In its short existence, Sonoma County (Calif.) DSA has grown rapidly and achieved an electoral victory. Its membership coordinator explains how it happened.

The post From Organizing Committee to Political Force appeared first on Democratic Left.

Billionaire donors, votes for corporate handouts, lack of socialist ID, and last-minute effort make a Donavan McKinney endorsement the wrong move

By Anthony D.

Metro Detroit DSA members will be asked at the June 13 General Meeting to vote on the endorsement of current State Representative Donavan McKinney’s campaign for U.S. Congress, just two weeks before absentee ballots go out for the August 4 primary. McKinney has had no significant prior relationship with the chapter. His track record as a State Representative includes voting for billions of dollars in corporate handouts and accepting campaign donations from billionaires and corporate PACs.

McKinney is not running as a democratic socialist and a DSA endorsement this close to Election Day would be a significant backslide into the pre-Bernie era of our organization, when our chapter routinely endorsed progressive Democrats whose campaigns we played no major part in building.

What Are We Building?

As DSA evaluates candidates for endorsement, we should consider how they fit into our broader electoral project and its goals. While consensus is rare in DSA, the various political tendencies within it seem to agree that we want DSA to act like a party. We want DSA’s infrastructure and identity to be clearly independent from the Democratic Party. We believe this is necessary to distance ourselves from politicians who would argue that capitalism is not the problem. We want DSA to be a vehicle towards the transformation of society in which the working class has full democratic control of our government, economy, and workplaces.

The type of party and its character remain up for debate, but DSA members expect the candidates that we run will differentiate themselves from Democrats by being clear that our goal is to win socialism. To that end, the 2025 and 2026 election cycles have seen an unprecedented number of DSA-endorsed candidates around the country running for office and publicly identifying as democratic socialists in their campaigns, after having spent many years organizing inside DSA.

DSA endorsements are unlike those given out by individual politicians or nonprofit organizations that simply act as a rubber stamp of approval based on personal relationships or the policies the candidates are running on. Instead, DSA endorsements are material commitments to run members of our party for office. Rather than relying on progressive candidates to come to us with campaigns that are already fully formed as we did during DSA’s pre-Bernie era, the best DSA candidates’ campaigns are conceived of within DSA and engage members to run them themselves. These campaigns are driven by DSA members who fundraise, write the platform, determine the messaging, run the canvasses, build a social media presence, phonebank, knock doors, and design the flyers we hand out. Through this process, the candidates we run remain rooted in DSA and act as an extension of the movement.

Unfortunately, McKinney and his campaign are none of these things. He has no experience organizing in or with DSA. His campaign did not grow out of the chapter and is not being run by DSA members. His social media and campaign literature include no mention of being a democratic socialist and his website was updated sometime since May 31 to add it.

Track Record

McKinney has served as a State Representative since 2023, so it’s useful to review his past campaign donations and how he’s voted while in office. During his 2022 and 2024 campaigns, he accepted donations from various billionaires, corporations, and corporate PACs including:

• $1,000 in 2022 and $500 in 2023 from billionaire Matthew Moroun, a prolific Republican Party and Trump campaign donor as well as the owner of the Ambassador Bridge who allegedly conspired with the Trump administration to attempt to block the rival Gordie Howe International Bridge from opening
• $1,250 from Ida Byrd-Hill, CEO of Automation Workz, whose company created SenseiiWyze, “an AI-powered behavioral intelligence platform that predicts warfighter and front-liner technology readiness under pressure”, according to her LinkedIn page
• $500 from JC Huizenga, who created National Heritage Academies, a for-profit company that runs 103 charter schools in nine states
• $1,000 from Jim George, whose development company was awarded a $5 million grant in the state budget for a housing project without any competitive bidding
• $2,000 from Realtors PAC of Michigan, whose top contributor is Morgan Stanley
• $1,750 from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan
• $1,050 from billionaires Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner. Tom Preston-Werner, the founder of GitHub, was forced to resign in 2014 over allegations of harassment by a former employee.
• $500 from Detroit Regional Chamber PAC, who shaped polls to promote former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan for Governor, then endorsed him. The Detroit Regional Chamber recently joined a coalition to promote data centers.

In the state legislature, McKinney has voted for billions of dollars in corporate handouts. This included a vote to send $1.4 billion into the Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve (SOAR) Fund, a corporate slush fund administered by a public-private partnership agency that requires lawmakers to sign non-disclosure agreements and has produced only 1,846 jobs as of October 2025. A separate vote sent $630 million to the site of Ford’s battery plant in Marshall and another $170 million into the SOAR fund. Ford’s battery plant has created just 100 jobs thus far and the SOAR fund has been killed entirely. McKinney has voted with Helena Scott, opponent of DSA-endorsed candidate Chris Gilmer-Hill, 99% of the time. He has not endorsed Chris Gilmer-Hill despite their overlapping districts.

McKinney, to his credit, said all the right things during his interview with the Electoral Committee to try to move us to action on his behalf. During the Q&A, he committed to coordinating on votes with Rashida Tlaib, if elected, and to identifying as a democratic socialist on his campaign literature, website, and social media.

However, McKinney launched his campaign in April 2025, making it more than a year old, and there has been nothing stopping him from identifying as a democratic socialist before now, without our endorsement. It seems unlikely that just a few weeks before absentee ballots go out, he would revamp his campaign, literature, and website, with very little time to reach voters with brand-new messaging. If he’s had a sudden change of heart, that’s admirable, and would be indicative of DSA’s progress. But his track record in Lansing should concern us about whether or not he’s ready to meaningfully change course on his politics. His actions weigh stronger than his last-minute words.

