For R13, Against R23: We Must Stay Committed to Labor

Entering YDSA Convention 2025, the authors make the case for YDSA’s continued commitment to the student labor movement and against the expansions of broader student union organizing on campus.

Student Unions and Student Worker Unions: Where does the US stand? – Daniel S.C.

To learn more about discourse around student unions in YDSA, I recently decided to reach out to an Italian student unionist friend of mine. I sent her articles by comrades David P. and Steven R. to provide two dueling sides of the debate. She found it interesting, as the terrain in Italy is quite different. Student worker unions don’t exist there, and instead, student workers are represented by the student union as a whole. 

The difference in our terrains triggered introspection: Why does Italy have student unions while the United States has student worker unions? I suspect this is due to the difference in the state of our respective labor movements, in both union density and class struggle consciousness. As it stands, the U.S. labor movement is in a fledgling state of reconstruction. In these other countries, strike waves are much more common and unions are more militant; the labor movement, the existence of strong socialist and workers’ parties, the existence of various collective bargaining formations (e.g. worker unions, student unions) are all the result of echoes of class struggle reverberating throughout society. 

As it stands, the working class faces a triple crisis of a lack of strong socialist leadership, a lack of organization into class struggle institutions, and a lack of revolutionary consciousness in spite of our revolutionary conditions. To resolve this triple crisis, Marxists must engage in the dual task of participating and embedding themselves in mass movements while building the Marxist core to lead the struggle. Without a doubt, the burgeoning U.S. labor movement is one of these mass movements Marxists must embed ourselves into and take part in this reconstruction. 

YDSA convention is the moment the entire organization comes together to decide what we devote our resources to; I will be voting against R23: “Building Campus Consciousness, Democracy, and Militancy through Student Unions.” and in favor of R13: “Rechartering the Youth Labor Committee”, R13-2 and R13-3 because, with the resources available, we cannot commit to building both Student Worker Unions and Student Unions. Succinctly, we’re against devoting national resources towards helping chapters build Student Unions because Student Worker Unions are the more strategic investment for pushing forward the class struggle; YDSA must wholeheartedly commit itself to the labor movement and rank-and-file strategy. 

YDSA Chapters and Student Worker Unions: A match made in heaven – Lael L.

Throughout the past year we saw unprecedented student worker union efforts, including the impressive 10-day University of Oregon (UO) student worker strike. We’ve heard, from UO student workers and burgeoning student worker efforts in the South, about the potential for strong, bidirectional, pipelines between student worker unions and the socialist movement. YDSA chapters are a place to develop enthusiastic salts for union campaigns, while unions themselves serve as a breeding ground for new socialists dedicated to organizing for economic demands and beyond. This bi-directional pipeline builds socialist consciousness within rank-and-file union members and trains lifelong socialists in labor organizing strategy, resurrecting the broken bond between ground-up labor and socialist movements. 

My experience as a member of the Youth Labor Committee (YLC) has shown me how vital it is for YDSA to put the force of national mentorship behind building strong chapters ready to assemble this socialist-labor bridge. The NCC’s mentorship has allowed Florida International University YDSA to build strong cadre who understand the vital role of labor in our collective struggle; these members are now prepared to salt future workplaces. In addition, YLC mentorship has taught many chapters to navigate the finer points of public sector union organizing, learning how to approach labor as socialists and maneuver organizing conversations with our coworkers in anti-communist regions in the South. On a local level, our strong YDSA chapter has provided trainings for ongoing labor efforts and aims to build labor ties with our faculty union.This experience is what prompted me to write R-13-3; an amendment committing to the construction of a bidirectional pipeline between YDSA and youth labor, further politicizing our labor efforts and building off of the incredible mentorship work from this year’s YLC and NCC. 

During the 2024-2025 term, we saw the implementation of two national campaigns for Palestine: the Student Intifada and the student strike. The Palestine Committee’s capacity was split as they tried to implement both campaigns, and NCC members found themselves struggling to fully realize both visions. In the end, neither came to fruition. The shift in focus towards implementing a national campaign for Sanctuary Campuses saw cohesive capacity lent towards the project, and chapters around the country are ready to hit the ground running with strong campaigns for socialist sanctuaries in the fall. 

Some arguments posit that student unions are unable to push for class struggle because they are formations not explicitly based on class lines. This argument falls into half-baked class reductionism; there are various “collective bargaining formations” that are based on non-class factors, like tenant unions, that socialists have historically engaged with, allowing us to fight the class war on multiple fronts. Whether in Italy, Bangladesh, Brazil or Quebec, student unions have instilled class struggle in the minds of many students. 

That being said, success abroad doesn’t necessarily mean that this tactic would be the most effective tactic in the United States. As it stands, there is no mass movement of students across the United States; the student intifada and encampments represented a spark in consciousness that has not existed in decades, a blip in student consciousness which subsided after the summer of 2024. At my university in the Netherlands, where I got my start in undergrad as a Jewish anti-zionist organizer in our equivalent of Jewish Voices for Peace, we had a broadly more conscious student body that was able to stage partially successful hunger strikes, occupations, and an encampment. This ultimately culminated in a form of collective bargaining with my university. However, organizing conditions were far more favorable: Police used relatively limited force, and when a Zionist speaker came for a guest lecture, students banged on the auditorium window chanting “free Palestine” with comparatively limited repercussions. My university “went easy” on protesters because they were still, to some degree, worried about aesthetics and press. And even so, many divestment demands made during bargaining were denied, and police eventually raided the encampment. In the US, we don’t have the luxury of a precedent for collective bargaining as students; the best way to extract demands from our university, therefore, is by threatening their capital. We do this by forming labor unions.

