Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Illapa Sairitupac as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA’s insurgent slate.

The post Illapa Sairitupac puts Socialism Back on the Ballot for the Lower East Side appeared first on Democratic Left.

[[{“value”:”

By: Nelson Lichtenstein

This article was originally published in New Labor Forum. These positions are the authors’ own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass.

Original Editor’s Note: This article appears as the United Auto Workers (UAW) union prepares for its 39th UAW Constitutional Convention, scheduled for June 15-18, 2026.

The strength of a union and its leadership can be gauged most accurately when the headwinds are strongest: when political opponents command the White House and Congress, when the economy sours, employers play hardball, layoffs proliferate, and new organizing drives stall out. Many American unions confront that situation today, but members and leaders of the United Auto Workers (UAW), who assemble this June for their first constitutional convention since reformer Shawn Fain was elected union president more than three years ago, might be feeling it more acutely than anyone else in the labor movement.

At the convention, almost a thousand delegates will debate a wide variety of topics, from the level of strike pay and union dues to a ban on hiring most non-UAW members onto the union staff. There will be speeches on how to stop layoffs in UAW organized factories and how to get the organizing drive in the South going again. And once the convention is over, we’ll also know who is running for top office in the union. Fain and his team of 13 executive board candidates, dubbed the “Stand Up Slate” after the 2023 “Stand Up Strike” against the Big Three automakers, will face opposition.  Still, his team is likely to retain control of the union after October 2026, when a government-appointed monitor counts the mail-in ballots sent to upwards of a million UAW members and retirees in the weeks before. After conversations with scores of unionists in recent weeks, Fain says he feels “confident” about the outcome.^[1]

But just holding office is hardly the point. Fain and most of those who backed him have sought to make the UAW once again synonymous with working-class power and militancy and transform the union into the “vanguard in America,” a phrase coined by Walter Reuther, the UAW’s legendary president, right after his caucus won full power in the union in 1947. That ambition has set a salutary standard for all labor partisans, but it has been thwarted by obstacles arising from within the union and without, circumstances and problems that in one degree or another bedevil all progressive insurgents who find themselves in high union office.

Fain’s presidency has attempted to reverse decades of union defeat, decline, and demoralization. Beginning in the early 1980s, when all industrial unions faced competition from abroad and union busting at home, the UAW has bled members, power, and political influence. In the late 1970s, UAW had a million and a half members, with nearly 100 percent of all automobile production in the U.S. union made. Today, the union has a working membership of 400,000 (half the number of the union’s retirees), and of that number only about 150,000 work in the core auto industry. In the U.S., half of all production is non-union, with Toyota, Nissan, Mercedes, and other foreign companies intensely hostile to the UAW.

But even more debilitating was the sense of passivity and resignation of so many in the union leadership. As UAW president Owen Bieber, who in the 1980s and 1990s presided over some of the union’s most consequential setbacks and concessions, told historian John Barnard, “Things that we had to do. We did.”^[2] That defeatism was exacerbated by two things: the Soviet-style rule of an increasingly insular one-party “Administration Caucus,” and the growth of a collaborative industrial relations ideology that attempted to cast labor and capital as partners in a common endeavor. Not unexpectedly, a wide variety of corruptions spread through the union staff and hierarchy, ranging all the way from various forms of nepotism and favor trading that enabled loyalist rank-and-filers to win cushy staff jobs at Detroit’s Solidarity House or in one of the regional offices; to the California golf junkets and outright theft of union dues that led to the criminal conviction and jailing of a dozen union leaders, including two former presidents.

This was the context, in 2020, where genuine reform finally became possible in the UAW. When a Michigan district court appointed a federal monitor to supervise the transformation of the union, a rank-and-file group, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) put the free and fair election of a new cohort of union leaders at the top of their agenda. In a government-supervised referendum, the membership voted to junk the system whereby convention delegates, all too often beholden to the existing leadership, chose union officers and instead instituted a one-person, one-vote union-wide ballot.

When the votes were counted in 2022 and 2023 (there was a runoff among the two presidential contenders), a haphazardly cobbled reform slate swept every office it contested. Shawn Fain, once an electrician from Kokomo, Indiana, became president, while Margaret Mock, an African American woman who had worked most recently at the Stellantis Warren Michigan Truck plant (Local 140), became Secretary-Treasurer, responsible for a wide variety of duties including purchasing, auditing, and strike assistance.

Fain did not know Mock very well, but since he was running against Ray Curry, who was just the second Black UAW president, her presence on the ticket was important. But a clever electoral strategy was hardly a hallmark of the slate headed by Shawn Fain. Normally, no two candidates would come from the same local. But in 2022 Rich Boyer, whom Mock had known since the beginning of her career, was also from Local 140, though not a top leader there. He was elected a UAW Vice President in charge of Stellantis.

Once in office, Fain had less than six months to prepare for negotiations, and a possible strike, with Detroit’s Big Three: Ford, General Motors (GM), and Stellantis, which had taken over most of the old Chrysler production facilities. Since Fain defeated Curry by just a few hundred votes, he hardly had a united rank and file behind him. Perhaps even more important, most of the existing staffers and local union officers were skeptical of his leadership. That made Fain particularly dependent on the crew of thirty-something East Coast activists he recruited to his staff. These included Jonah Furman, who as communications director put a brilliant series of union advocacy messages online; lawyer Benjamin Dictor, heavily involved in the UAW’s decision to break with past practice and conduct simultaneous negotiations with all three Detroit based automakers; and Chris Brooks, a key strategist and Fain’s chief of staff. ^[3]

Brooks, who hailed from Chattanooga, Tennessee, the site of a big Volkswagen (VW) factory, had been a reporter for Labor Notes, a newsletter-cum-organizing center long critical of the old UAW, and then an organizing director at the NewsGuild. Energetic and determined, Brooks played a key role in shaping the innovative strike strategy in the fall of 2023 that generated what even the most anti-union commentators considered a pathbreaking union victory. But Brooks has also been described, even by admirers, as “arrogant” and a “know-it-all.”^[4]

