By Jane Slaughter

Meeting members of UAW Member Action, the reform group within the UAW, makes me remember why we’re doing this socialism thing. On a recent weekend their steering committee met in Southwest Detroit. People came from Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, New York state, as well as around Michigan — and not all of the 40 or so members were even on the steering committee. They just wanted to be part of the action.

UAW Member Action was founded a year ago, after the previous reform group, UAWD, dissolved over internal differences over what a reform caucus should be. It was sad, because UAWD had done great work to help get Shawn Fain’s slate elected to the union’s executive board in 2022–23.

But leaders regrouped and founded UMA with the mission of educating members and training new leaders. Despite Fain’s big win at the top in 2023, almost all UAW locals are still run by the same crowd of management-friendly types who came up in the union’s bureaucracy before. They make it harder to fight the companies and their way of operating encourages members’ cynicism about the union and the possibility of change. UMA is digging in for the long fight for change throughout the union.

FROM THE SHOP FLOOR

When I went to their Friday night social, I wasn’t thinking of an article. I didn’t ask if I could use anyone’s names, so I won’t. I met a retired case worker for the state of Michigan, a member of UAW Local 6000; we talked about the problem that a Local 6000 member with a similar job had just brought to DSA’s labor working group (threats of violence from clients).

I met a Ford worker from Kentucky who said he works with DSAers all the time, including on a May Day festival coming up, co-sponsored by DSA, his local, and the AFL-CIO.

I sat by a Ford worker from Chicago who told how she and her co-workers leafleted all shifts, all four entrances, in their fights with management. I talked with another Ford worker who’s running for state senate in Indiana.

I met a Detroit Stellantis semi driver with just four years’ seniority who’s running for UAW Convention delegate. I congratulated a Jeep worker who just got elected delegate, on his third election try. He’s a leader of an informal group there who ran against the “good old boys” who head the local.

At one point UMA Chair Scott Houldieson said to the crowd, ““If we’re not building our union to fight the boss, what are we building our union for?”

It was encouraging that when I introduced myself, “Jane Slaughter, I’m with Labor Notes,” everyone knew and liked Labor Notes. Some mentioned our book, Secrets of a Successful Organizer. Some are going to the national Labor Notes Conference June 12–14 in Chicago. (The DSA labor working group held a fundraiser on May Day to send Detroit-area lower-wage workers who are unionizing.) It’s all part of the “troublemaking wing” of the labor movement.

In DSA, we can disagree about a lot of things. I think we’re pretty united on working with these types of worker-leaders who really exemplify the future of socialism in this country. We’re not going to get there without them. We need DSA to be their allies and eventually their own.

[Jane Slaughter is on the board of Labor Notes, where she covered the UAW for decades. She works on Detroit DSA’s newspaper committee.]

Rank-and-File Reform Alive and Well in the UAW was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kind words from chapter foes, Piker rallies with endorsees, and more in the April edition of Chapter and Verse.

The post More Than 170 Chapters Take May Day Action appeared first on Democratic Left.

[[{“value”:”

By: Travis Wayne

SOMERVILLE – Somerville and its new mayor face a test from organized labor as the city’s executive sits across from a burgeoning municipal workers’ union: Somerville Workers United (SWU) – AFSCME 93, whose members are joining a union representing 45,000 state, county, and municipal workers across New England.

The new city workers’ union, which seeks to represent around 220 non-union workers in the city including both the bulk of the city’s administrative staff and positions of lowest compensation, hovers near the 50% threshold of cards needed to formally request voluntary recognition from the mayor. 

The union crosses the threshold after taking the unusual organizing decision to announce their intent to unionize to the public before reaching a 50% majority — which led only to more support, both externally and internally. Compensation and rising austerity in the city government were common themes in conversations between city workers and Working Mass. 

Rising Anxiety and Opaque Compensation 

Multiple non-union employees that Working Mass spoke with shared that feelings of destabilization in their jobs began in late 2024, but were exacerbated in 2025. Non-unionized city workers have felt increasingly unstable as Greater Boston continues to lose tens of thousands of jobs – a trend that has only worsened. 

ICE’s early descent on Somerville did not help in making workers feel safe. 

As workers’ vulnerability increased, the need to protect their employment collectively did, too. Individuals’ requests and questions regarding stability and compensation were often punted under former Mayor Ballantyne’s administration. Workers were asked to wait for a Compensation Plan to be released in 2025, the summer before the city elections. But upon its release, the Plan did little except unlock deep dissatisfaction in much of the non-union workforce. According to Josh, one city worker and SWU organizer: 

While the base rate was increased for the the lowest-paid employees, the top line pay for directors also increased – and the way they paid for this was a giant step and grade system in the middle for the vast majority of non-union employees.