It’s Too Late

With more time, these shortcomings could be overcome by developing a relationship with McKinney and moving him closer to our politics. But Metro Detroit DSA has never endorsed a candidate this close to Election Day in its post-Bernie era. Absentee ballots will arrive to voters just two weeks after our June General Meeting. With two-thirds of voters voting by absentee in Michigan, there’s no opportunity to do anything other than knock doors for an already set-in-stone campaign, with its literature already printed and ads bought. At best, a few thousand doors knocked may translate to a few hundred votes in a primary election that saw 81,125 votes in 2024, which would equate to less than 0.25% of the total votes cast. DSA’s endorsement will be essentially irrelevant to the outcome. Endorsing now and claiming a DSA victory if McKinney wins would be lying to ourselves and to our base.

Table 1 below shows how the timing of our potential endorsement would compare to that of our past endorsements dating back to 2020. McKinney would be the latest we have ever endorsed a candidate, just seven days before absentee ballots are mailed out and 129 days later than our average endorsement date. Compared to the timing of congressional candidate endorsements by other DSA chapters around the country, McKinney’s endorsement would be 89 days later than the average of the 18 candidates.

Changing our approach to endorse a campaign that is more than a year old would indicate to future candidates that they do not need to get involved in DSA and our organizing work in order to win our endorsement. It limits us in the future to reacting to candidates that come to us with a fully formed campaign — including campaigns that do not share DSA’s politics — rather than bringing the candidates into the organization and developing them into lifelong socialist organizers who we then run for office as an extension of our party. It signals that it is acceptable for DSA-endorsed candidates to act individually, deciding to run for office and building their campaign and its messaging on their own without our organization and its collective process behind them.

Learning From The Past

Admittedly, we would not have endorsed Rashida Tlaib in 2018 according to the criteria that I’m advocating we apply to McKinney in 2026. But DSA has matured, our organizers are far more experienced, and we are eight years removed from the lessons learned in a pre-Bernie era. That era saw our chapter hand out numerous endorsements to various liberal and progressive candidates like Kat Bruner James and Abraham Aiyash that did not pan out.

In 2019, Kat Bruner James, running for Ferndale City Council, said during our endorsement interview process that she would run on a slate with our other two endorsed candidates. She later turned heel and instead ran on an opposing Democratic establishment slate when it opened a better lane to victory. The chapter voted unanimously to pull her endorsement and she was elected ahead of our candidate.

In 2020, Abraham Aiyash, running for State Representative in Hamtramck, said during the endorsement interview process that he “was not going to Lansing to make friends.” In 2022, when Michigan Democrats took full control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984, Aiyash became the Majority House Leader and used the position to pressure other Democrats to vote for billions in corporate handouts.

We’re lucky to have Rashida, but she was a rare exception back then, within a flawed approach to socialist electoral politics in which we took too many unfamiliar candidates at their word.

Looking Forward

When Dylan Wegela ran for State Representative in 2022 and applied for our endorsement, our Electoral Committee voted against moving his endorsement forward because he had no prior relationship with the chapter and was running in a district in which only five DSA members resided. We asked him to prove himself in the state legislature and to keep showing up to DSA events. Immediately after taking office, he was the single hold-out vote (McKinney voted yes) for a tax policy bill that included $1.4 billion in corporate handouts. Dylan publicly held firm against Democratic Party leadership even as they threatened to punish him (by undoing the cancellation of public school debt for one of the cities in his district).

The chapter later endorsed Dylan in part due to this principled stance. He became an active member of the chapter and has been a leader in recruiting and training more socialist organizers in his district, creating a model of what legislators can do when they strongly identify as socialists and see themselves as organizers.

As DSA grows, more candidates and elected officials will want to join our movement. We should welcome them, but endorsing someone with a questionable track record that very few of us have any relationship with is antithetical to our strategy for winning socialism. We should take the same careful approach with McKinney that we did with Dylan, by declining to endorse him and asking that we maintain an organizing relationship. If he wins, we could revisit the endorsement in 2028 when he’s become involved with the chapter and we can meaningfully shape his re-election campaign and the outcome.

Anthony D. has been active in the chapter’s electoral and labor organizing work since 2019 and is a member of the Bread & Roses caucus. He previously served as the chapter’s co-chair during the 2021–2022 term.

He’s currently active in Socialists Organizing Western Wayne (SOWW), a geographic working group that was created to organize locally alongside our Socialists in Office (SIOs) — Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, State Representative Dylan Wegela, and Westland City Council President Mike McDermott — where their districts overlap in Westland, Romulus, Inkster, and Garden City.

Too Little, Too Late: Against a Donavan McKinney Endorsement was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rashida Tlaib needs a socialist partner in Congress. Reject idealist notions of movement building.

By Charlotte G. and Aaron B.

What does it mean to be a socialist? Is being a socialist defined by what exists inside one’s mind alone? No. This is idealism, a framework lacking in a material analysis of the structural forces that truly move political agents and the masses through history. Socialism, we assert, is the action one does, through the construction of a left pole that will pull the working masses into its orbit.

This does not preclude the internality of any individual who moves through liberal democracy from having any effect whatsoever on their choices, but the question is: can you actually rely on that to build a mass movement? Can you rely on ideologically refined individuals to escape marginality and be a hegemonic political force in the world that can actually abolish the present state of things?