In a memo Brooks wrote at the outset of his tenure, he outlined the big, disruptive changes he wanted the new Fain team to put forward: “Everything we do, at every stage, must be reinforcing the message: there is a new sheriff in town, something different is happening. This starts with who is appointed to what, who does and does not get fired, and by demonstrating the willingness of the new leadership to embrace new ideas and new practices.” As for the union’s old guard, Brooks expected resistance and resentment. “The mantra of the counter-revolution is going to be ‘we’ve never done it this way,’” he wrote. “People will be upset because their jobs are going to change and because new things are being expected of them.”^[5] As Brooks would later put it, “newly elected leaders can’t be saddled with the top lieutenants of the incumbents they have just defeated.”^[6]

Not unexpectedly, disdain for the “white boys from Brooklyn” spread through some offices at Solidarity House, the UAW headquarters. But Fain stuck by his new staffers, telling the Wall Street Journal — which would soon publish a twenty-first century version of an old red-baiting meme by highlighting the “new hires who never worked in an auto factory” — that “I thought it was important to bring in people that weren’t ingrained in the system.”^[7] That fall, when the resentment of some veteran UAW staffers became manifest, Fain doubled down at a large staff meeting. He had his crew of thirty-somethings stand up on the stage, then told the audience that he would “slit the fucking throats” of anyone who “messed” with his new hires.^[8]

This tension between outside activists, often from middle-class backgrounds, and those veteran unionists who have worked their way out of the shop and into the ranks of the union apparatus, has been endemic in the labor movement, especially evident when reformers assume power in a union. During the UAW faction fight of the mid-1940s, Reuther won support by denouncing Communist-oriented staffers—not just because of their politics, but because they had come from outside union ranks. Just a few years later, some of the more conservative officers on the UAW executive board saw the brain trust around Reuther, many from New York, as an “alien faction.” In the summer of 1949, this resentment exploded when southern-born Vice President John Livingston denounced Brendan Sexton, editor of the UAW’s Ammunition, as one of the “obnoxious long-hairs” who peddled socialist ideas on union time.^[9]

This same insider-outsider tension reemerged when the United Mine Workers’ Arnold Miller won a surprise victory against a profoundly corrupt regime early in the 1970s and then imported a cohort of New Left activists to help him reform the union. But the old-fashioned red-baiting became so intense that Miller soon purged headquarters of a group whose skills were admittedly useful, but who were also seen as occupying posts that should have gone to deserving and loyal mineworkers.^[10] Just a few years later, when Ed Sadlowski campaigned for president of the Steelworkers, just four international representatives out of 600 supported his insurgency.^[11] Even unions like the Communications Workers of America (CWA), urban and occupationally diverse, have encountered this tension, reports Bob Master of the New York/New Jersey CWA region.^[12] It’s almost an “existential” issue, observed one union reform advocate, who told me that in conversations with many UAW members that “99 out of a 100” thought the union should not hire from the outside. But that must be weighed against the larger purpose of the union. “Is the UAW a jobs program for 500 people or is it a movement to change the lives of 500,000 workers and their families?”

A Tumultuous Reform Process

All this set the stage for what would turn out to be a highly consequential meeting of the UAW executive board in February 2024. By this time, the UAW had turned its sights on organizing the non-union auto factories in the South, first VW in Chattanooga but also Mercedes in Vance, Alabama and Toyota in Georgetown, Kentucky. Immediately after the conclusion of the 2023 Stand Up Strike, all the non-union companies raised wages to meet the new UAW standard. Fain called that the “UAW bump.” Upwards of ten thousand Southern auto workers signed union authorization cards, many with little or no encouragement from a UAW organizer.

“The workers are ready,” Fain told his executive board. “This is our time…We haven’t seen a moment like this in our lives and we may not see one again…it is not a time for half measures and being conservative. It’s time to swing for the fences.” A “generational leap” could rebuild the UAW, said Fain, not unlike that of the founding generation in the 1930s and 1940s.^[13]

Fain was here outlining a theory of momentum organizing, an approach to unionization pushed forward by Chris Brooks and many of the new staff hires, that eschewed the careful planning and step-by-step organizing of the sort most unions practiced when confronted by management hostility and worker hesitation. That approach, one refined and advertised by the late Jane McAlevey, was essential in normal times, but now Fain and his team wagered that the UAW’s exceptionally high-profile strike had created a “movement moment,” a “brief period in time that workers are ready to join by the thousands.” ^[14]

Of course, that did not mean that the union could neglect the recruitment and training of union advocates in the factory and community. But even here, the UAW was trying something new. It had been trying to organize the big VW complex in Chattanooga for more than a decade, and a handful of veteran staffers were on the scene. But Fain wanted to inject more energy and elan into the effort. He therefore recruited nearly a dozen West Coast unionists, who had won their spurs in university organizing.

Their leader, Carla Villanueva, who held a Ph.D. in Latin American history, would later argue, in a New Labor Forum article co-authored with Michael Belt, that at both VW in higher education momentum was hardly enough. The UAW’s big National Labor Relations Board election victory at VW (73 percent voting for the UAW in April 2024) was the product of an intense cadre building effort in every department and on every shift, so that nearly all the 4,300 workers understood the stakes.^[15]

Regardless of the organizing methodology, Fain and his team wanted to strike while the iron was hot, while union enthusiasm in the South was high, and before the Tennessee business and political elite could mobilize. The UAW had appropriated $40 million for the organizing campaign, so Furman sought to hire a couple of D.C.-based media and consulting firms, both of which had close connections to the Biden administration or the Democratic Party. They would spread the UAW message on billboards and on television and social media throughout East Tennessee. The contracts would be worth upwards of half a million dollars each and both would be “no-bid,” an exception to the “three-bid” procedure mandated by the outside monitor and the UAW constitution. Fain and Furman argued that delay would sap the momentum, and, equally important, the three-bid contract procedure would alert anti-union forces in Tennessee to the renewed UAW effort.^[16] In years past, billboards the UAW sought to rent had instead been secured by the National Right to Work Committee and other business groups, who emblazoned them with messages like “The UAW Wants Your Guns” and pictures of derelict factories with the tag line, “Detroit: Brought to You by the UAW.” ^[17]

But Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock was unwilling to cut corners. In December 2024, she had angered Furman and the rest of the Fain team when she refused to sign off on one of the D.C. contracts. Her office had spent the Christmas holidays vetting Conexion, the media company Furman wanted, but the delay angered Brooks, Fain, and other newcomers—just one more instance, they thought, of Mock not grasping the need for organizing speed and message. Thus, for example, when the 2023 strike began, Mock wanted to save money by using up the many thousands of generic picket signs stored at various UAW local offices, much to the annoyance of Furman and Brooks who had crafted strike-specific messages. And then there were the petty holdups and reimbursement denials when organizers found their UAW credit card unworkable. In one instance, Mock rejected a $151 pizza bill, paid by Brooks with his personal card, when Shawn Fain visited Chattanooga to meet with key UAW organizers.

