How Bernie Sanders’ Campaigns Helped Forge a New Generation of Labor Organizers

Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns did more than reshape electoral politics; they helped politicize and cohere a generation of young labor activists who would become central to the post-2020 labor upsurge. Beyond the growth of democratic socialism as an electoral force and the expansion of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Sanders’s campaigns provided organizing experience, networks, and a class-based framework that many organizers trace as formative.

Reporting From the Ground: The 2018 Teachers’ Revolts

While Sanders did not cause the 2018 statewide teachers’ strikes—years of austerity and attacks on public education created those conditions—reporting in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona repeatedly turned up rank-and-file leaders who said Sanders’s 2016 campaign had politicized them.

“The role of the Bernie campaign of 2016 on organizing in West Virginia really cannot be overstated,” Charleston teacher and strike leader Emily Comer told me. “It got people, especially young people, plugged in who before had been feeling hopeless and who would not have made their way into organizing before.”

“It was the continuation of a movement that started with Bernie Sanders and is going to result in a power shift from the elite wealthy to the working people,” Morgantown teacher Anna Simmons recalled of the night educators rejected a union settlement and kept striking.

Survey Evidence From the Post-2020 Upsurge

Patterns that emerged after 2020 make that connection harder to dismiss. For my book We Are the Union, I surveyed more than two thousand worker leaders who helped unionize their workplaces in 2022. The median respondent was twenty-seven years old, and nearly half self-identified as radical.

When asked what outside influences mattered, more than 80 percent cited at least one non-labor movement as a major factor in their decision to organize. Among those non-labor influences, Black Lives Matter had the broadest reach, followed closely by Bernie Sanders’s campaigns, which respondents reported as having particularly intense impact.

From Campaigns To Institutions

Sanders’s campaigns also helped spawn durable organizing infrastructure. The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) grew directly out of Bernie 2020 and DSA-for-Bernie organizing. In March 2020, as Covid hit, workers reached out to the Sanders campaign seeking help with protective equipment and sick leave; campaign labor organizers, DSA volunteers, and members of the United Electrical Workers set up a simple intake form to connect those workers with volunteer organizers, reflecting the campaign’s class-struggle politics and distributed organizing model.

On-the-Ground Organizers

Interviews put faces to the data. Max Yusen, who helped lead the St. Louis Starbucks into unionization, said he had not grown up around labor: “Labor was a big part of Bernie’s message, and being around union members while canvassing and inside DSA really made me see how important they are.” He later took a job at Starbucks with the explicit goal of organizing it.

Many of the rank-and-file “salts” who took jobs to organize—and who were crucial to the Amazon Labor Union’s JFK8 victory—were politicized by Sanders’s presidential runs. Across Starbucks, Amazon, CVS, Trader Joe’s, and other campaigns, young workers brought an anti-billionaire politics that had become far more widespread since 2016.

What Didn’t—and What Did—Create the Upsurge

None of this implies Sanders alone produced the labor revival. Covid-19 was a major catalyst, as were a tight labor market, a more favorable National Labor Relations Board under the Biden administration, new digital organizing tools, and the contagious example of workers winning. The 2018 teachers’ strikes inspired later actions; early victories at Starbucks and Amazon convinced thousands that organizing could work.

Why This Matters

Electoral campaigns can influence workplace struggle by politicizing people, raising expectations, building networks, and giving volunteers hands-on organizing experience. Sanders’s campaigns provided all four, and they helped create people and institutions that continued organizing after the campaigns ended.

Looking Ahead

Organizing at Amazon has spread beyond the original JFK8 win: the Teamsters reported this year that roughly ten thousand Amazon workers had organized across thirteen facilities. In New York, Amazon workers and the Teamsters are organizing on the job while campaigning for the Delivery Protection Act, which would regulate last-mile facilities and impose new employment and safety requirements; as of September 2026, that bill remained pending in the city council with thirty-five sponsors.

Bernie’s contribution to the revival of the American left therefore extends beyond electoral politics and DSA growth. As Vince Quiles, a Home Depot worker in Philadelphia, put it: “Bernie showed me and a lot of people my age that it’s not a bad thing to fight corporations or demand more from your government. We’re workers—we produce everything, and we deserve more.”