The latest issue of Jacobin Magazine is dedicated to "the party we need" - meaning America's missing socialist party. As well as a history of the long-moribund SPUSA and some blueprints for future action, they published this look at various moments throughout the 20th century during which a Labor Party could have emerged (and why it didn't). Kind of an AH treasure trove.
So, from first to last (and, probably, from most- to least-viable):
1. What if the CIO leadership of the mid-1930s, rather than backing Roosevelt with their Political Action Committee and "Labor's Nonpartisan League," had founded a labor or a farmer-labor party, as some of its rank-and-file wished?
Probably not realistic if things pan out as they do IOTL, but a possibility in the ever-popular Zangara-kills-FDR scenario or any other TL with a failed, abandoned, or timid New Deal.
2. What if Dewey or another Republican wins in 1948 and the Reuther brothers go ahead with their plan for an independent labor party to fight anti-union legislation? They were outspoken anti-communist socialists and could red-bait with the rest of them, so they wouldn't be as vulnerable to those charges as Henry Wallace was.
3. What if Tony Mazzocchi's 1996 Labor Party had figured out a coherent electoral strategy instead of waffling for years about whether or not to contest elections? Maybe it could look something like the party strategy Jacobin itself proposes elsewhere in the issue:
So, from first to last (and, probably, from most- to least-viable):
1. What if the CIO leadership of the mid-1930s, rather than backing Roosevelt with their Political Action Committee and "Labor's Nonpartisan League," had founded a labor or a farmer-labor party, as some of its rank-and-file wished?
Some scholars, like historian Eric Davin, hold the CIO leadership responsible. In the early 1930s, local labor parties ran candidates in at least twenty-three areas and won control of the local government of Berlin, New Hampshire. Central labor councils in at least ten other places advocated building a national labor party, as did state labor federations in New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. At the 1935 AFL convention, which led to the creation of the CIO, various unions submitted proposals for a labor party; a resolution endorsing the idea only narrowly failed.
But by 1936, John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) and the CIO, and Sidney Hillman, head of the ACWA, had founded Labor’s Nonpartisan League — a move designed to ensure the CIO would remain loyal to the ostensibly pro-labor Roosevelt.
Probably not realistic if things pan out as they do IOTL, but a possibility in the ever-popular Zangara-kills-FDR scenario or any other TL with a failed, abandoned, or timid New Deal.
2. What if Dewey or another Republican wins in 1948 and the Reuther brothers go ahead with their plan for an independent labor party to fight anti-union legislation? They were outspoken anti-communist socialists and could red-bait with the rest of them, so they wouldn't be as vulnerable to those charges as Henry Wallace was.
It was the complete failure of Wallace’s presidential campaign that led union leaders like Walter Reuther, once an advocate of building an independent labor party, to shelve the idea in favor of pushing for social-democratic welfare programs through the Democratic Party.
Assuming that the Republicans would win the presidency in 1948 (and fearful of more anti-union legislation like the Taft-Hartley Act, which the Republican Congress had passed a year earlier) the UAW executive board had initially called for a new party after the election. Walter’s brother Victor even planned an educational conference featuring leaders of British and Canadian social democracy.
3. What if Tony Mazzocchi's 1996 Labor Party had figured out a coherent electoral strategy instead of waffling for years about whether or not to contest elections? Maybe it could look something like the party strategy Jacobin itself proposes elsewhere in the issue:
Avoid the ballot-line trap. Decisions about how individual candidates appear on the ballot would be made on a case-by-case basis and on pragmatic grounds, depending on the election laws and partisan coloration of the state or district in question. In any given race, the organization could choose to run in major- or minor-party primaries, as nonpartisan independents, or even, theoretically, on the organization’s own ballot line.