Complained Fain, “every time we make a request, we’re being investigated like we’re doing something corrupt…we get blocked and it turns into a damn fight just to get done what we need to get done.” To which Mock replied that because of the corruption scandal of just a few years back, she was indeed “strict” when enforcing UAW expenditures guidelines. “I was sent here with a mandate,” she argued, “The membership said, go in there and you protect our money at all costs. Am I counting dollars and pennies and nickels and dimes? Absolutely. That’s my job.”^[18]

But Mock’s outlook embodied more than just green-eyeshade rigidity. Early in her tenure, according to union staffers, she had unsuccessfully tried to get her son on the UAW staff focused on Stellantis.^[19] Later, her hostility to Brooks and other new staffers—and her defense of the old system whereby union jobs were a reward for years of service—became clear when she told the executive board, “I am totally against hiring anybody from outside. We have hundreds of thousands of members…So I take offense that our people aren’t qualified.” That’s a sentiment she will put forward in a resolution, prohibiting “nonmembers from exercising policy making, strategic direction or supervisory control” at the UAW’s constitutional convention in June 2026. ^[20]

While that’s a popular sentiment in the ranks, Mock was almost entirely isolated at that February 2024 executive board meeting. Significantly, she had no support from Chuck Browning, a veteran UAW officer, then Vice President in charge of Ford, who had been a Curry partisan in the election just a year before. Browning, however, was now an enthusiastic supporter of Fain’s “kick ass” organizing strategy, and he thought the new UAW president entirely within his rights to reassign some of Mock’s responsibilities so as to eliminate what he also considered her obstructionism.^[21]  Thus the union’s executive board stripped Mock of some 11 departments under her supervision, prompted by a report from the UAW’s compliance officer asserting that she had used her authority “to delay, obstruct, or even block the work of other departments.” For “weeks and even months” she used the Purchasing Department to drag out approval of vital union tasks. It was a “dereliction of duty,” concluded the report.^[22]

Enter the Monitor

Margaret Mock may have lost the battle on the UAW executive board, but she had a powerful ally waiting in the wings. In May 2021, the Michigan federal court that oversaw the union’s corruption case appointed Neil Barofsky UAW monitor, a post that gave him a wide-ranging mandate to investigate virtually any aspect of the union’s activities to “remove fraud, corruption, illegal behavior, dishonesty, and unethical practices from the UAW.” Barofsky, a former prosecutor and a Democrat, was the Treasury Department’s Special Inspector General in 2009 and 2010 overseeing the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program, after which he wrote a book, Bailout, asserting that because of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s regulatory favoritism to the banks, the American people “should be enraged by the broken promises to Main Street and the unending protection of Wall Street.” Thereafter, Barofsky joined the law firm Jenner & Block, where he co-chaired its New York-based monitorship practice.^[23]

It’s a lucrative business, in the U.S. and abroad, where courts and government agencies use monitorships as part of various investigations, legal settlements, and regulatory actions. Big companies like Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Glencore, GM, Uber as well as the New York City Housing Authority have been Jenner & Block clients. With at least three partners working with Barofsky on the UAW monitorship, Jenner & Block billed the union more than $25 million in the four years that ended in 2025.^[24]

Courts have imposed monitorships on unions far less frequently than on companies and other government entities. Beginning with the Teamsters in 1989, monitorships at the Laborers and Carpenters have supervised fair elections and excluded officials guilty of outright corruption from union affairs. But Barofsky saw his mandate at the UAW as far more intrusive, a perspective derived from his work with corporations and government agencies where he saw “a flawed or dysfunctional corporate culture” as the object of reform and rehabilitation. But “fixing a broken culture is no easy task,” wrote Barofsky in a monitorship handbook written by Jenner & Block attorneys. To do so required “the successful monitor to develop a deep understanding of the company’s business and financial objectives.” In other words, Barofsky was going to be a nanny correcting and cajoling a set of potentially wayward wards.^[25]

Such a perspective may or may not have worked when it came to the hierarchically structured capitalist enterprise, but trade unions are something else again. If the monitor does in fact create conditions under which a free and fair election can be held, democracy itself holds the solution to the most important problems that emerge within the union. That is the rough-and-tumble democratic union “culture” that represents real reform. It is unlikely that Barofsky had much of a feel for that dynamic. His firm had contracted out the sometimes-complex work involved in holding both the UAW referendum on a one-member, one-vote basis and the subsequent election of all the top officers. And in all his many reports on the transgressions he saw in UAW governance, there was nary a word of understanding that the whole point of the union was the mobilization of a working class for effective combat with enterprises of enormous wealth and power. ^[26]

Barofsky exacerbated these difficulties when on December 13, 2023, he made a phone call, “strictly on a personal level,” to President Fain, then in Pennsylvania for a Mack Truck negotiation, urging him to rethink the UAW president’s talk at a Capitol Hill rally the next day where several unions would call for a Gaza ceasefire. Fain’s appearance was in line with a recently adopted UAW executive board resolution on the Israeli incursion, a position that reflected the growing strength and radicalism of that portion of the union, largely in the Northeast and on the West Coast, composed of grad students, contingent faculty, public defenders. ^[27]

When Barofsky made the phone call, he was actually in Switzerland, where he was investigating the extent to which Credit Suisse had failed to divulge previously unreported relationships between the bank and the Nazis. Barofsky was clearly among those equating opposition to the Gaza war with a species of anti-Semitism, a sentiment that he punctuated by describing how his children had been “harassed” when passing a UAW protest where members were holding signs and “chanting hateful comments.”

