses know how to play both sides: threaten the workers who organize and reward those who keep quiet. At my union shop in a restaurant, my chef agreed not to schedule me on Sundays. That arrangement lasted until I started organizing delegations and filing grievances. Suddenly, my Sundays off were considered a contract violation. He wrote me up and warned me: “If you want to keep your job, you better come to work this Sunday.” What looks like a favor can become a weapon the minute you fight back.
That is why unions keep management out of their meetings. Workers need room to organize without the boss dangling favors or threatening retaliation. A union worth its name fights for gains everyone can defend, not perks that management can withdraw one by one.
Put the boss inside the union and sooner or later the boss runs it. There’s a name for that: a company union.
The same principle applies to politics. At work we face individual bosses; in politics we face the capitalist class, its parties and its state. A workers’ party would turn the independence we fight for on the shop floor into a national political organization.
We wouldn’t invite the manager to chair our union meeting. So why hand our political organization to the bosses? Big business doesn’t merely influence the Democratic Party; it has enormous power over its priorities and leadership.
Working people cannot build independent political power inside a party dominated by the interests that they are fighting. At best, labor bargains for concessions while its own organizing resources help elect politicians it cannot control. We need our own party.
That doesn’t mean turning down reforms. We fight for every improvement. But there is a difference between a favor handed down to a few and a right won for everyone. A favor can be withdrawn quietly; a universal right gives millions a stake in defending it. Our goal is not to trade political loyalty for temporary concessions. It is to build the power to win and defend rights for the whole class.
Q. What is the difference between a labor party and a socialist campaign like yours? And how would it differ from democratic socialist campaign like that of Mamdani in New York City?
Rosa: Well, first, these are not necessarily the same thing. A socialist candidate is a candidate who fights for a socialist program. A labor party would entail a question of class organization: whether working people have an independent political organization based on our own organizations and struggles rather than one controlled by the capitalist class. Such a party would be a tremendous step forward in working-class political independence, but it would not automatically be a revolutionary socialist party. A struggle would still occur inside it over its program, its leadership, and ultimately whether it seeks to administer capitalism or fight for workers’ power.
Our campaign tries to bring those two things together. We are socialists running independently of the capitalist parties, and we use the campaign to argue that the working class needs its own political organization. We don’t think an election campaign substitutes for the entire process of building a mass workers’ party, and obviously our campaign itself is not that party. However, an independent socialist campaign can show in practice what political class independence looks like, help organize workers around a program based on their own needs, and fight to create a mass workers’ party.
From our perspective, Mamdani is neither a workers’ candidate nor a socialist in the way we understand it. Mamdani calls himself a “democratic socialist,” but he ran a campaign through and governs as a part of the Democratic Party. So the disagreement is not simply over whether one candidate has better reforms than another. It is about whether socialism can be advanced through a capitalist party and by administering the existing capitalist state, or whether workers must build their own political power independently of both.
Take Mamdani’s proposal for five municipal grocery stores offering basic goods at lower prices. Cheaper food is welcome. But five stores leave the corporations that control food production and distribution untouched. The issue is not whether a reform helps someone; it is whether workers are organized to win it, extend it, and defend it as a right rather than depend on a politician’s goodwill. And that question gets sharper when the same administration confronts movements in the streets.
The point is not whether a politician can offer a useful reform. It is whether workers can organize to win rights that outlast the politician. A discount at five stores is not the same thing as the right to affordable food that millions are prepared to defend.
Mamdani can promise relief with one hand, and police protest with the other. He talked about arresting Israeli Premier Netanyahu when he visited New York City, yet his NYPD protected Netanyahu while arresting protesters outside. That contradiction matters more than any campaign slogan. The danger is that modest reforms become a reason to stand down just when independent movements need to press harder.
Mamdani’s joint statements with the NYPD leadership equating far-left and far-right extremism raise the same problem. Working with the police intelligence apparatus does not make that apparatus less dangerous to organizers. It risks giving repression a friendlier public face.
And there is another cost: When a Democratic administration brands a handful of concessions “socialism,” it invites workers to judge socialism by what that administration delivers—and by what it takes away. If those reforms collapse while movements have been demobilized, the right wing will be ready to exploit the disappointment. Socialism should mean workers exercising power, not being asked to applaud from the sidelines.
Q. But if you believe in a form of socialism that entails overcoming the capitalist system, and wielding working-class power to do so, isn’t running for elections a form of perpetuating the illusion in the liberal democratic system that sustains capitalist rule?
Rosa: Think of the difference between a candidate promising to stop a factory closure and workers occupying the plant, organizing solidarity strikes, and forcing the issue. A campaign should help make the second possible, not substitute for it.
Running in elections is not the same as believing elections will liberate us. For many years, revolutionaries have used campaigns to reach workers, expose the limits of capitalist institutions, and strengthen organization outside parliament. The Bolsheviks’ intervention in the Duma and the Socialist Workers Party’s campaigns in the 1960s offer different examples of that tactic. But a ballot cannot replace a strike, a mass demonstration, or workers refusing to cooperate with repression. Imagine the difference between a politician promising to oppose deportations and organized workers stopping work to resist a raid. Elections should help build that kind of power, not substitute for it.
Q. We hear many activists saying that a labor party will never work because of the relatively debilitated state of the labor movement and the entrenched bureaucracy. How do you respond to that?
Rosa: It is true that the labor movement is not as strong as it could be; unions have been, after all, stuck in building the bosses’ political projects for many years now. And we do know that in order to build a strong labor party capable of fighting for our demands, we will need unions that are more democratic, more fully engaged in the social movements, and more capable of wielding the strike weapon. But this doesn’t mean that we should take an abstentionist attitude toward the unions of today.
