When eight unions representing more than a million and a half workers met in Cleveland to found a Labor Party early in May, they signaled the start of formal divorce proceedings between the Democratic Party and a good chunk of American labor. While delegates decided not to run their own Labor Party candidates this year, for the first time the potential exists for working people to have their own voice in the political system. PNS associate editor David Bacon, a veteran labor organizer, writes about labor and immigration.

CLEVELAND -- For forty-seven years the marriage between unions and the Democratic Party has been so tight that calling for any kind of independent voice for labor was like asking for a divorce in a nuclear family.

Last week, part of labor started filing for divorce. The ILWU (International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union), UE (United Electrical Workers), OCAW (Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers), and four other unions representing over a million and a half workers met here to found the Labor Party. Not since the Congress of Industrial Organizations met here in 1949 and expelled ten unions for, among other things, advocating a break with the Democratic Party has there been a political convulsion of this magnitude.

Americans, unlike Europeans or Canadians, aren't used to the idea of a political organization based in unions. Instead unions -- following Samuel Gompers' dictum to "reward your friends and punish your enemies" -- have supported the candidates of someone else's party. That's meant supporting Democrats.

But that's becoming more and more difficult for labor to do. On a national level, Democratic positions on issues like welfare, cutting social services, workers' rights and trade are ones even the Republican Party would have found hard to endorse twenty or thirty years ago.

The problem according to delegates isn't that there are no Democrats dedicated to the problems of working families. It's that big money has acquired a hold on the party. "Both parties seem to say that what's good for corporate America is good for everyone," says Bob Wages, president of the OCAW, whose members run Los Angeles' huge oil refineries. " Their versions of trickle-down economics are just a little different."

What's made workers and unions even more bitter is that the Democrats, unlike the Republicans, could always say to labor "where else do you have to go?" When Clinton sought workers' votes four years ago, and then turned around and pushed through NAFTA after the election, that's exactly what he said.

"This is the only movement where they'll give you money, you can kick them in the ass, and they'll come back and give you more money," observes Tony Mazzochi, another OCAW leader who's been advocating for a labor party for years. "That's the history of the labor movement and people who've betrayed it. They were never afraid of us."

Like most separations and divorces, the Labor Party's split from the Democrats is likely to be messy and drawn out. Delegates here were divided over when, and even whether to run candidates, with many arguing that it is better to build a movement to pressure the political system from the outside. Delegates also found more unity on economic issues than social ones like abortion rights.

Ultimately, the unions forming the Labor Party decided to continue to endorse existing candidates and to focus their energies on organizing its structure and recruiting new members. Most will undoubtedly campaign for Clinton this fall, despite their anger and misgivings. Nevertheless, for the first time in almost a century, the potential exists that a significant part of the labor movement will start nominating and running its own candidates.

The party's program aims to pull the political spectrum back to the priorities of working people. Instead of arguing about how much to cut education, it proposes free education through university for every one. Instead of medical care for profit, leaving millions with no care at all, it demands free universal care for all people.

In an era when the idea that a job should exist only if someone's making a profit from it, the Labor Party argues that a job with a livable wage is a right -- one that should be written into the constitution, just as property rights are for employers.

Pie in the sky? I don't think so. Working families are tired of a political system in which everyone claims to talk for them but in which they have no voice of their own.

When French unions defended the needs of all that country's workers in last year's strike, they won popular support far beyond the small percentage of the population who were union members. The Labor Party's program could win its candidates the same kind of support here.