Not unexpectedly, Fain took offense, not only because it was impossible for the monitor to make a “personal” phone call, given the legal and supervisory authority at his command, but also because of the veiled charge that either Fain or others in the UAW were anti-Semitic.  Said Fain at a later executive board meeting: “For anybody to ever fucking say I’m anti-Semitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat.”^[28]

Fain was willing to let it all pass after the call. But then in mid-February, Barofsky e-mailed the entire executive board, this time prompted by a message he had received from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which noted that UAW Local 7902, composed of NYU and New School lecturers and teaching assistants, issued a pro-Palestine resolution and come out in favor of BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) against Israel, which might put that union in violation of a New York State anti-BDS law. This prompted another round of recriminations. At an executive board meeting Barofsky attended remotely from New York, Ben Dictor, who made a point of mentioning that he became bar mitzvah at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, took the lead in pummeling the monitor. He called the ADL, who Barofsky cited in questioning the UAW’s Gaza stance, an outside “interest group” and wanted to know if the UAW was being billed for “unsolicited political advice” based on concerns raised by an outside third party. ^[29]

Barofsky was humiliated; “lesson learned,” he later admitted.[30] But as Ken Paff, a founder and leader of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, put it, “Monitors are powerful. If you go to war with them, you’re going to lose.”^[31]

Until that conflict, Fain had maintained “a pretty collaborative working relationship with the monitor,” said one UAW official.^[32] However, within days of the February 2024 executive board meeting where she was stripped of her posts, Margaret Mock complained to Barofsky of what she saw as a set of illicit and retaliatory persecutions. Almost immediately, he sent the union a request for all its internal communications bearing on that potential transgression. This inaugurated more than a year of investigations and interviews in which Barofsky probed and judged the degree to which Fain and his close assistants had unjustly harmed Mock and also Rich Boyer, the Stellantis vice president who was also stripped of some of his responsibilities in May 2024, after it became clear that during the 2023 negotiations he had permitted his corporate adversaries to actually strengthen an attendance policy that had long been an irritant for thousands of factory workers.

Barofsky’s Javert-like investigation turned up a good deal of damaging information on Fain, Brooks, and other unionists in their corner. None of it was criminal or corrupt, but it did violate what the monitor thought to be good governance and ethical practice. Fain had made the determination to sideline Mock late in 2023, so Brooks and Furman colluded with the union’s ostensibly independent compliance officer to edit and revise portions of the report that indicted Mock for her delays and other transgressions. Barofsky also thought it untoward that Fain, seeking to deflect any charge of racism, had Laura Dickerson and LaShawn English, both African American women on the union’s executive board, formally introduce the compliance report for discussion. When Barofsky sought thousands of internal UAW documents, e-mails, and other messages related to these issues, Fain and his team either delayed their release or attempted to delete some of them from their computers and iPhones. From Barofsky’s perspective, all this was emblematic of a “union culture that remained mired in fear and distrust,” with staffers “scared to death, scared to lose jobs if they don’t march to [the President’s] tune,” because his approach is “you’re either with me or against me.”^[33]

Such divisiveness was real, but Barofsky’s solicitude for frightened staffers reflected a set of corporate values that saw culture rather than politics as the site of reform and renewal in a 400,000-member union whose new leadership was seeking, however imperfectly, to create a more effective combat organization. Thus Labor Notes’ Jane Slaughter, who has been a keen observer of UAW affairs for decades, offered a rather different and more persuasive interpretation of the union’s internal tensions: “Old guard UAW staffers at the international and in the regions, often using their staff union, have dug in their heels against the new expectations, filing dozens of grievances—and griping about new staff who came on with a different attitude. A strict staff contract limits elected leaders’ ability to dismiss holdovers standing in the way.”^[34]

But Barofsky’s will would not be thwarted, at least for a season. Finding that Fain had acted with “illegitimate and retaliatory intent” after both Mock and Boyer had been stripped of their responsibilities, Barofsky threatened to take his charge to the Trump Justice Department unless the UAW caved. And that the union did in late 2025, agreeing to retore to Mock and Boyer all the departments and assignments lost the previous year, while demoting Jonah Furman and forcing Chris Brooks to resign under pressure. ^[35]

Towards the Next Internal Election

Neither Mock nor Boyer are members of the slate Shawn Fain has assembled for the general membership election that begins when ballots are mailed out this August. Mock is running for Secretary-Treasurer, but at this writing, it does not look as if she will anchor an opposition slate. As one veteran unionist on Mock’s side during the UAW’s internal conflicts told me, there’s “no political basis for the formation” of such an opposition.^[36] While Mock has come to represent the outlook of the old Administration Caucus, which former president Ray Curry has even sought to revive, her perspective has little in common with other Fain opponents, largely sectarian radicals and self-starters who never signed on to his agenda in the first place. ^[37]

Because Fain’s new electoral team, the “Stand Up Slate,” is composed of several figures who were members or backers of the old Administration Caucus, some observers have described it as either a “more progressive version” of that caucus, or perhaps even the UAW’s “Thermidor.” Only three people who were part of the original UAWD-backed slate in 2022 are still on the Fain ballot lineup, and the UAW president has chosen as his new chief of staff, Brandon Keatts, who worked for many years under Chuck Browning. Fain told me he was “disgusted” with the three years of executive board infighting and wants to groom a new generation of union militants, but in the meantime, “I need people who know how the union works.” So, there are some “holdovers” from the old regime.^[38]

Fain is right to combine forces, because if the union is successfully moving forward, then many of the old divisions transcend themselves. Brooks has cited an old organizer maxim: “we win people over, we don’t write them off.”^[39] Thus, Mike Miller, the West Coast director, wanted more money and support for his organizational work in higher education, so in 2022 he backed Ray Curry, a calculated bet that the old regime would hold on to power and purse. But once Fain was in, Miller quickly became a team player, forming a productive alliance with the younger and more radical Brandon Mancilla, director of the New York/New England region, where colleges and universities were also a big organizing target. That kind of programmatic integration may well be more difficult in the Midwest auto centers, where many local unions are still controlled by a set of “get along, go along” leaders unwilling to mobilize their membership for shop-floor fights with management. They may well expect officials like Laura Dickerson, another Browning protégé now running for vice president and Brandon Campbell, a Chrysler/Stellantis veteran staffer, candidate for Secretary-Treasurer, to protect their interests.