We assert that Donavan McKinney is a socialist both through the position he occupies in politics and what exists within his mind’s eye.

Who Is Donavan McKinney?

Donavan McKinney is a lifelong Detroit resident, having grown up on the northeast side with his grandmother while his mother worked to keep their family together. Despite the hard work of his family, they moved 13 times primarily due to evictions, which often included couch surfing with extended family and stints of living in their car. As a child he spent upwards of five hours a day on public transit just to get to school. This level of immiseration is all too common in Detroit, especially among its internally colonized black population, but ultimately what does any of this mean? Many people who grow up impoverished end up becoming traitors to their class, but is that the direction Donavan chose? No.

Donavan, coming from this working class background, put it into action by pursuing a degree in public policy, working as a legislative director, doing community engagement through a nonprofit, and then becoming an organizer for Service Employees International Union Healthcare Michigan (which is composed primarily of low-income black and brown workers). This is a career path indicative of someone who believes in organizing for the betterment of his community, so it makes sense that since becoming a State House Representative for the 14th district (now 11th since redistricting), he has been consistently taking on the monetary influence of entities like DTE in our politics, pushing bills to protect victims of police abuse, winning millions of dollars for violence prevention programs, securing more than half a billion dollars to replace lead pipes, and calling for a ceasefire in Gaza since November 2023. But even so, one might say “any progressive liberal can do these things!” “Economism!” Donavan’s history and character prove otherwise.

Not only has he been a DSA member since before the COVID pandemic, he has described himself as a democratic socialist prior to seeking endorsement on multiple occasions, including an appearance on the For the Sake of the Argument podcast. He has shown interest in attending our GMs independent of the endorsement and joining a socialist congressional caucus, has committed to attending our SIO meetings, is enthusiastic about learning more about the intellectual aspects of socialism, and has expressed a belief in eventual class independence through the party surrogate. These are not the marks of an opportunist; they are the marks of someone who is dedicated not only to improving the conditions of Detroiters, but to learning and building a movement that can birth a socialist party for the masses.

What is the Current Electoral Situation?

Donavan McKinney is running in the 13th Congressional District against incumbent Shri Thanedar, a member of our chapter before we overwhelmingly voted to expel him for his support of Indian Prime Minister Modi and AIPAC. Afterwards, Shri chose to attack and “disavow” our chapter after October 7th, to build better relationships with the Zionist lobby and to cynically use our image and past relationship (especially after we disavowed him) to build his own political career. Donavan, on the other hand, supports a single democratic Palestinian state, Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, a powerful labor movement, and rights for all people regardless of their citizenship status and location in the world. He is already working closely with Rashida Tlaib, calls himself a democratic socialist in person and on his website, and has already planned an event with the nationally DSA-endorsed candidate from Colorado, Melat Kiros.

All of Donavan’s opponents have dropped out save for Shri, who has the advantage of being an incumbent. Shri has money from AIPAC and other corporate PACs for TV ads, mailers, and billboards, all just to make meaningless symbolic moves to impeach Trump while knowing he doesn’t have the votes. All Shri has is name recognition, which is why every time someone answers a door and hears Donavan’s message they are immediately on board. This is not an unfamiliar situation to our chapter and many other chapters across the country. Where other organizations struggle to take on candidates with this kind of backing, our chapter has excelled at it in the recent elections of Denzel McCampbell and Chris Gilmer-Hill. When our opponents have leaned on the establishment and their capital, our chapter has managed to beat the odds.

In this case, we would be doing work we are already doing. There is about an 80% overlap between Chris Gilmer-Hill’s district and the one in which Donavan McKinney is running. If our chapter focused our efforts on that 80% overlap, we would be able to handily deliver this election to Donavan with minimal lift. This is a close race but as history has shown us, people power can overcome corporate capital.

How Would this Endorsement Build the Movement?

When endorsements come up, there is always a fear of opportunism. Shri Thanedar is someone who came to our chapter, and while not endorsed, was able to cynically use our organization to elevate himself and then throw us aside (after we had expelled him) when we no longer suited his needs. There are opportunists who come to our chapter, but Donavan is not one of them. With Donavan, we have the ability to remove Shri from office, sending a powerful message to electeds and candidates who would try to use our chapter to advance their political career — we are capable of unseating any candidate, even incumbents, who do not adequately represent the needs of their constituents and the larger working class, and our political vision is to be respected because we have the means of enforcing it.

Chapter capacity is a strange thing — if you don’t use it, you lose it. People come to our chapter to be engaged in work and to change the region and make real differences. With the low number of elections in 2027, we will have the opportunity to find work in other areas. We propose that 2027 be the year of the SIO — deepening the work we do with our SIOs and focusing our efforts within their districts. With Chris Gilmer-Hill, Rashida Tlaib, Denzel McCampbell, and Donavan McKinney, we will have at least one elected in every part of Detroit, which opens up tremendous organizing opportunities within the city. There is no shortage of fights our chapter can take on — ICE, Flock cameras, and divestment are just some of the ongoing issues where our chapter can intervene. Having the team listed, we will have the reach to educate and activate every Detroit zip code, not only to bolster our chapter’s ranks but the larger socialist movement.

By adding MI-13 to our territory, we have the potential to reach people and communities that have been long forgotten and left behind by the current economic and political system. Donavan has shown great enthusiasm in using his platform as a congressman to educate his constituents about the ways that capital dominates their lives in order to bring politics to them. Not only will this boost our membership, it will help boost the capacity for the poorest Detroiters to self-organize to reshape their communities into bulwarks against capital. For too long American socialism has been dominated by the downwardly mobile white middle class and Donavan can be a key ally in the diversification of our movement.

