Labor law reform. Ending at-will employment. A federal jobs guarantee. A four-day workweek. Guaranteed paid family, medical, and sick leave and vacation. Medicare for All.
This list reflects the ambitious, long-standing policy goals of the labor left — goals that many have given up on after decades of demoralizing neoliberalism. It also happens to be a collection of highlights from socialist congressional candidate Claire Valdez’s labor policy platform, just released today.
Valdez, a New York State Assembly member who is now running for the Seventh Congressional District, is also calling for federal government support for new union organizing, legalizing strikes for federal employees, implementing pro-worker trade and industrial policy, raising the federal minimum wage, and expanding unemployment insurance. She is casting the proposals as furthering three goals: to establish “unions for all,” to “empower workers and end corporate dominance,” and to guarantee everyone the “freedom to live a good life.”
It is a bold list of demands. If just a portion of the agenda were passed, it would mean a major shift of power and income away from capital and the ultrarich toward working people.
“I see my role as a legislator right now in the assembly, but hopefully someday in Congress, as making the terrain fertile for new organizing and for workers to be as powerful as possible,” Valdez told Jacobin. “This platform, talking about a federal jobs guarantee and a four-day workweek, wresting power back from billionaires and bosses and corporations that have taken so much of our free time and energy, so much of our wages and basic dignity on the job — it’s essential to building the world that we need.”
It is also significant that Valdez, who has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is foregrounding support for unions and framing many of the policies as aimed at empowering workers to organize…
Auteur: Nick French