But the fate of UAW’s revitalization will also be shaped by conditions over which union leaders have little control, and here the near-term prospects are hardly bright. The Trump Administration’s about face on the electric vehicles (EV) transition has made the UAW’s organizing effort much more difficult, North and South. There have been layoffs at GM’s Factory ZERO, near Hamtramck, which built electric trucks and SUVs, and at the Ultium Cells battery plants in Lordstown, Ohio and Spring Hill, Tennessee. Near Memphis, Ford’s BlueOval SK joint venture with a Korean battery maker has dissolved, putting in jeopardy a narrow UAW election victory at this large buckle of the mid-South “battery belt.” Workers getting the shaft at such new production facilities are as likely to blame Fain’s UAW for not protecting their jobs as they are to pin responsibility on GM, Ford, or Trump. That’s one reason for the demise of the UAW’s once hopeful Southern organizing drive.

Meanwhile, Stellantis workers are furious that for the first time in over a decade, they will take home no profit-sharing checks in 2026 while checks of upwards of $10,000 are in the pipeline at GM and Ford. Stellantis reported a $26 billion loss in 2025, largely attributed to the cost of the on-again, off-again EV transition. Layoffs have mounted since the UAW’s 2023 strike, with blame for the failure of the company to reopen its Belvidere Assembly Plant, then considered a signal victory for the UAW after the union convinced the company to reopen the plant through the strike, landing on Fain’s shoulders. Not unexpectedly, support for the Stand Up Slate may well prove weak among the nearly 40,000 UAW members at Stellantis. And since Mock has roots among these workers, their disaffection may constitute her one chance of retaining power and office in the union. ^[40]

Such discontent exists throughout UAW ranks, not unlike the economic and social disquiet now spreading in so many working-class neighborhoods. So, the forthcoming UAW election, free, fair, and un-gerrymandered, will constitute more than a referendum on the Fain leadership. It will be a token of the larger hopes and frustrations confronting tens of millions of American workers.

Nelson Lichtenstein is the author of Why Labor Unions Matter, forthcoming in October 2026.

The post Shawn Fain’s UAW Is Facing Strong Headwinds appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

Through U.S. history and around the world, people have understood that taxation of the wealthy is crucial to a democratic political system.

The post Taxing the Rich Means Taking Their Power appeared first on Democratic Left.

Arielle Clynes was an integral volunteer in the early years of EWOC, building our crucial structures and setting us on a path to success.

The post Remembering Arielle Clynes appeared first on EWOC.

Democratic Left interviews New York State Assembly candidate Conrad Blackburn as part of a series of interviews with members of New York City DSA’s insurgent slate.

The post Conrad Blackburn is Ready to Challenge the Machine appeared first on Democratic Left.

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By: Ashraf Hazeyen

Every semester, the adjunct professor walks into the classroom carrying the full symbolic weight of the university while possessing almost none of its protections. He enters with a syllabus, readings, assignments, office hours, and the responsibility of making a discipline feel alive to students who may never know the terms of his employment. In that room, he is the university’s voice, its care, and its promise that thought still matters. Then the class ends, the students leave, the emails continue, and the institution that needed him for its mission offers him only a temporary place in its life.

Adjunct professors are contingent, non-tenure-track faculty members usually hired on temporary contracts to teach specific courses. They often perform the central work of the university itself: preparing classes, teaching, grading, mentoring, and sustaining intellectual life in the classroom, while frequently lacking the security and institutional protections attached to permanent academic positions.

Their labor is usually described through numbers: wages per course, lack of benefits, unstable contracts, and the uncertainty of whether another class will appear next semester. These numbers matter because they shape rent, health care, debt, family planning, and the ordinary dignity of imagining a future. The numbers tell the truth, but not the whole truth. The adjunct is present where the university performs its mission and unsettled where the university distributes continuity, status, and institutional memory.

This arrangement did not appear by accident. According to data from the American Association of University Professors, nearly 75 percent of instructional staff in American higher education now work outside the tenure system. Contingency no longer exists at the edges of academic life; it increasingly defines the structure through which the university teaches, adapts, and reproduces itself. Universities rely on adjunct and contingent appointments to sustain undergraduate teaching at lower long-term cost even as administrative structures and managerial layers continue to expand.  The system grew inside a university increasingly shaped by enrollment management, administrative expansion, budget flexibility, weakened tenure lines, and the treatment of teaching as adjustable capacity. As institutions planned around fluctuating numbers, shifting programs, and market pressure, contingent labor became the convenient answer to problems described as managerial necessities. The language of efficiency made the transformation sound practical. The cost appeared inside the lives of teachers whose work remained central to the classroom and peripheral to the institution’s durable commitments. Adjunctification taught the university how to preserve its public promise of intellectual depth while relocating the risks of that promise onto the people asked to carry it.

Adaptability has become one of the preferred moral words of modern institutions. For administrators, it means efficiency, responsiveness, and quick adjustment when budgets, enrollment, or priorities shift. For workers, it enters life as fragmentation: a late-changing schedule, a future waiting on approval, a household organized around uncertain income, and a self repeatedly bent around institutional need. The institution calls it adjustment. The worker lives it as interruption. Some lives never gather long enough to become continuous.

Precarity reaches the whole person. Wages matter because they shape rent, food, health, transportation, debt, and the daily conditions of dignity. Unstable labor also enters planning, confidence, family life, intellectual growth, and the person’s sense of continuity. A worker who lives from contract to contract learns to measure life in short intervals. Decisions about housing, children, research, care, rest, and hope pass through the narrow gate of the next assignment. Work organizes the kind of person a future can still produce. When work keeps the future provisional, the worker’s life gathers itself under pressure, always carrying the next uncertainty before it arrives.