Towards Hegemony and Building THE Party

Looking at the larger picture, our chapter should take a step back and assess how it wishes to engage candidates and pull them into our orbit. Often we ask that our candidates come into our organization with a perfect understanding of how our organization functions and our ideology, a full commitment to all of that with complete selfless intent. It is unfettered, ineffective idealism.

We have an opportunity to pull someone into our orbit and contribute to building a national DSA presence the likes of which has never been seen before. We do not accomplish this by sitting out elections. We as socialists and communists must intervene if we are to create a left pole in Metro Detroit that can actually make a change. Our interventions must be comprehensive and encompassing if we are to win the battle for hegemony. We must accept and develop not only those who exist at the center of our gravity but those who are pulled into it. The masses and history will move without us. The question is whether or not we want to have a seat at the table.

We took Shri’s membership, we took his office — now let’s take his seat.

Charlotte is an American Communist and member of the Membership Engagement and Political Education Committees. Aaron is the former Co-Chair of MDDSA and later Electoral Chair. Aaron is one of the leaders on the Chris Gilmer-Hill for State Rep being run by our chapter. Both are members of Groundwork — a caucus dedicated to building a mass socialist party governed by all of its members.

Building Hegemony and Socialism Through Action: Vote Yes to Endorse Donavan McKinney was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[[{“value”:”

By: Nicholas W

BOSTON – On May 8-9, 2026, the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) held its 181st Annual Meeting at the Hynes Convention Center..

The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) is the largest union in Massachusetts and the state affiliate of the National Education Association.  Alongside 36 fellow delegates elected from the Cambridge Education Association, we met over 1500 delegates from across the state representing K-12 and higher education workers. 

I have organized as a rank-and-file educator ever since I became a teacher over ten years ago. In 2019, I joined Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU), a militant rank-and-file caucus within the MTA,  after learning about their involvement in the Dedham Education Association’s strike the same year. Not only was this my first time attending the annual convention as a delegate, it was my first time as a member of a caucus that was competing to maintain leadership in my statewide union. 

Contentious Politics – Organizing for Palestine

The Annual Convention is the highest decision body of the MTA, where we elect our leadership, including both President and Vice President, as well as the Executive Board and Board of Directors. Membership utilizes Roberts’ Rules to debate and vote on resolutions, elect the President and Executive Board, budgets and operations. The Convention  is where the magic happens outside of the shopfloor: which political path our union should take and what priorities our union should organize around.

This year’s convention was packed with resolutions and bylaw changes, along with a very contentious leadership election. 

The MTA Rank and File for Palestine (MTA-RFP) introduced six New Business Items (NBIs), which included endorsing the #DropTheADL campaign and protecting the freedom of speech of rank-and-file educators who speak up against genocide and war. NBIs are the last items to be voted on at the convention; because of that, many of them do not get to be voted on by the delegates and get assigned to the incoming Executive Board to decide. 

This year was no different. Seeing that time was running out to vote on the MTA-RFP NBIs, a delegate decided to make a rule change that allowed members to vote in a straw poll in an effort to move through the items quicker. The results of the straw poll would then be given to the incoming leadership to guide them in whether to adopt specific NBIs not formally voted on by the membership. As the straw poll began, many teachers, tired and exhausted from two days of deliberating, began to leave the convention hall. A tiny Zionist contingent with  support from outside organizations, such as Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, called for quorum three times to end the vote of the straw poll and ultimately had their way before members were allowed to vote on the MTA Rank and File for Palestine backed NBIs. 

Other contentious battles revolved around the budget. One central question involved increasing dues to expand our organizing budget for 2026/2027 year, as well as changing our bylaws to allow for a direct vote of all MTA members for the office of president. Currently, only elected delegates to the annual meeting are allowed to vote for union leadership, but this would open up the election to all rank-and-file members. Concerns over the integrity of the election, such as lack of guardrails to block outside groups from taking advantage of our democracy, and the cost of setting up a brand new election system animated the debate. 

Battle for Leadership

By far the most contentious battle was over the MTA  presidency and vice presidency.

Three candidates ran for president with running mates for vice president. Representing the old guard of union politics was John Sullivan of Belmont Education Association and Gayle Carvalho, of the Quincy Education Association. The old guard has historically played a non-confrontational role with the state and has shied away from taking a stance on political issues. This year was no different, as both Sullivan and Carvalho’s campaigns highlighted going back to “bread and butter issues,” and not getting entangled in controversial political fights, such as solidarity with Palestine.

In the middle was current Vice President Deb McCarthy of the Hull Teachers Association running for president and Dean Robinson, of the Massachusetts Society of Professors running as VP. McCarthy, who has a history of union militancy throughout her career as an educator, largely highlighted her experience as the Vice President of the MTA and the accomplishments she and the outgoing President, Max Page, worked on. This included passing the Fair Share amendment, which imposes a 4% surtax on annual income exceeding $1 million that funds public education and transportation and the elimination of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam as a high school graduation requirement through a ballot initiative in 2024. Robinson focused on his contributions to policy, such as expanding Mass Health and working on single payer initiatives in the state. Their supporters made up a mix of former EDU members and MTA-RFP members which demonstrates that they had support from other left factions within the MTA.

To the left were Matt Bach of the Andover Education Association and Deb Gesualdo of the Malden Education Association running for President and Vice President respectively, who are also members of  Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU).  

Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU)

 EDU members have a record of winning positions in leadership. Barbara Madeloni was first — she won the presidency unexpectedly in 2014 to take the first step in ousting a largely moribund and undemocratic business union leadership that ran the MTA for decades. Merrie Najimy and Max Page were Madeloni’s successors. Each election brought a stronger slate of EDU members to push the union left and focus on issues that members most cared about. Since 2019, under EDU leadership, Massachusetts educators have gone on strike multiple times, despite  Massachusetts state law prohibiting any form of work stoppage, and won large concessions from their bosses. 

In 2019, Dedham teachers became the first local to strike since 2007. They were followed by Brookline, Haverhill, Andover, Woburn, Malden, Newton, and, most recently, the historic and coordinated strike of North Shore educators in Beverly, Gloucester and Marblehead. All of these strikes were substantial victories for their members, including increased pay, especially for the lowest paid education workers, such as paraprofessionals, smaller class sizes and contract language that protects students and staff from ICE. Throughout these outbursts of increased worker militancy, EDU has led the charge by transferring their strike program to different MTA locals throughout the state. It is also important to point out that the Dedham, Brookline, Andover, Malden, and Haverhill strikes were led by presidents who are also members of EDU. 

Internal Divisions of EDU

During each MTA election cycle, EDU endorses candidates from their membership to run for office. While there is no hard rule within the caucus barring candidates to run for leadership within the MTA who did not receive an EDU endorsement, usually, EDU members accept results and campaign for their union sibling.

That was not the case this year. While Matt Bach and Deb Gesualdo won the endorsement from EDU after a lengthy runoff election, outgoing MTA VP Deb McCarthy and college professor Dean Robinson decided to run for office even though they lost the EDU endorsement. This effectively split the “left” vote and gave room for the old guard, represented by John Sullivan and Gayle Carvalho, a stronger chance of winning at the Annual Meeting. Max Page, EDU member and outgoing president, stayed true to his EDU commitments and endorsed Bach and Guasaldo despite working alongside McCarthy over two terms. 

Ultimately, Bach and Gesualdo, who both received the most votes during the initial election and runoff election against Sullivan and Carvalho, were elected to the presidency which means that EDU has continued its streak of winning leadership within the MTA. EDU also maintained a solid leadership on the Executive Committee and Board of Directors. Nonetheless, this election has exposed real divisions within EDU and inside the MTA itself. 

Endless debates over what was actually “germane” to a resolution, cranks punishing their fellow delegates with their endless amendments, and most importantly, serious debate over the strategy and politics of our organization all characterized the MTA Annual Convention. Nonetheless, what made the experience of union democracy feel so much more real was that all of this was happening within the context of my workplace; the location I spend so much of my time and energy teaching my students and organizing my coworkers so we can build a better world for us, our students, and their families.

Under those conditions, the stakes feel — and are — different.

Nicholas W is a rank-and-file member of Cambridge Education Association (CEA) and Educators for a Democratic Union (EDU), a rank-and-file caucus within the MTA. 

The post Militant Rank-and-File Stays in Leadership of Massachusetts’ Largest Labor Union appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

by AC

Our chapter is fortunate to be growing and maintaining a high percentage of active members. Folks have taken this to indicate our chapter can expand to take on additional work. In the past few months, I have been deeply skeptical of our ability to expand on our current work largely from my experience on the Trans Rights Priority Project leadership team and observing the trajectory of the Immigration Solidarity Priority Project first term. While our chapter’s growth has led many to believe we can expand our work, I’m increasingly convinced that growth in membership alone is not enough; without significant member engagement across the chapter, we risk projects that are doomed to fail and further burning out our most experienced organizers.

What finally put my nebulous feeling about our lack of capacity into perspective was my recent trip down to Louisville DSA to canvas for their electoral candidates. Louisville DSA is supporting four candidates for local- and state-level offices concurrently in a chapter virtually the same size as Cleveland DSA. They also have a Trans Safe Haven campaign similar to our Trans Rights Priority Project, which is pushing sanctuary city legislation. This project has the support of over 100 local unions and political organizations and has collected at least 3,000 signatures from residents in the two years it has been running. Louisville DSA also has several other active campaigns, a building fund with over $10,000 towards purchasing a permanent office, and several educational projects. Talking with Louisville comrades, I must be honest that my initial reaction was one of embarrassment that our chapter is struggling to succeed in a fraction of the work of our southern comrades. I feel there is a significant barrier in our way to accomplishing what Louisville DSA has, which is a lack of militant engagement across our membership. 

Our work requires militancy; not in the sense of posturing or burnout, but in the sense of disciplined, collective commitment to carrying out democratically decided work. To be militant socialists, we must be dedicated and principled in our organizing. That means showing up to meetings on time and prepared, to be uncompromising in our pursuit for liberation of the working class. It also means taking responsibility and initiative to carry our democratically decided work forward – even when we might have our own personal reservations – and thinking critically and strategically about all projects as we design and deliberate on them. As a brand new member in late 2024, I sometimes took it for granted that every project the chapter took on would build power for the working class, even if only a little bit. At the time, that little bit was good enough for me and I was often frustrated when experienced comrades pushed me to articulate explicitly how certain work would build power for the chapter and/or the working class as a whole. Now, over a year in with some leadership and organizing experience under my belt, I can see more clearly how this is the critical question that should inform every action we do as DSA. 

