Working Families Party

The Working Families Party (WFP) is a minor political party in the United States founded in New York in 1998. There are "sister" parties to the New York WFP in Connecticut, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Oregon, but there is as yet no national WFP.

New York's Working Families Party was first organized in 1998 by a coalition of labor unions, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and other community organizations, members of the now-inactive national New Party, and a variety of public interest groups such as Citizen Action of New York. The party blends a culture of political organizing with unionism, 1960s idealism, and tactical pragmatism. The party's main issue concerns are jobs, health care, education and energy/environment. It has usually cross-endorsed Democratic or Republican candidates through fusion voting, but has occasionally run its own candidates.

In the 1998 election for governor of New York, the party cross-endorsed the Democratic Party candidate, Peter Vallone. Because he received more than 50,000 votes on the WFP line, the party gained an automatic ballot line for the succeeding four years. In 2000, Patricia Eddington of the WFP was elected to the New York State Assembly. In the 2002 election, the Liberal Party, running Andrew Cuomo (who had withdrawn from the Democratic primary), and the Green Party, running academic Stanley Aronowitz, failed to reach that threshold and lost the ballot lines they had previously won. This left the WFP as the only left-progressive minor party with a ballot line. This situation will continue until at least 2011 following the party's cross-endorsement of Eliot Spitzer in the 2006 election, in which he received more than 155,000 votes on the Working Families Party line, more than three times the required 50,000. The Working Families Party endorsed the then U.S. Senator Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

As of 2006, the executive director of the New York WFP is Dan Cantor. The party's Co-Chairs are Sam Williams, UAW Region 9 CAP director; Bertha Lewis; and Bob Master of the Communications Workers of America. The WFP also has an alliance with Dennis Rivera and Local 1199/SEIU (Service Employees International Union).