The sheer complexity of the Plan makes its meaning entirely opaque to many employees looking for critical information on their own employment terms. Many employees have no idea what step and grade to expect at any given time. In effect, the policies are obscured by a wall of legalese that increase barriers to entry for workers just trying to put food on their tables.

Luis, a strategic planner with the city, also added that the Compensation Plan didn’t include any mention of gender parity or Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) increases – even as gas soars and rent rises. Layoffs also remained firmly on the table. 

There was another layer, too, which fundamentally impacted the nature of the labor done in the workplace. Non-union city workers had seen their job descriptions slowly divorced from requested responsibilities and compensation. “All non-union employees were doing other duties, one-off pet projects of the mayor or whoever the city manager was at the time,” said Josh. Directors can press rank-and-file workers for assignments entirely outside their job realm and hold them accountable for that work and workers shared between departments. As Luis indicated:

It’s very difficult to figure out what to do when no one can come to agreement on what my job actually is… and we do what they need us to do at any given time.

New Austerity Suffocates City Workers Further

Mayor Jake Wilson has stated values that are aligned with many of the same priorities as Somerville workers. He supports the development of social housing and calls for the city to be a “guinea pig” in the fight against displacement. And when Mayor Wilson reported in the Cambridge Day that administrative restructuring has occupied much of his effort since taking office, he said “we’re building a team” as his biggest accomplishment of his first one hundred days in office. 

Many workers have been made to feel they are decidedly not inside that team.

First, city workers already anxious about their employment since 2025 heard silence from the mayor. According to multiple sources, Mayor Wilson did not contact or introduce himself in any way to the workforce, not even an email. “To this day, we haven’t been properly introduced to the Cabinet of the new Mayor’s Office,” said Luis, shaking his head. Other workers that spoke to Working Mass confirmed that they also had not seen the mayor once.

Then, the mayor fired Arts Council Director Greg Jenkins. The same “departmental reorganization” that created the Cabinet never introduced to workers was enough to end someone’s career after 25 years. In that case, multiple sources speculated to Working Mass that the mayor showed up in-person to introduce himself to workers (one of the only times reported) to assuage their anxieties after their direct manager’s abrupt firing.

But larger concerns than just the remoteness of the mayor were top of workers’ minds: namely, cuts. One SWU organizer shared with Working Mass that every department is expected by the administration to cut a position from their department, as of the end of April 2026. This is after they fired a staff person working in housing, an “active and essential organizer,” in late April 2026. Workers expressed the broader feeling the cuts underscored: that their labor was not valued, with dire consequences to residents. Josh said:

 The nature of our job is policy implementing for the public good. It’s a real problem we have no voice in crafting the policies we are charged with implementing.

For example, the city’s portfolio of complex permits is overseen by just three staff members charged with the enforcement of all zone ordinances and inspection in Somerville. In just one department, then, an austerity pattern towards staff from the Mayor’s Office can decrease access to direly-need services for tenants and protection from abusive landlords. Luis summarized the effect of the cuts on the already-squeezed staff:

You start to think of yourself as a number. The perception of how the administration treats us is just as a number in this work: a producer of outputs. People are still passionate about the work.

In lieu of investing in the workers who actually hold relationships with residents and can serve their needs most effectively, the Wilson administration has been characterized so far by what two workers called “a tech bro approach.”

In the Cambridge Day, the mayor underscored a “performance measurement tool” that turns many of the key calculations workers make in policy implementation into an automated dashboard for metric tracking. The mayor is also forcing workers back to work in person, following the same pattern as corporations after the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, the labor movement in Somerville beyond City Hall also signaled dissent to the austerity of the new administration impacting non-union city workers. According to the Somerville Educators’ Union (SEU), the mayor aims to take funds from Somerville schools: 

Mayor Jake Wilson has asked the district to prepare for up to $1 million in reduced funding, which is well below level-service. This is to account for the projected $5.3 million deficit in the City’s budget.

The mayor has asked for these cuts despite, as the teachers’ union pointed out, the fact that the City of Somerville holds 23.8 million in “Free Cash” and $15 million in a Stabilization Fund. Those funds not only can be utilized to float education, but also support city workers.

Organizing the Union of the Formerly Non-Union

Within the city government, around 220 non-union employees make up the workforce that SWU seeks recognition to represent. The organizing drive took off across multiple non-union departments after the Compensation Plan’s release, but especially revved up as workers felt the need to ensure their own jobs’ stability as the city administration changed. 