Newer members often have understandable hesitancy and insecurity about entering into political activism and organizing work, which is counterintuitive to the rugged individualism and liberalism under which we have been indoctrinated our entire lives. Experienced organizers must cultivate an environment of support and empowerment to overcome this capitalist indoctrination. Newer members must also be willing to challenge themselves and take the leap into the unknown. They will encounter failures and make many mistakes, but that is a critical and unavoidable part of the learning process. 

Outside of DSA, I teach for a living. My own teaching philosophy, based on the science of teaching and learning, rests on a foundation of practice and feedback. Whether it is learning in a classroom or in a conference room, it makes no difference; personal growth and development are iterative processes. Few of us are thrilled by the notion that trial and error involves error, and many “baby leftists” are understandably risk averse – they want to avoid letting their comrades down or sounding dumb. In our current internet age, social media cancel culture and purity testing within the leftist spaces that radicalize so many of us also infect us with the fear that holds us back from meaningfully engaging. Still, this is what the role of a militant member of a collectively run organization asks from us. Sharing your opinion in a meeting can be nerve-wracking, but participation is both something every member is entitled to and something the organization desperately needs from its members.

When I talk about doing the work, I don’t just mean actions like canvassing for a petition, bottomlining an event, or organizing a new member. Doing the work is also voicing your opinion during a project meeting, commenting on proposal drafts, and speaking for or against proposals during the general meeting. All members in good standing are entitled to participate in all of these activities and are responsible for doing so. We cannot defer to the oldest, loudest voices in the room. It allows for personal biases and cliques to dominate the governance of the chapter, and it robs members of their own political development. Often in meetings I observe the same people dominating conversation, including myself. When I try to pull back and make space for others, often the void remains unfilled. I find this both personally frustrating and concerning with respect to the long-term health and viability of the chapter. Our work is one of collective, participatory democracy, after all.

I feel an aspect of militancy that is especially important to our chapter as of late is the act of showing up when it is inconvenient or hard to do, or when the project isn’t your personal favorite thing. No matter how much or how little someone has on their plate, organizing is hard work. It will take all of us and so many more to bring about the socialist future we dream of. Of course, there must be a balance between maintaining militancy and avoiding burnout. This balance is something I personally struggle with. I like to joke that I suffer “chronic volunteering disease” and often catch myself internally asking some version of “If not me, then who?” I know I’m not the only one who feels this way; in one of my all-time favorite books on organizing, Dean Spade describes what sounds an awfully lot like my own chronic volunteering disease:

“For years I had a pattern where whenever I was in a meeting and the group identified a task that needed to be done, I would feel a strong impulse to volunteer for the task. It stemmed from my unconscious desire to be seen as useful, and to secure my place in the group by being of service. It also often included a tinge of anxiety that the work either wouldn’t get done, or wouldn’t get done in what I thought was the ‘right’ way. This pattern sometimes resulted in overwork, exhaustion, and neglect of other parts of my life.”

Chronic volunteering disease contributes to unsustainable relationships with the movement that create the conditions that stoke resentment and organizer burnout. Objectively my brain knows this, and yet I continually return to “If not me, then who?” It isn’t a fully rhetorical question– someone really has to do the tasks of maintaining the movement, whether that is creating an agenda, writing a proposal, throwing a social, or showing up to canvas on a Sunday morning. As the Trans Rights Priority Project likes to say, “It’s YOUR project, it doesn’t work without YOU!”, where “you” is everyone in the chapter, from the most seasoned organizer to the comrade who signed up to pay dues yesterday. 

One additional observation that informs my opinion is that many of our most experienced, long-term organizers are currently sitting on the “burnout bench”. This situation obviously arises from a variety of factors: some have other life obligations or obstacles, some are dealing with interpersonal conflicts, and some have a necessary and well-earned break after intense service to the chapter. In my discussions with Louisville DSA comrades, I wondered about whether they were able to carry out their large amount of work sustainably, and asked if each project was successful due to an unreasonable amount of work put in by senior organizers. There was a telling pause in the conversation, before the comrade acknowledged several of the projects were relying on several members pushing themselves to the brink of burnout – potentially a cautionary tale for us to consider as we grow here in Cleveland. It is expected that individuals’ capacity ebbs and flows throughout their tenure in the movement. Therefore, we have to ensure that our work continues when members need to take a step back. This requires other members to step up and support their comrades and the work of the movement. 

Overall, I do have faith that our chapter can continue to build power for the Cleveland working class and should be able to grow the work we are engaged in, but only if we approach our current and future work with intention to build power, increased militancy, and care regarding membership capacity. My ask to the “oldheads” – practice pausing for others to speak and to intentionally ask newer comrades what their thoughts are. Be mindful about how you respond, especially if you disagree. Check in with yourself about your capacity. If you need to take a break, actually take it! It is difficult to feel restored when ruminating on chapter work, even if you aren’t actively showing up. But also, ask yourself about whether a situation calls for militancy. My ask to newer comrades – take a chance and challenge yourself to become comfortable with the inevitable mistakes that will and must happen. Seek out information from comrades you respect and trust (and some you might not yet!). Volunteer for a small task at a meeting. Connect back to the reasons you joined DSA in the first place – hopefully to become meaningfully engaged in the socialist movement!

The post Capacity and Militancy appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

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

The post Samantha Kattan Organizes Queens for Victory appeared first on Democratic Left.

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By: Matt Wolfinger

LOWELL – In the Sacred Heart neighborhood, a massive black box looms over the surrounding homes. The building, called ‘the Dungeon’ by some locals, is the largest data center in Massachusetts.