Adjunct labor names more than an employment category. It reorganizes the conditions under which teaching, study, and sustained inquiry become possible. The modern university still presents itself as a space devoted to reflection, dialogue, criticism, and public purpose while building much of its educational structure around conditional presence and temporary labor. The contradiction enters the classroom every day. Institutions celebrate thought in mission statements, public speeches, and recruitment materials while placing many of the people responsible for sustaining that work inside unstable conditions.

This instability reaches beyond contracts and salaries. The adjunct belongs intensely to the classroom: to the students, the discussion, the readings, the long hours of preparation, and the fragile moment when an idea begins to matter for someone. His labor turns institutional promises into lived experience while his own place inside the institution remains uncertain. He assembles academic life from borrowed offices, temporary schedules, short appointments, and partial recognition. The instability spreads across space, time, memory, and the long movement through which serious thought gathers shape and continuity.

Spatial instability begins where academic life is expected to continue after class. The adjunct teaches in the building, walks its hallways, answers students’ questions, writes recommendations, and carries much of the university’s daily teaching responsibility while remaining temporary inside the institution he helps sustain. His labor fills the space with meaning, yet the campus gives that labor only a passing address. A student stays after class to discuss a paper, a family crisis, or a sentence in a difficult text that opened a new way of seeing. The conversation happens beside the classroom door, over a library table, in a shared room between appointments, or later inside an email thread. This is the geography of adjunct labor: a living presence carried through borrowed rooms, hallway conversations, and whatever corner the campus leaves available.

Temporal homelessness organizes life through a future that arrives in fragments. The adjunct plans by semester, by enrollment, by contract, by the late appearance of a course on a schedule. January can carry one life, August another. A class opens, fills, shrinks, disappears, or becomes possible only after the budget permits it. One week, the teacher revises a syllabus with care; the next, he checks enrollment numbers, waits for a contract, coordinates travel between campuses, or wonders whether a course that shaped his plans will survive long enough to shape his semester. The university asks him to cultivate duration in others: patience, discipline, growth, intellectual confidence, the ability to think beyond the immediate moment. It places his own duration under semesterly review. That is the temporal wound: the adjunct helps students build futures inside an institution that grants his future one term at a time. Continuity exists for others first.

Intellectual homelessness appears where institutional dependence and institutional recognition move along different paths. Adjuncts shape students’ confidence, curiosity, discipline, and intellectual development while occupying temporary positions inside the institutions they help sustain. Their labor becomes part of the university’s public image of teaching excellence, student care, and transformative education, while permanence gathers around titles, committees, offices, governance structures, and institutional memory. The same instability enters the life of the mind. The adjunct begins again through new courses, new schedules, and new administrative thresholds. Serious thought develops through duration, return, and sustained relation. Teaching gains force through repeated encounters with students, texts, disagreement, failure, and revision. Precarity interrupts that movement before it accumulates weight. The university has built a system in which the labor of inquiry educates others while searching for a dwelling of its own.

Universities still speak beautifully about rigor, and those words still matter. They promise knowledge, transformation, critical thinking, mentorship, citizenship, and lifelong learning. At their best, these words name real human possibilities. A classroom can change the way a student reads the world, and a university can become one of the few places where a society pauses long enough to ask what kind of life is worth building. The fracture begins when this public language of rigor meets a private organization of disposability. The institution celebrates growth, inquiry, and mentorship while arranging much of its teaching labor through temporary contracts, shifting schedules, and adjustable teaching bodies.

The transformation reaches beyond employment structure. The persistence of adjunctification at financially stable institutions makes the pattern difficult to explain through scarcity alone. Large endowments, expanding administrative structures, and visible institutional growth often coexist beside increasing reliance on contingent faculty labor. The university preserves permanence unevenly, concentrating stability in some areas while normalizing uncertainty in others. Universities continue to describe themselves as spaces devoted to knowledge, reflection, and long-term inquiry while increasing dependence on contingent labor organized around flexibility, cost efficiency, and short-term institutional adaptation. Teaching remains publicly celebrated as central to the university’s mission even as the conditions surrounding teaching grow increasingly unstable. The contradiction gradually reshapes the meaning of academic life itself.

Many students experience the university through courses taught by adjuncts, lecturers, visiting instructors, and contingent faculty who carry much of the university’s everyday intellectual labor. They design assignments, guide discussions, grade carefully, meet students in moments of uncertainty, and translate the institution’s mission into actual encounters. Their labor gives coherence to the student experience. The arrangement carries its own pressure: the institution offers students stability through teachers whose own place inside the institution remains conditional.

Time allows ideas to accumulate weight. Thought develops through return, revision, disagreement, silence, and sustained attention. Teaching changes through repeated contact with students, texts, failures, and difficult questions that refuse quick resolution. Universities understand this rhythm well. Their public language praises rigor, inquiry, mentorship, reflection, and careful study. Their labor structures increasingly organize classrooms through speed, replacement, short-term contracts, and administrative flexibility. Knowledge loses durability when institutions build the conditions of teaching around interruption. Adjunctification exposes the contradiction clearly: universities celebrate inquiry in public while placing much of the labor that sustains inquiry inside unstable conditions. 

The crisis begins with adjuncts and opens onto a broader question about modern work. Adjunctification is no longer only a university labor problem; it is becoming one of the models through which modern life organizes human beings: necessary, available, temporary, and always adjustable. A society reveals its priorities through the conditions it gives to the people who sustain its most serious tasks. When teachers live provisionally, thought itself begins to inherit the structure of provisional life. Courses continue, students learn, institutions function, and the surface remains intact. The damage survives below visibility. Beneath that surface, something essential thins out: memory, depth, mentorship, intellectual courage, and the durable relation between a society and the people entrusted with its formation.

The adjunct remains one of the clearest figures of modern work: necessary, available, present, and permanently adjustable.

Dr. Ashraf Hazeyen is a Palestinian-Jordanian philosopher, political commentator for Roya News, and adjunct professor at the University of Rhode Island.

