Over the past several months, Party comrades in the U.S. intervening within the Class Struggle Action Network (CSAN) have continued developing contacts among militant workers and oppositional formations active inside several established unions in the United States. This work has proceeded not on the basis of reforming the existing union apparatuses through electoral maneuvers or democratizing formulas, but through efforts to place workers organized on class lines into contact with one another and to promote methods of struggle independent of labor-management collaboration, bourgeois legal-reform methods, and the political parties of capital.

During the winter, comrades participated in a campaign supporting an electrical apprentice facing retaliation on the job, denial of disability accommodations, and eventual blacklisting from an apprenticeship program through the combined actions of employers and the union apparatus. Militants attempted to organize collective pressure against both the employers and union officials involved, raising demands not only around reinstatement but against blacklisting practices, collaboration between union officials and contractors, and the broader suppression of militant workers inside the union structure itself. Workers from different unions and industries were drawn into support efforts, and direct collective actions were organized in an attempt to push the struggle beyond the narrow legal channels prescribed by the labor apparatus.

As the campaign developed, legalistic conceptions increasingly asserted themselves among sections of the support effort. Pressure mounted to reduce the struggle to the pursuit of reinstatement through labor-law mechanisms while abandoning the broader class demands which had emerged through the campaign. We communists defended the necessity of maintaining collective class methods and resisting the reduction of the struggle to an individualized juridical case mediated through the same state and union structures responsible for the attack in the first place. Although the apprentice ultimately pursued the legal route and was later expelled from the union, the campaign nevertheless produced important consequences. A layer of militant union electricians in Northern California, who had themselves been attempting to organize opposition to the official apparatus on class-struggle lines, reached out after observing the methods and positions advanced throughout the campaign. Discussions soon followed regarding the union question, labor legality, and the limitations of the reformist current dominant within the labor movement.

After learning that many of these workers, alongside comrades active within CSAN, would be attending the upcoming 2026 Labor Notes conference in Chicago, a proposal was advanced that discussions should move toward organizing a coordinated intervention and joint event bringing together those worker formations distinguishing themselves from the labor-left reformist current.

Out of these various discussions and contacts emerged the proposal, advanced by comrades within CSAN and subsequently adopted by the network, to organize a joint event during the Labor Notes conference. Comrades then undertook the work of drafting an initial proposal and opening discussions with various workers’ organizations and oppositional formations with whom contact had been developed over the previous year through interventions within the union terrain.

The proposal proceeded from recognition that, while still fragmented and isolated, small worker formations organized on a class-struggle basis have begun to emerge within several established unions across the United States. Though these groups remain uneven and embryonic, they express an important tendency: opposition not merely to individual boss-linked leaders, but increasingly to the entire framework of labor-management collaboration, subordination to bourgeois political parties, and the legal-regulatory structure through which the regime unions discipline proletarian struggle.

The effort was therefore conceived not as another reform caucus, nor as the proclamation of a rival union center engineered from above, but as an attempt to place the advanced elements of these struggles into contact with one another and expose broader layers of militant workers, building links and establishing joint united-front work from below between militant worker formations while advancing methods of class struggle distinct from those advanced by the labor-left current gathered around Labor Notes.

The initial invitation circulated among participating groups identified the Labor Notes milieu as the dominant expression of labor-left reformism in the United States: a current which speaks in the language of militancy while remaining confined within the framework of labor legality, the National Labor Relations regime, bourgeois electoral politics, and the ideology of national economic partnership between labor and capital. Against this framework the proposal advanced several limited but clear points of agreement: affirmation that the working class and employer class possess no common interests; opposition to labor-management collaboration; independence from bourgeois political parties; defense of international working-class solidarity; recognition of strike action as indispensable to proletarian defense; and opposition to the legal restrictions imposed through the NLRA and Taft-Hartley system.

The proposal was received positively by several worker formations. Since then, comrades on behalf of CSAN have been organizing and hosting coordination meetings involving representatives from Teamsters Mobilize, the Committee to Organize the Unorganized among IBEW electricians, Transit Workers for a Fighting Union, Committee for One Fighting Transit Union, and the Machinist Reform Action Committee among IAM workers. These bi-weekly meetings have served as a venue for discussion of strategy, labor conditions, and the union question. A website and email address have since been launched for the effort, now publicly operating under the name For A Fighting Workers Movement. With only minimal promotion, the effort quickly received dozens of RSVPs and inquiries from workers across the country.

The coordination is now preparing a counter-event in Chicago during the Labor Notes conference under the title A Militant Critique of Labor Notes: For A Fighting Workers Movement. The event will include both in-person participation and online attendance from workers across different regions, alongside a public viewing event in Portland, Oregon. A number of comrades will be present on the ground intervening both at Labor Notes itself and at the independent event organized by the coordination.

Representatives of the effort have also been approached by sections of the labor press seeking interviews regarding the growing criticisms of the labor-left current and the limitations of the established unions.

Predictably, the moment the effort became public it immediately drew hostility from labor-left and collaborationist layers tied to existing union apparatuses. Workers associated with participating groups have already experienced targeting and exclusion efforts. Several militants connected to the coordination have reportedly been banned from attending the Labor Notes conference itself, while others have faced denunciations and pressure campaigns aimed at isolating them from broader layers of union militants. This response merely confirms the political role of the labor-left current. While presenting itself as militant opposition to the conservative business union leadership, it functions in practice as the left wing of the regime unions, seeking to contain militant workers within the framework of reformism and suppress every tendency that begins moving toward genuine class independence.

As broader discussions have developed among participating workers, more theoretical and tactical questions regarding the union movement and the present phase of capitalist crisis have also emerged. During recent meetings, presentations and discussions were prepared on the Party’s positions concerning the trade-union question. It was reaffirmed that the union question is historical and not moral: the unions arose from the real necessity of proletarian defense under capitalism, but in the imperialist epoch the dominant trade-union organisms have become progressively integrated into the capitalist state through labor law, mediation systems, national productivity demands, and subordination to bourgeois political parties.

Against reformist illusions, comrades stressed that communists must intervene wherever workers are compelled to organize while maintaining complete political independence from the union apparatuses themselves. It was emphasized that under imperialism no serious economic struggle remains purely economic; every important workers’ struggle increasingly collides with the capitalist state itself through injunctions, labor regulations, nationalist production demands, and the political mechanisms of bourgeois rule. Against the fragmentation imposed by legal unionism by workplace, bargaining unit, trade, and nation, emphasis was placed on the necessity for workers to organize themselves from below through strike committees, assemblies, inter-workplace coordination, and forms of struggle capable of extending solidarity across sectors and borders while maintaining independence from bourgeois parties and labor-management collaboration.

The present effort remains limited and embryonic. Nevertheless, the growing contact between militant workers across different sectors, and the increasing emergence of discussions posed on the terrain of class independence rather than labor reformism, reflects an important development within the current period of low proletarian struggle in the United States. The effort remains significant not because it already constitutes a broader class movement, but because it expresses a step toward it as small groupings of advanced workers seek one another out beyond the limits imposed by the regime unions and their labor-left appendages.