Lowell residents have been living in the shadow of Markley Group’s 352,000-square-foot data center for more than a decade. The center’s cooling towers emit a constant hum less than 100 feet away from the surrounding homes on Otis Street, while its backup diesel generators spew fumes into the air. Lowell resident Jake Fortes told Working Mass that on hotter days, the center’s AC units work overtime and “sound like jet engines.”

“I’m just trying to live quietly,” he said. Fortes is the founder of Honest Future For Lowell, a grassroots group fighting back against Markley’s plans to further expand their data center.

In March, Lowell became the first city in Massachusetts to impose a moratorium on the construction and expansion of data centers. The one-year moratorium is part of a nationwide pushback from local communities against the rapid spread of artificial intelligence and the data centers needed to sustain it. While Lowell’s data center wasn’t created with AI in mind, larger and more power-hungry hyperscale versions used to power AI have sprung up in small towns across the country.

The Public Responds to Data Centers

These centers need massive amounts of water and energy to function, but municipalities are placing the burden of the consumption onto local taxpayers. Tap water is drying up, and utility bills in the vicinity are skyrocketing.

Lowell is no exception. At the city hall hearing on the moratorium, resident Alex Solange claimed his winter electricity bill, once $40, has risen to $177 per month as a result of Markley’s data center.

While the moratorium passed unanimously, local opinions are more divided. Lowell residents supporting the measure faced opposition from members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 103, who showed support for the data center by holding signs and wearing “Stand with Markley” shirts. 

The union members have their own economic concerns, namely the high-paying construction jobs that stem from building data centers. These contracts are enticing for trade workers looking for fair compensation and the unions seeking to keep their workers employed.

“Markley is a great partner of ours,” said Local 103 Business Manager Lou Antonellis in an emailed response to Working Mass. “They’ve always been committed to hiring Local 103 contractors and paying livable wages to their employees. It was a no-brainer to support a business that stands with us.”

Many data centers in the U.S. are built with unionized labor. As the scope of these projects expands, the interests of unions have been placed in opposition to local residents forced to live with the consequences. Pitting members of the working class against each other takes attention away from the real culprits – hyperscalers and the lawmakers who created these conditions.

$75 million of Governor Maura Healey’s proposed Mass Wins Act would be spent “to expand the application of artificial intelligence across key industries.” Healey signed a law in 2024 granting sales tax exemptions for data center sales in Massachusetts, hoping to “retain and attract top AI talent” to the state.

According to Pew Research Center, there are more than 3,000 operational data centers in the U.S. and over 1,500 in development. Tech billionaires like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman want to go even further, saying we may have to cover the entire world in data centers to keep up with the demand for processing power. Healey has openly bragged about her historic partnership with OpenAI, making Massachusetts the first state to do so.

Maine passed a statewide ban on data center construction in an effort to prevent the harm data centers would cause to the local environment. It was vetoed by Governor Janet Mills. Healey has refused to support a similar ban in Massachusetts.

“We need to have data centers of some sort for the kind of … innovation economy we want to have,” Healey told the New England Council business group in April.

The Cities Vs. Data Centers

Without state-wide protections, cities have largely been left to fend for themselves against the data centers springing up in their backyards. Even as they continue to be built and expanded, lawmakers warn that Massachusetts does not have the power capacity to support these data centers. Markley’s data center consumes so much energy that National Grid had to upgrade nearly 200 utility poles to keep up with demand.

Healey’s support for data centers in recent years makes more sense when you follow the money. According to data from the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance, Markley Group CEO Jeff Markley has donated a combined $24,000 since 2022 between Healey, Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll and the Democratic State Committee.

Markley Boston LLC contributed an additional $150,000 to PACs running ads in support of Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll and Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell leading up to the 2022 election.

Also of note is the $250,000 the LLC donated to the “Coalition to Stop the Tax Hike Amendment,” which ran ads to oppose a 4% surtax on those earning more than $1 million a year. The “Fair Share” tax narrowly passed and is expected to bring in $2.7 billion next fiscal year to help fund public transit and education.

Markley has donated thousands more to politicians like former Governor Charlie Baker and former Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito during their terms. It’s clear Markley has no problem spending money to get officials in office and stay on their good side.

While Markley’s Lowell data center received a $77 million tax break, dozens of city employees have been laid off amid budget cuts. Residents may also face increased property taxes, sewage payments, and water payments.

“We’re not winning from this,” Fortes said. “What are we gaining from this place being here?”

AI Boom Divides Workers

Depending on who you ask, the AI boom is either a blessing or a curse.

For some trade unions, the boom is a dream come true. Data center contracts pay well, there’s always a new one that needs building, and many commit to union labor. Nonetheless, good jobs do not guarantee welfare for the working class overall. Some workers take home wages while generative AI devastates workers everywhere else.

The claim from data center supporters that they’re boons for local job creation also doesn’t match the reality. While data centers may provide an influx of short-term jobs during the construction phase, the skeleton crews that maintain them don’t facilitate long-term job growth.

A recent study from the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business found that on average, the workforce of a data center reduces by 78% once construction is complete. Antonellis shared with Working Mass that IBEW 103 currently has “at least a dozen journeyman [sic] and apprentices in [Markley’s] Lowell & Boston locations doing daily maintenance… we had about 120 in Lowell a few years ago for their expansion.”

While trades like construction are currently more resistant to automation, other labor leaders have sounded the alarm on the threat AI and data centers pose to both blue and white-collar work.