The post Intellectual Homelessness: The Adjunct and the Disappearing University appeared first on Working Mass.

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A progressive enclave in northern California attracted participants to disparate issue campaigns. Now, they have a unifying organization with over 100 members.

The post New Chapter in Humboldt County California appeared first on Democratic Left.

by Anna V.

Meat is expensive. It always has been. Prices are higher, sure, but it’s never really been cheap. Many people don’t think of it as the most expensive item but ounce for ounce it is. It’s why when you go to a hotel breakfast buffet the meat will generally be placed at the very end so you fill your plate with the less expensive fruit and bagels and can’t get as much of the pricier sausage and bacon. 

The reason meat costs so much is due to the amount of resources needed to produce it. Before you can slaughter a cow you need to give it feed made from corn and soybeans for one to two years.  Grass fed beef is even more expensive as it takes longer to get a cow up to slaughter weight on grass alone. This is why multiple studies have found that vegetarian diets can be less expensive, because instead of feeding soy beans to a cow for a year or more you can just make them into tofu.

That’s why it is concerning that the new USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans increase the protein recommendations and are emphasizing eating beef – as well as the similarly expensive dairy – to meet those new recommendations. 

It would be one thing if these changes were backed by science, but most nutrition experts heavily disagree with these guidelines. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics released a statement expressing concerns over the new recommendations (source).  Furthermore, the guidelines actually contradict themselves. For example, they keep the recommendation from the previous guidelines to keep saturated fats consumption under 10% of total calorie consumption. However, in the list of recommended cooking fats are “beef tallow, butter, and olive oil,” two of which are saturated fats. Not only would canola and soybean oil be healthier, but they are less expensive, so it seems the new guidelines are going out of their way to make Americans spend more money on worse health.

Now it would be easy to write this off and say, “Well, everyone knows RFK Jr is crazy, no one is going to listen to him.” However these guidelines aren’t just suggestions for the average American. They instruct how federal food programs like WIC and School Lunches are set up. So if the guidelines aren’t making Americans healthier and aren’t reducing costs, who do they benefit? Well luckily they tell us on page 2: “We are realigning our food system to support American farmers, ranchers, and companies who grow and produce real food . . .”

A lot of people think of farmers as working class but don’t let the big trucks and boots fool you. A lot of farms are owned by large companies or families with generational wealth who make their profit exploiting the low paid farm workers who are the ones actually getting their hands dirty. These profits translate into power via groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Global Dairy Platform who go on to influence politics. 

This problem isn’t even unique to the current administration. Probably for as long as you can remember you’ve seen the recommendation that adults need three servings of dairy a day. This has been heavily contested over the years. It’s not that you can’t have a balanced diet with that much dairy in a day, it’s just that it isn’t always necessary. Many people, especially those of non-European backgrounds, get all their nutrients in with little to no dairy. However, it’s in the guidelines and therefore has an effect on government programs. I once spoke to someone who had been on WIC and complained that they gave her way more milk and cheese than she knew what to do with.  

So it seems these new Dietary Guidelines are continuing the theme of taking existing problems in our government and cranking them up to 11. The exact effects on programs like WIC haven’t been seen yet but they’re not likely to help struggling families. However, these guidelines aren’t meant to help them. They are meant to help the wealthy cattle ranchers who will destroy our environment, government, and health if it means increasing their own wealth.

The post My Beef with RFK Jr.: The Problem with the New USDA Dietary Guidelines and Who Really Benefits appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

Labor organizer Daniel Gross's new book, Unions of Our Own, helps workers build progressive, militant, and sustainable unions driven by the rank-and-file.

The post Daniel Gross and Unions of Our Own appeared first on EWOC.

I’d wager not. 

In a union campaign, the way to answer a question like this is through a structure test. Before going on strike, organizers know that they’ll need a supermajority of workers to authorize the strike, given that a vicious anti-union drive by the boss will likely reduce their numbers. Some campaigns might have a mobilization where workers do something like wearing pro-union attire in order to gauge support. Ideally, this would be one of several escalatory structure tests meant to evaluate a worker’s risk tolerance as well as how effective the channels of communication are in terms of getting the word out. In other words, a structure test measures the strength of an organization and its ability to mobilize towards a specific goal. 

Chicago DSA (and the DSA in general) is not a union. However, as a prospective mass-membership party that anyone can join, our level of organization is low. We should think and act more like a union fighting a campaign. Amidst conversations of leadership burnout, tremendous uncaptured membership growth, and increasing need for urgency in the political landscape (no source needed), Chicago DSA is at an impasse. What we do next will shape the organization for years to come. While we are poised to become a major player in the labor movement and Chicago politics, failing to build our organizational cohesion risks souring newcomers and leadership to the movement. Instead, it’s time we seize the moment and live up to our vision.

CDSA Vision – What are we organizing towards? 

When discussing strategic choices for the direction DSA will take, it is important to center the conversation around our shared vision. We are working towards democratic socialism, or the demand that “our economy should be run to meet human needs for all, not to make profits for a few” (https://chicagodsa.org/). Different people have different ideas of what this might look like. Many of us will think of universal healthcare, a Green New Deal, or of recent national and local politicians in the limelight, but being a democratic socialist and a member of CDSA is more than a positive feeling towards items on this agenda, as laid out on our chapter’s website:

“Our primary tasks are to organize the working class, make more socialists, and lay the foundation for an independent mass party capable of conquering political power and transforming our society” (https://chicagodsa.org/). 

As socialists, we care about a lot of issues, from protecting our trans and immigrant comrades who have been the latest targets of the Trump administration’s attacks, to issues like environmental justice, prison abolition, overpolicing, and countering American imperialism. We need to be fighting on all of these fronts. However, as emphasized by our tasks above as an organization, we need to continue asking the question: “how are we building power?”. Without the crystallization of short-term mobilizations such as the “No Kings” protests into long-term organizational capacity, we will forever be putting out fires and responding to crises rather than proving that a better world is possible and leading the fight. 

How do we build working-class power?

Working-class power is our ability to force elected officials, the government, and the owning class to meet our demands. This power comes from the fact that we, the working class, work the jobs that make society run. Also, as workers comprise a huge majority of the population, we can vote to elect people to represent our interests in government. However, the nature of these two sources of power is not the same. 