The union bureaucracy is not the same thing as the union membership. If we want a fighting trade-union movement, we have to advocate it! This means putting all our forces into ground-level organizing, so our unions will succeed in economic struggles, and develop a conscious participation in crucial political struggles of our times, like the defense of civil liberties, immigrant rights, trans rights, or the fight against ongoing wars and environmental devastation. This is what we have been doing through the electoral campaign: We talk to our coworkers, meet trade unionists in social movements, and raise these issues on the campaign trail.
One place to start is with endorsements. Why should a union executive board decide behind closed doors which Democrat gets the membership’s money and volunteers? Let the rank and file debate and vote! A campaign for an independent working-class candidate can become a fight for democracy inside the union itself.
We do not have to wait for perfect unions before fighting for a workers’ party. Independent campaigns can help organize a fighting current inside unions; rank-and-file victories can give a future party its backbone. And a workers’ party would do far more than run candidates. It could organize the unorganized, coordinate strikes, defend immigrants against raids, support struggles for abortion rights, and link workplace battles to the fight against war and environmental destruction.
Workers keep society running. When they stop, the bosses notice. A party rooted in that power could make the whole political system notice, too.
Q. Let me put the same objection in another way. The calls for a labor party in the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s and ’40s, were based on a historical labor insurgency, with the rise of the CIO—yet we don’t see that today. Is now the right time to call for a labor party? Shouldn’t we wait for a better moment and, in the meantime, run progressive or socialist candidates wherever we can, regardless of the ballot line?
Rosa: Why wait? Unions already devote enormous amounts of money, staff time, and door-knocking to electing Democrats. Imagine those resources backing candidates answerable to workers instead. Even the fight to build such a party would change how members think about their unions—not as campaign machinery for someone else but as organizations with their own political future.
Imagine a party fighting for full employment, a three-day weekend, single-payer health care, free public higher education, the abolition of ICE and mass surveillance, and papers for all—and backing those demands with workplace organizing and strikes. That would be something worth knocking on doors for.
There is an audience for it. Workers have shown their appetite for organizing at Amazon and Starbucks, in the UAW strike and the UPS contract fight, and in mobilizations for immigrants and Palestine. Too much of that energy is funneled back into the same two parties. Some workers who once backed Obama or Sanders later turned to Trump; others are now disillusioned with him. We cannot write them off or leave the right to recruit them. We have to offer a political home rooted in shared class interests and collective struggle.
Look to the immigrant-worker mobilizations of May Day 2006 and the uprisings of 2020, not to the Democratic Party’s campaign consultants. The question is how to turn moments of mass action into durable working-class organization.
Q. A different source of skepticism we encounter is the fact that the labor movement only represents 10% of workers, and most of the time the most privileged workers, whereas the most active sectors of the working class in recent struggles, immigrants or Black and Brown youth, are very underrepresented in the labor movement. How do we deal with this paradox? Should we still call for an independent workers’ party based in the unions?
Rosa: It’s true, the trade unions really only organize a small minority of the working class, and they disproportionately represent highly skilled and highly paid workers, so we really shouldn’t fetishize them, but we can’t abandon them either. In many cases, the most exploited workers fall outside of the unions. Take for example, the immigrant working class; in the U.S., immigrant workers are statistically less likely to be unionized than workers who are born in the U.S. And yet right now immigrant workers are the layer of the class that is the most willing to stand up and fight back. Just like in 2006, the immigrant rights struggle is showing us all the way forward with mass actions on the streets of LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis.
This is why a labor party would only be successful if it built upon and related to the upsurges in the fight for immigrant rights. Imagine a fighting labor party that could build on these days of no work, no school, no shopping and organize coordinated work stoppages around the country on an indefinite basis to win our demands. Imagine if it were able to send political strike leaders across the country to inspire workers to take on ever more ambitious projects. A movement organized like that could go far beyond merely defensive struggles (defending migrants who have already been victimized) and would actually be able to win a program that calls for an end to the raids, detentions, and deportations, and papers for all.
Moreover, a labor party could proactively organize workers’ defense guards, who would be able to respond to the attacks on immigrants with the power of organized labor. These defense guards would not only be mobilized for rapid response; they could protect polling places, or defend striking workers from the bosses’ thugs.
That is what a workers’ party could change. When immigrants face raids, it could coordinate workplace action and mass defense; when Black youth protest police violence, unions could bring their organized strength into the streets; when Amazon workers organize, the wider labor movement could back them with money, people, and solidarity. The relationship has to go both ways; those movements would also challenge union conservatism and bring new workers into leadership.
I have seen what happens when workers stop waiting for permission—the boss suddenly has to listen. The challenge is to carry that defiance beyond one workplace. Start with union meetings, endorsement fights, and solidarity actions that bring organized and unorganized workers together. A workers’ party will not arrive as a gift from union headquarters. We have to build the forces that can make it real.
Only a minority of workers belong to unions. That is not an argument for giving up on a workers’ party; it is an argument for building one that reaches far beyond existing union membership. Inflation, subcontracting, gig work, automation, outsourcing, war, and climate disasters do not stop at the factory gate. Neither can our politics. A workers’ party must organize the employed and unemployed, union and nonunion, documented and undocumented, around a program they can fight for together.
Photo: Rosa Pepper-Macias (on right), with a campaign supporter, Oli, petitioning to get on the ballot in New Haven, Conn., last summer.