The Office of Sustainability and Environment was among the first centers of agitation. According to SWU organizers, department workers’ direct feedback was met with coldness by their director, leading to further dissatisfaction exacerbated by micromanagement that followed. Any projects that needed directorial approval were stonewalled and access limited. 

The Office of Sustainability workers were the first to sign union cards, with three members of the original Organizing Committee (OC) from that department, because of both that stonewalling and another key factor: the employees’ own deep experiences. Workers in the office included a federal employee purged from the Environmental Protection Agency and a former member of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), equipped with union experience, while another employee was a community organizer hired to work in community development for the city due to their organizing background.

Other departments proved more challenging to reach and build solidarity with, because they were more remote, more autonomous, and better-managed by their director than others. 

Non-union workers share a workplace – tasks, relations, ideas – with unionized colleagues. Thus, even in departments without workers with labor or organizing experience, workers had exposure to the major differences between their contracts and those of union workers. The Somerville Municipal Employees Union (SMEU) was unaffected by the Compensation Plan and, when union employees saw benefits won, non-union workers also observed increases due to the city’s requirement for parity. The difference became stark.

City workers first sought to organize into one of the city government’s existing unions that inspired so many of their ranks. Ultimately, that choice seemed less possible over time for workers’ needs, according to Josh. Despite SMEU President Ed Halloran’s support, the reception of SMEU membership to their coworkers’ unionization was frostier than they hoped. Controversy between other parts of the Somerville labor movement and SMEU around the reinstatement of one union member that led to the 2024 resignation of library workers was also not encouraging.

We started having these amorphous conversations… those of us who were former municipal workers began reaching out to SMEU, the Steelworkers, UAW, and eventually AFSCME 93… their expertise with the public union process was on display in a way the others in a technical space weren’t… and many felt SMEU would not yield in their challenges, and the time it would take to activate leadership would be too long for workers.

In the end, 75% of the nascent union chose to affiliate with AFSCME 93. 

Going Public 

Somerville Workers United (SWU)’s demands are, in the end, simple.

“We need a seat at the table,” Josh told Working Mass. “We need clear policies and procedures in the handbook, like overtime, flexibility, offboarding, steps and grades made transparent, position reclassification.”

The union chose to go public on March 10, before reaching the 50% threshold, largely because one obstacle they encountered was hesitancy from their coworkers to join in any clandestine effort. In a city where so many unions bargain with the city, some non-union city workers felt uncomfortable organizing with Somerville Workers United till the union was open about its work. 

According to SWU organizers, the strategy of going public early was successful. Going public allowed the union to speak to more and more of their non-union coworkers openly. Questions of dignity, compensation, and stability unfolded in conversations from City Hall to the most remote corner, with organizers conducting one-on-ones department by department. 

The mayor’s office did not interfere or in any way communicate its notice of the new union. On April 10, 2026, SWU had reached 70 union cards signed out of around 220. The union held a series of socials for workers and their allies in labor and beyond: a St. Patrick’s Day social at the Burren, building-level tabling at the Annex and City Hall, a potluck picnic in Winter Hill, an art build at Aeronaut Brewery. Workers signing on steadily grew, till by the end of the month, the union hovered near the 50% threshold needed for climactic action. 

On May Day, as workers rallied in socials and events across Greater Boston, SWU coordinated with the Somerville Educators Union on their rally to “demonstrate solidarity across public sector workers in the face of looming budget cuts” in their final stretch push for recognition from the city government. The action signals an important shift from seeking recognition as a union to acting as one, as part of and connected to the fight for recognition – in this case, representing workers’ interests in unity with Somerville’s teachers’ union facing the city to reject the notion of a zero-sum game between schools and services.

“To some extent, to be the union is the point,” Josh said. SWU has certainly become the union. It’s up to the mayor whether he will recognize the workers as the union they already have become, or not. 

Travis Wayne is a union organizer in Somerville and the managing editor of Working Mass.

The post Somerville City Workers, Facing Opaque Pay and Austerity, Unionize with AFSCME 93 appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

The post Coulee DSA ENDORSES Emily Berge for Congress! first appeared on Coulee DSA.

A statement from our Creating Democracy in Columbus Campaign

Today Columbus City Council is hosting a “community conversation” on the current voting system for City Council Districts. Since last spring, Columbus DSA has led the actual community conversation in Columbus on the issue of City Council Districts. Residents are sick and tired of their elected officials ignoring their neighborhood concerns while turning around and giving billionaires anything they want without question. The recent McCoy Park debacle exposes just this: the interests of the billionaire class are served over those of the residents of this city. And we saw City Council respond in their usual way: deflecting blame and performative response while maintaining the status quo. Today is no different.