YDSA convention is the site where we democratically decide the direction our organization shall take for the incoming year, devoting national resources and focus towards executing our projects and priorities. With our situation in the United States, YDSA is best suited to invest in and orient towards the labor movement by building young socialists into seasoned and effective labor organizers. May Day 2028 is around the corner, and if we want our socialist youth section to make a splash in the sea of class struggle, we must focus our investment in the labor movement by devoting YDSA’s national focus and resources towards the construction of student worker unions.

Meet the moment, read the room – Daniel S. C.

I can hear you asking, “Aren’t the student movement and the labor movement in similar situations regarding low consciousness?” While at the moment, US union density is at a historic low point, this is changing; to workers across the country, unionizing your workplace feels more possible than ever. 

In his book We Are the Union, DSA member Eric Blanc chronicles how the COVID-19 pandemic was partly responsible for an organic, bottom-up groundswell of worker organizing, aided by advancements in technology like Whatsapp and Zoom. After discussing union efforts at companies like Amazon or Starbucks, Blanc shares a quote from Alan Hanson, the former organizing director of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400: “I’ve never seen this number of workers reach out to our union before.”. In the same vein, the YLC’s 2025 Red Hot Summer labor training saw an increase in attendance of around 300% compared to last year, with about 80 regular attendees from across the US for the entirety of the 4-week course. Testimonies like these serve as proof that there is an organic and growing mass movement for worker organizing in the United States; if we are interested in DSA and the socialist movement winning legitimacy in the eyes of the working class, YDSA must wholeheartedly lead the charge in student worker organizing. 

As we see high-profile strikes from unions like the SAG-AFTRA, more and more people are understanding the role unions play in protecting the working class from the greed of capital. Student unionism in the United States seldom exists outside of YDSA’s circles, and would require YDSA creating a mass movement from thin air – even in our conversations within YDSA, we must conceptualize the student union in relation to worker unions. During these debates, a specific letter from Leon Trotsky comes to mind; addressing the Spanish section of the Left Opposition, he wrote:

“The masses of the city and countryside can be united at the present time only under democratic slogans… Soviets are as yet nonexistent. The Spanish workers – not to speak of the peasants– do not know what soviets are; at any rate, not from their own experiences.”

Much like the Spanish workers and peasants in 1931, in the United States, the only students that know about student unions are those who are already directly in YDSA’s orbit. Even within DSA, the concept is so unfamiliar that consistently we must clear up the differences between student unions and student worker unions! When explaining student unions, we usually opt for analogizing it with worker unions, which itself is evidence of greater familiarity and consciousness with the preexisting mass movement that is the labor movement. 

Between the anecdotes shared by Blanc and our direct experience at FIU, where young workers outside of YDSA’s orbit have organically sought to engage in organizing their work place, we can see that the experiences of young workers are bringing them towards the labor movement. Labor organizing is an incredibly daunting project for chapters to take on, but when done successfully, the rewards we reap are life changing. As one of the primary tasks of national leaders in YDSA is to generate buy-in for national initiatives, we cannot split our limited focus by trying to generate buy-in for two different unionist projects. We should prioritize generating buy-in for the construction of worker unions both because we must make a strong intervention into the pre-existing burgeoning labor mass movement, but also because we cannot afford to half-ass either intervention. 

Fulfilling the Rank-and-File Strategy – Daniel S.C.

I can hear a second question coming, “If the labor movement is already underway, then why should we intervene in it? ” The rank and file strategy is not only about rebuilding union density and institutions of the working class, but it also emphasizes a crucial focus on building the reform movement to bring the class struggle back to unions and defeat class-collaborationist business unionism.

While the labor movement is making great strides, it is still far from perfect; we see this, partially, through its leadership. There are rather egregious examples, such as Teamster President Sean O’Brien uncritically tailing Trump; however, the darlings of the labor left still fall short, such as Shawn Fain, who, despite being an ally of the left, still critically supports Trump’s tariffs and uncritically supported Kamala Harris’ presidential run, despite her inhumane position on the genocide in Palestine.

Student worker unions are a U.S. anomaly, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. YDSA builds lifelong socialists and the future revolutionary vanguard, and when creating the secure pipeline into the labor movement, we aim to win more workers over to DSA’s political project and create the foundation to contest for leadership of the labor movement in the future. YDSA has a central role to play in building these student worker unions, earning recruits from individual union drives, and affiliating with larger unions to build the socialist wing of their reform efforts.

If we focus capacity on YDSA chapters, across the country, building student worker unions that later affiliate with large international unions like the Teamsters or the UAW, we can play a direct role in building up the socialist wing of the reform movement. We will not be able to have a strong intervention on May Day 2028 if leaders like Sean O’Brien remain at the helm of our unions. By having young democratic socialists embedded in the reform fights of these unions, we can make sure we don’t get lost in the sea of class struggle while seizing control of the socialist current, ensuring the current leads us towards mass politics and not ultraleftist conclusions. 

The YLC members of today can be the UAW presidents of tomorrow; to not wholeheartedly invest ourselves into solidifying our foothold in the labor movement, as DSA, would be a century-defining fumble. The first step must be the NCC and relevant national committees supporting the YLC’s efforts to start student worker organizing committees at universities with strong chapters across the country. We can start consciously setting this foundation for a strong YDSA intervention for May Day 2028, but we cannot afford to get distracted and split capacity. For this reason, we call on everyone reading this article to join us in voting in favor of R13: “Rechartering the Youth Labor Committee”, R13-2, and R13-3, and voting against R23: “Building Campus Consciousness, Democracy, and Militancy through Student Unions.”