First, let’s start with the weaker of the two: electoral power. Elected officials are–in theory–held accountable to their constituents through their desire for reelection. This power is diluted by the fact that elections are increasingly decided by spending and fundraising. This gives capitalists a decisive advantage in influencing and subverting democratic elections. Given the current lax campaign spending laws and skyrocketing levels of wealth inequality, elections are increasingly determined by the sheer volume of money poured into a given campaign, which is a losing position for the working class. Nevertheless, recent campaigns have found success with a grassroots or “Mass Movement Electoralism” approach. For example, Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 Mayoral campaign managed to mobilize 100,000 volunteers to knock doors thanks in large part to NYC’s DSA chapter as well as its active left ecosystem. The problem is, no matter how a working-class-friendly politician is elected, two things remain true: there are certain things an elected official cannot do (especially with regards to challenging capital’s interests), and there is little recourse for working people to hold them accountable. 

Luckily, working people have another, more reliable, source of power: the ability to withhold our labor. To build working class power, we need to organize workplaces into fighting unions. This is the crux of the left’s emphasis on organized labor and the recent excitement surrounding the idea of a general strike. It is not just a commitment to fairness and equality in the workplace, but an understanding that working people as a class are the only ones who can transform society. Work stoppages hit the capitalist class where it hurts: their profits. This is what gives the working class its greatest leverage and transformational power. 

Then, to answer our question of what it takes to build working class power, it is clear that we must organize workplaces and unions to be capable of militant strike action, using their political power to aid the working class in electoral politics and thus building power independent of state institutions. 

What is organizing, really? Where does the DSA fit in?

At its core, organizing is bringing people together into a long term structure to “mobilize” for certain tasks and work towards a bigger goal. Almost any organization can build a hierarchical structure to accomplish a goal, but as democratic socialists, we must accomplish our goals while simultaneously modeling and prototyping the kinds of radically democratic structures we are fighting to build and sustain. In line with the Labor Notes tradition of democratic organizing this means relying on a “leadership-dense” model. Carla Villanueva and Michael Belt, organizers with UAW, define a leader of a union drive as someone, a worker: 

“…who is willing to fight for the union, receptive to feedback on how to speak with coworkers, and capable of moving their coworkers into action. Leaders are those who are public and willing to speak to their coworkers when the time is right. Throughout the campaign, leaders are given a steady flow of training and tools to better answer their coworkers’ questions. This approach is grounded in a belief that workers in any industry can understand and make complex strategy decisions and are able to have difficult organizing conversations with their coworkers.”

A leadership-dense model of organizing depends on finding workers willing and able to build a union, and developing them into organizers. The more leader-organizers that can be developed, the better. Furthermore, we need to trust that average workers are capable of organizing themselves when given access to structure, resources, and guidance. This requisite belief in the competency of workers is more than a principle; it’s foundational to our strategy and is essential to winning. Any worker can be a leader. The benefit to this orientation is that worker-organizers are constantly training new organizers, building the project’s capacity. Also, after a certain point, there is no single organizer or identified “leader” who is carrying the bulk of the work on their own; the campaign is self-sustaining and can recover and succeed even if a key organizer needs to take a step back from the work.. 

Another way to think about organizing is as an ideal. Just as there is no way to achieve “democracy”, there is no such thing as a “perfectly organized” workplace, either. There are certainly workplaces and institutions which are more organized or democratic than others, and what sets those apart is the strength and number of connections between people. Put differently, what we are organizing is a network of people, within which each node has a varying number of connections with varying levels of strength. To build the network, existing connections must be strengthened or new connections added. To do this more effectively, individual “nodes” must be trained and developed.

At last, we can see how our definition of “organizing” can be applied outside the workplace and to our work with Chicago DSA. Many of those reading this may be among the most active in the chapter and already fill leadership roles in various committees and working groups. We are the DSA’s version of the worker-organizer, the “member-organizer” or cadre. As member-organizers we may already have this orientation; we view our chapter as a network of relationships and are willing to fight for its vision. But are we using tried-and-true fundamental organizing skills to get there? Are we developing new member-organizers to apply those same skills and build further organizational capacity? Our ability to strengthen and expand this network depends on our utilization of fundamental organizing skills. 

Conclusion

With recent wins nationwide like Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, the wave of left flank democrats bringing excitement to primary elections, our own local DSA chapter’s worker organizer job fair and successful bid to get Byron Sigcho-Lopez on a ballot, the future of democratic socialist politics is brighter than ever. Despite this, we need to seriously reconsider our organizational structure and strategy if we expect to contend for power and build the foundation for our aspired-to independent mass party.

As mentioned previously, we struggle to retain both leadership and new members, something which costs us institutional knowledge, skills, and growth. In “Middle-Level Organizing: The Key to a Successful CDSA”, Monk lays out this problem in detail as well as its solution: organizing fundamentals. We conduct political education for new members, yet struggle to convey skills like organizing conversations, making asks, and how to run a meeting. These things are just as important as understanding our long-term vision and past. The history of social movements is the history of organizers. 

One of the important lessons Monk reminds us of is to “Clarify Your Goals”. With changing leadership and a flux of new membership, it’s fair to say that we might not all be on the same page. In fact, we can prove it. We should conduct a survey of every member in Chicago DSA. Surveys are used in union drives as structure tests to gauge support. Rather than texting out a form for people to fill out, a proper structure test requires being systematic and having one-on-one conversations with everyone. In these conversations we can gauge members’ understanding of our vision, hear about their theory of change and power, invite them to action in a specific way, and simply get to know them. 

As a collective, we can struggle with the questions of how we actually contend for power. Do we recruit people to organize workplaces and the labor movement where so much of our power resides? Do we run our own candidates or support others who match our vision to communicate our politics to a broad base and win non-reformist reforms? How do we weave the fights that are already happening across the city into something cohesive? Together, we can find out. Together, let’s organize Chicago DSA!

The post If Chicago DSA were a union, could it pull off a successful strike? appeared first on Midwest Socialist.