Labor Leaders’ Disconnect From Workers on Palestine Is Showing Up in Elections

While the rest of the U.S. left celebrated two major wins in New York’s congressional primaries in June, much of the organized labor movement was left licking its wounds.

The combined heft of New York City’s largest labor unions was not enough to best the candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the star power of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Darializa Avila Chevalier won the primary for New York’s 13th congressional district in a long-shot race against five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat, while labor organizer Claire Valdez nabbed the open seat in the 7th congressional district in an unexpected landslide against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. One week later in Colorado, DSA-endorsed Melat Kiros kept the socialist wave building by winning the nomination in Colorado’s 1st congressional district, ousting longtime incumbent Diana DeGette, who was also endorsed by major unions.

The Espaillat and Reynoso campaigns boasted an impressive slate of endorsements from major New York City labor organizations like SEIU 32BJ, SEIU 1199, DC37, and the state AFL-CIO. Our own union, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), endorsed both candidates. Reynoso was also endorsed by the influential Working Families Party, a progressive national third party, in a controversial decision that overrode the Brooklyn and Queens chapter memberships’ votes to support Valdez. And one year ago, unions overwhelmingly backed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary in an ultimately unsuccessful establishment effort to crush the insurgent Zohran Mamdani.

These losses for labor-endorsed candidates underscore how a failure to engage union members and a fealty to the Democratic Party — which has manifested as a deep divide between leadership and the rank and file on Palestine — has weakened labor’s electoral influence and left it backing electoral losers.

High-profile endorsements by labor have not yielded victories because they have materially meant little more to candidates than a logo to put on their campaign literature. The backing of a union is only effective if it comes with a well-organized base of committed support, both on the campaign trail and in the voting booth. If labor unions want to win elections, they should ask themselves why the DSA is turning out so much more support.

When the Rank and File Has a Say, and When They Don’t

Member democracy is key to DSA’s success, and it offers the labor movement an alternative way to engage and activate the rank and file in electoral campaigns. Valdez and Avila Chevalier both went through the organization’s formal endorsement process, which entails a detailed questionnaire, a forum where all members are invited to ask questions directly to the candidates, and a series of chapter votes deciding on endorsement.

With the membership’s buy-in and enthusiasm, Valdez and Avila Chevalier were able to count on practical support from the organization: thousands of dedicated volunteers knocking on doors, flooding social media, training more leader-organizers, and recruiting their friends to vote.

The comparatively undemocratic endorsement processes of many unions — where small political committees screen and select candidates typically without direct input from general membership — mean that the rank and file often disagree with whom leadership chooses to back, and may not even know that an endorsement is being considered. In turn, although union endorsements serve as signals to membership about who to vote for, the lack of member engagement in the decision-making process fails to generate enthusiasm and active participation in elections.

Labor leadership’s failure — intentional or not — to support working-class insurgents stems from a refusal to engage members and act as an independent political force outside of the Democratic Party establishment. Organized labor is at its weakest in decades and under unprecedented assault, and its leadership has decided to address this crisis by attempting to please the less outwardly adversarial of the two major parties. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this unquestioned loyalty to establishment Democrats has alienated rank-and-file members.

Palestine as the Bellwether Issue

Many workers are fed up with the Democratic establishment’s support for and defense of U.S.-Israeli atrocities — polling from June shows that a third of U.S. adults, and more than half of Democrats, believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. For many people, the party that labor has hitched itself to is standing — often arrogantly — on the wrong side of the defining political question of our time.

Union leadership and professional membership organizations have crushed many international solidarity efforts in their own ranks. Two proposed resolutions to divest from Israel bonds were killed in committee at the American Federation of Teachers convention in 2024, and the American Historical Association leadership vetoed efforts from membership to condemn scholasticide in Gaza not once but twice. In 2025, the board of the National Education Association overturned its membership’s democratic decision to boycott the Anti-Defamation League. And our own Palestine-focused CWA member organization has had our efforts to pass resolutions in solidarity with workers in Gaza and the West Bank undemocratically stymied by leadership.

For many voters and for many more volunteers in the New York primary, the distinctions between candidates’ stances on Palestine were key factors in their decision to back a candidate. Espaillat’s votes to send weapons to Israel and his slow response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s arrest of Palestinian Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in his district were contrasted with Avila Chevalier’s past as an encampment organizer at Columbia. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee both directly gave to Espaillat’s campaign and funded PACs supporting his run. In New York’s 7th congressional district, Valdez’s early, vocal, and consistent support for Palestine separated her from a Reynoso campaign that said all the right things, but was dampened by the borough president’s past support for Israel and silence on the genocide until he was vying for votes. And both insurgent candidates benefited from the endorsement of the DSA mayor, whose own campaign was boosted by the dedication of pro-Palestine volunteers. Whether or not Gaza was a top or deciding issue for voters, it was certainly a mobilizing force for those who executed the campaigns’ ground game.

The Difference Member-Led Organizing Makes

There is, however, one union that has found itself in the winner’s circle. UAW was the only major union that endorsed both Avila Chevalier and Valdez; both are rank-and-file UAW members (Valdez’s campaign launch was even attended by union President Shawn Fain). UAW Region 9A, covering much of the northeast and Puerto Rico, determines its endorsements through a member-wide democratic process similar to DSA’s.

What’s more, five days before the June 23 primary, at their June 18 convention in Detroit, rank-and-file UAW delegates finally passed resolutions to divest from Israel bonds despite leadership having struck down a similar motion two years prior. These two wins are not unrelated. In both cases, members were the driving force behind picking the fights and winning them.

It remains to be seen if the anti-imperialist, democratic socialist–aligned left can prove successful in other states, with trials ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida. (Organized labor might be headed in that direction in the Sunshine State — Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a staunch supporter of Israel who is facing a primary challenge from DSA-endorsed Oliver Larkin, was the only Democratic incumbent the state’s AFL-CIO didn’t endorse).

Workers have made it clear, repeatedly, that they are rejecting genocide. While labor leadership appears attached at the hip to the detested Democratic establishment, rank-and-file organizing has the potential to usher in union democracy that puts labor on the right side of history.