A conversation with Carl Rosen

Get the labor movement on board

Since the Labor Party's founding convention, Carl Rosen, President of District 11 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), has been organizing support for the Labor Party within his union and through the Chicago chapter. He was also on the committee that came up with the electoral proposal that we'll be considering at the convention.

I've done work both in the Chicago chapter and within my union. We recently had a meeting of about 40 union leaders here in Chicago, and we pitched the Labor Party idea to them, and encouraged participation in the convention. We're also trying to do some work on the state-wide level: We want to use a state-wide organizing committee approach to bring additional unions on board in the state. Unfortunately we don't have a full-time organizer here, unlike in certain other parts of the country!

I've also been concentrating on getting more UE locals in the district to affiliate with the Labor Party, and to sign up more of their members. We did the American Dream workshop in several locations for our membership, and it's now an ongoing part of our educational work.

My thinking hasn't changed that much about how we need to organize the Labor Party. The door-to-door work for the 28th Amendment was a good learning experience. That told us some things about what resonates with people, and about what it's going to take to really get this party off the ground. All our experiences have reinforced, in my mind, the necessity of getting a substantial portion of the existing labor movement on board. It's the key to having the resources - especially the people resources - to really move the party forward.

I think there's a growing level of acceptance of the idea of a Labor Party these days. I think the Labor Party has more resonance among unions now in part because we're less of an unknown, potentially scary entity. I think it's also due in part to the whole reevaluation the labor movement has been doing about how they can serve the working class politically. I think there's growing frustration with the inability of the Democratic Party to deliver anything meaningful for working people. We're obviously in very treacherous times politically, and I think we need to get ourselves out there so that folks can see that there is an alternative to the old system.

"Slow but steady" is the official UE description of the Labor Party's growth - and I agree with that. Obviously we'd all like to see it growing faster. But we also know that it's going to grow only as fast we can make it grow, and there's no sense beating ourselves black and blue over it. We just have to do the best we can, and hope that the events that are going on around us will convince people that they ought to get on board sooner rather than later.

To really get the Labor Party to grow, I think we need people within the labor movement freed up to work on an essentially full-time basis, to reach out and recruit at the local and regional level. If you look at the experience of Jobs with Justice, the growth of the coalition really picks up wherever they have their own staff person or a donation of staff time by a participating union.

As we get more unions signed on, we'll be more capable of doing that. It's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg question. But I would really like to urge other unions to make the contribution that a couple of unions already have - to devote staff resources to the Labor Party.

I would hope that, based on the experiences we've had since the founding convention, this convention will be less contentious than the last one. I think at the founding convention there were some people who thought we were going to change the world overnight and that there were all kinds of shortcuts to working class power in this country. Hopefully those people have since gone out and done some Labor Party activities, and realized that organizing something like this is tough work, and that we have to take care of our own base first before we can really get out and do too much beyond our base.

I served on the Labor Party's electoral committee. And I very much believe that we have to organize first, and then run candidates. We are not going to organize by running.

Of course, the electoral committee's proposal will be one of the big issues at the convention. And given the nature of the work that was done to put that proposal together and the time that people have had to think about it and absorb it, I think the discussion should go pretty smoothly. What we were trying to do in coming up with the proposal was to set conditions for running candidates based on what you actually need to do to achieve some kind of power - we weren't just trying to be stringent for the sake of being stringent.

I think there are two core issues we need to be focused on coming out of this convention. One, it's probably time to start having a more public face than what we've had up to now. And two, we need to have a clear plan for how we are going to put maximum resources into recruiting additional unions. We can't just leave it to a small hardy band of people to do all the work nationwide. We have to have a more concentrated and coordinated approach.

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