In the words of a spokesperson for SAG-AFTRA, in an emailed statement to Working Mass:

Generative AI has profoundly affected our members because it allows companies to replicate voices, likenesses, and performances in ways that were not previously possible at scale. Our members are rightfully concerned about unauthorized copying, replacement, and manipulation of their work and identities,

VFX artists are being laid off in the hundreds as studios look to cut costs in favor of using AI to replace human labor and create digital replicas. Screenwriters have found their scripts are being used to train AI models without their knowledge or consent

A study from the American AI Jobs Risk Index revealed Massachusetts has the highest risk of AI-induced job loss of any state, with up to 535,000+ jobs on the chopping block in the next five years. But AI has been taking much more than jobs – it’s taken a toll on local ecosystems and their residents who had no say in these decisions. A recent Gallup poll found that seven in ten Americans oppose the local construction of data centers. Ignoring majority opposition, municipalities across the country are forcing them onto locals. The political capital for data center construction is not primarily coming from labor, when Chambers of Commerce are often major organized interests of support with direct lines to government.

Markley’s expansion in Lowell shows no sign of stopping. Fortes alleges that Defense contractor Draper Labs, who, “among other things, helps develop weapons systems from the U.S. Navy,” moved into the data center in August 2025. By October, according to Fortes, security cameras lined the center’s walls and armed guards were stationed at the gates.

While neither Markley or Draper have disclosed the latter’s involvement with the data center, Draper is an “anchor tenant” of the ongoing Lowell Innovation Network Corridor (LINC) project, an $800 million partnership between the city of Lowell and UMass Lowell. The ‘university pipeline to war profiteering’ known as UMass Lowell identifies Draper as a ‘premier’ partner alongside Raytheon, as reported previously in Working Mass.

The Weight of Powerful Interests

At a meeting last June where Lowell’s City Council approved Markley’s request to build four more diesel generators, chair of the UMass Building Authority Mary Burns said LINC wouldn’t be possible without Markley’s data center. “In order for LINC to happen, we need Markley,” said Burns. Markley then doubled their ask to eight generators, which was also approved. Then, last October, Healey pledged $25 million to assist Draper with the construction of their new center in Lowell.

Despite residents appealing the decision, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) allowed Markley to go ahead with building new generators behind the backs of Lowell residents. Honest Future For Lowell members filed a lawsuit against both parties, the first of its kind in Massachusetts. They claim MassDEP unlawfully approved Markley’s expansion into a heavily congested area during an ongoing appeal.

The lawsuit, filed on April 27 on behalf of 10 residents, alleges that “Markley has chosen to subject its neighbors to intrusion, disruption, and serious health dangers—all without transparency and meaningful community engagement, and with little oversight by State regulators charged with enforcing state air pollution control laws.”

Markley and his associated LLCs have spent millions buying up residential buildings surrounding the center. He has yet to give a reason, but Markley’s website has been changed to indicate they’re “now available for your generative AI workloads.” To accommodate AI, Lowell’s data center would need even more space to grow.

Healey refusing any sort of statewide legislation and tech CEOs cozying up to the Trump administration places the responsibility on the shoulders of the working class to fight back. While billionaires and their allies loot the planet and its people for all their worth, they’ve manufactured a state of affairs that pits the interests of working people against one another. They insist without evidence that anyone opposed to these data centers being built in their backyard must be misinformed or funded by China. Implementing similar tactics to Markley on a larger scale, big tech is pouring millions into politics, hoping to sway the midterms in their favor.

Markley’s Lowell data center gives us a window into the existential threat they may pose to the planet if the AI craze continues to spread. The hyperscale versions needed to power AI dwarf that center in comparison  – consuming up to 5 million gallons of drinking water each day.

‘Half-Finished Husks Without Purpose’

Some experts warn the AI bubble could pop any day now – just like with NFTs, crypto, and the dot-com bubble. But unlike the dot-com bubble, which had a comparatively clearer path to recovery, it won’t be as easy with data centers. They’ll sit as half-finished husks without purpose after the damage is already done.

Wells have dried up, property values are plummeting, and companies are building power plants to meet the immense energy demands.

Tensions remain high between unions and Lowell residents as they spar in social media comments. The incitement of working class infighting distracts from the damage the ruling class is inflicting to the planet and its people. As long as the interests of the working class remain in conflict, this will only continue. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has launched a tool to map data centers as they appear in local communities. While incomplete, it’s a useful resource to keep track of where they’re springing up or to report one in your own backyard.

Beyond Lowell, other cities in Massachusetts have won their own battles against data centers. Mansfield is the first city in Massachusetts to pass a near-total ban on data centers, the community taking preemptive action before any could be built. Monterey Park, California just became the first city in the country to pass a permanent ban.

The technocracy surveys the plains of America through the serpentine eyes of a predator. They strike, sink their poisonous fangs into the earth, then move onto their next target while the venom seeps into the water and air of the local community. The billionaire class will not be satisfied until, as Altman proclaimed, they’ve marked the entire world as their territory. The working class has been left to fight for survival against one another, wasting precious time that could be spent working on an antidote.

Don’t wait for a data center to come to you. Stand in solidarity with your neighbors and take collective action against their construction before we’re robbed of our safety, our health, and our dignity.

Matt Wolfinger is a data journalist, Northeastern University graduate, and a contributing writer to Working Mass

The post The Dungeon Over Lowell: How the Data Center Boom Divided One City’s Working People appeared first on Working Mass.

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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.

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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.

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

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