Rebuilding the Working-Class Base One Door at a Time
Reinvigorating class-based politics in the US depends on more than inspiring candidates like Bernie Sanders: it requires durable working-class political organization. Here’s what one group learned about organizing working people around bread-and-butter issues.
Ryan Hurley, from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, who works with MP Erin Weir, and Roger Zagar of Des Moines knock on a door as they canvass the Union Park neighborhood, Monday, February 1, 2016, in Des Moines, Iowa. (Al Drago/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)
Working America is among the largest member-based working-class organizations in the United States, with over 3.5 million members and thousands of local community activists across the country. The organization employs sustained contact with voters through in-person canvassing and digital engagement over the course of years — rather than just before Election Day. To date, Working America has mobilized millions of working-class Americans to take action in defense of their economic interests and to vote for candidates who will advance a working-class agenda.
We spoke with Working America’s executive director, Matt Morrison, to better understand the keys to his group’s success in building working-class consciousness and organizational capacity on a scale most on the Left can only dream of. Morrison highlights many important lessons Working America’s experience can impart to the broader left, as we struggle to build up the foundation of historic yet halting advances from the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders to the recent triumph of Amazon warehouse workers in New York and beyond.
Jared Abbott
Building organizing capacity and class consciousness among working Americans is a critical task if progressives and socialists hope to build majoritarian coalitions to support their candidates as well as cultivate a new generation of skilled organizers who can help deliver gains for working people on the shop floor and electorally.
Matt Morrison
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