Steve Early is the author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress and Embedded with Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, both published by Monthly Review Press.
He first met Bernie Sanders in 1976 during a Vermont political campaign, and today reflects on how organized labor should respond to Sanders’s bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
In Jacobin magazine, Early writes:
“When I first met Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders, he was a relatively marginal figure in his adopted state of Vermont. It was 1976 and he was running, unsuccessfully and for the fourth time, as a candidate of the Liberty Union Party (LUP).
“Liberty Union was a radical third party spearheaded by opponents of the Vietnam War who had, like Sanders, washed up in the Green Mountain State as the sixties subsided. At its historic peak, the LUP garnered maybe 5 or 6 percent of the statewide vote for some of its more presentable candidates — in short, nothing like the winning margins racked up in recent years by the far more savvy and effective Vermont Progressive Party, which now boasts a ten-member legislature delegation and attracts growing union support.
“During Sanders’s quixotic mid-1970s bid to become governor of Vermont, I accompanied him to a meeting of local granite cutters, teamsters, and electrical workers…”
Read the entire article, “Labor for Bernie,” in Jacobin magazine.
And here, Steve Early comments on the Sanders campaign on the radio program Alternative Visions, hosted by Jack Rasmus. He is joined by Alan Benjamin, a delegate to the San Francisco Central Labor Council, a member of OPEIU, editor of The Organizer progressive socialist newspaper, and a member of the executive committee of the Labor Fightback Network in the US. The entire show is available to stream online here.
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