Columbus’ current City Council voting system is a farce, the so-called “Districts” in this model are an illusion having no actual impact. Because we maintain at-large voting, requiring a candidate to win votes across the entire city and not just their “District”, these “Districts” could simply not exist and the outcome of the elections would be the same, as we saw in November.

At-large voting favors the well-funded and those in power at the expense of real community representation. It is why most cities have abandoned at-large elections for city council seats. Columbus is one of the very few cities of its size in this country still using this archaic system.

Our proposal is simple: eliminate at-large voting and make the Districts real. In order to represent a District, you must win the election in just that District. This gives neighborhoods a real say in who represents them in city government and makes candidates answerable to their neighbors.

We are happy to see the issue has captured Council’s attention, but we should set the record straight as to what is actually going on today: an attempt to co-opt a citizen-led initiative to build our own power. Council is not holding this hearing for the working people of this city but for their own benefit.

If Council truly cares about the District issue, they should drop the pretenses and just let us get on with our good work. We don’t want to see Council attempt to redirect this energy into any proposal retaining at-large seats. We don’t want to see any competing proposals that would confuse voters. The Our City Our Say coalition is working towards a simple true-districts amendment for this November’s election. We look forward to winning real representation for the people of Columbus!

[[{“value”:”

Our 2026 spring edition, Issue 8, is DSA at 100k. To receive a bimonthly full copy of the magazine issue delivered to your door knowing your funds directly support the independent media we represent, you can subscribe here.

Working Mass is a project of union members and members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Massachusetts and beyond. We cover strikes, new organizing, and contract campaigns, as well as labor strategy, the reform movement, and socialist politics.

History has changed. Welcome to Issue 8.

In 1912, the Socialist Party of America had grown to surpass 100,000 members. They held two congressional districts, mayoral seats, and countless council seats nationwide. That eve of the Great War was their peak.

For the first time since the SPA’s decline, DSA has reached the coveted milestone of 100,000 members. This is uncharted territory for U.S. organizers today. A mass organization of this magnitude has not been seen in generations of the socialist movement. In Massachusetts alone, thousands organize in five chapters: Boston, Worcester, Cape Cod, River Valley, and the Berkshires, membership rising across all of them, with party offices for members in Holyoke while organizers secure one in Boston to serve over thirteen neighborhood groups, many with memberships exceeding small chapters. There are socialists in workplaces and apartment complexes agitating tenants. There are socialists fighting in the streets and organizing rapid-response efforts against ICE. And there’s a pantheon of socialist officials, once again: hundreds of councilors, legislators, some mayors, while other comrades challenge our opposition for seats in the U.S. Congress to directly confront fascism and the imperialist war machine from the halls of power.

In this issue, we interview workers organizing for their first contract at breweries and dining halls; we follow carpenters fighting against bad developers; we witness marches against each successive war and invasion, from Venezuela to Iran to Cuba; we see labor’s continued work, alongside ICE watch, to muster the capabilities and unity needed to defend us. We review a deeply personal memoir about how one comrade became an organizer through revolution. She’s not the only one. Throughout the issue, DSA leaders share their personal stories of how they came into organization: as unionists, radicals, nurses, field directors, red diaper babies, and single moms involved in the first 100K Drive.

Together, we are a fighting organization.

It’s ours to choose what to do with it.

In Solidarity,

Travis Wayne

Issue 8 Contributors: Maritza S, Robin, Ben A, Tefa G, Jake S, Ezra S, Francesca M, Hayley B-B, Cerena E, Frederick Reiber, Megan Romer

How Did You Become An Organizer? (Part 1)

Tefa G, Chapter Co-Chair, Boston DSA:

I went to Labor Notes in 2018 [a national conference for union activists] and met people from DSA there. And then when AOC got elected in 2018, I decided that I wanted to continue to do this work, but I needed to do it somewhere where it is going to work. So I moved to New York City in 2019 and became a fully active member of NYC-DSA.

I believe in this organization because in organized strategic efforts. As a Marxist, I need a platform to organize people who are disorganized, so that we can actually do something. I believe in civil disobedience protests, but it is important to have a plan – knowing your long-term goals, being strategic about your messaging, knowing what the next step is going to be. What you are gonna get people to do next? Who are gonna be involved? What are the repercussions?

Ezra S, Political Education Chair, Worcester DSA:

I knew what socialism was, but never called myself a socialist. I joined DSA in the summer of 2020, in the midst of COVID and the George Floyd protests. After seeing how the Democrats sabotaged Bernie’s campaign, the failure of the privatized healthcare system, and deepening my understanding about the police force’s relationship with the capitalist state, I began to ascribe the socialist label to my own politics. After nearly eleven months in NYC-DSA, I left to join a Marxist-Leninist microsect called the People’s Revolutionary Party, since disbanded.

In 2024, I found myself returning to DSA: to Worcester DSA, specifically, after I had moved to Worcester for school. The genocide in Palestine had motivated me to want to do more and be more active, and I was especially deflated by Clark SJP’s refusal to hold an encampment. I found Worcester DSA through its statements on October 7th, which I thought were incredibly strong and principled, so I joined the chapter to give it another shot. Two years later, DSA has become my sole political home. I cannot believe there was a time in my life when I debated that fact.

Francesca M, National Political Committee

I’m a red diaper baby: I was born into a socialist family. My childhood memories are dotted with candle-lit marches against the Iraq War; my brother leading a rally against education cuts; falling asleep on a plastic chair at the back of the union hall during my dad’s Party meetings; the ’70s feminist chants I sang with my mum in the car. Yet as I entered adolescence, the contradictions between my home life, the goodness and intuitive correct-ness of my family’s beliefs, and the pervasive social consensus around me — the photographs of Che Guevara on our walls, and my best friend describing Cuba as a ‘dictatorship’ with a knowing look — caused me to live with a sort of split consciousness. If asked about my political identity, I choked.

I had to first experience politics before I could articulate my politics. High school catapulted me into the student movement: every government, it seemed, took a turn at slicing off a piece of the public education system, so there was always something to fight for. And so we did: student strikes, occupations of school buildings, assemblies, bus rides to national marches, picket lines, fundraisers, panel discussions. I participated in everything, and brought my friends along too, but I didn’t have the confidence, or the certainty yet, to lead anything. I was organized, but not organizing. I did, however, begin to claim ideas: I read Marx, and anarchist anthologies, and learnt to distinguish between radical and assimilatory kinds of feminism.

After a stint in Students for Justice in Palestine during grad school, the moment that turned me into an organizer in my own right was the May 2021 Unity Intifada triggered by the Sheikh Jarrah evictions and the 11 days war on Gaza. For two weeks, I had thought of nothing but the war and how to stop it. I took time off work, turned my house into a headquarters, learned to give speeches, rehearsed talking points, travelled to every rally, allowed my friends to bring me groceries and make me coffee and offer their couch, talked to a thousand people, painted banners in my backyard, cold-emailed journalists, yelled at other journalists, yelled at politicians, yelled at the sky and God and Joe Biden, and by the time a friend in Gaza sent me videos from the street celebrations of the ceasefire, I knew I was an irreversibly changed person.

Four months later, I joined DSA.

Articles Featured in Issue 8:

1. Lamplighter Brewers Win Union Vote, Becoming the First Union Brewery Statewide

2. Is the Labor Movement Growing or Shrinking? The Incredible Views of the AFL-CIO

3. Bad Blueprints: Worcester Building Trades Challenge Subsidies to Developers

How Did You Become An Organizer? (Part 2)

Hayley B.B., National Political Committee:

Growing up, my grandmother would reminisce about her organizing efforts in Southern California: walking side by side with the United Farm Workers, protecting women outside of Planned Parenthood, and mobilizing for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. I did not realize what this would mean to me years later as a 31 year-old socialist union organizer. She passed when I was a freshman in high school, long before I had the chance to ask her all the questions I now wish I could ask. Throughout high school during Obama’s presidency, I found myself angrier about ongoing political issues than my peers, but I never moved my anger to action beyond posting on social media. In 2016, while attending the University of Colorado Boulder, I yearned to get involved with the inspiring movement that was building around the Bernie Sanders campaign, but I never found a place on my campus to do this. I stumbled around working various low-wage jobs while attempting to “soul search” for a career path. When relatives suggested I do politics when I was consumed by the Kavanaugh trials, their suggestion was eye-opening to me. Within a few months, I was working for a Berniecrat legislator at the State Capitol, where I met Lorena Garcia, a current Colorado State Legislator, who in 2019, was running for the US Senate with a grassroots, socialist campaign endorsed by all four Colorado DSA chapters that took a major gamble and hired me as her full-time field director. I developed relationships with socialists all around the state. After the 2020 COVID shutdown ground her campaign to a halt, I plunged in and joined Denver DSA and was elected as electoral chair within months. In that same period, I led a successful organizing campaign with a fellow Denver DSA comrade to unionize the nonprofit we were working at under a Communication Workers of America (CWA) local. I’ve been a union member ever since and currently work as a union organizer for AFT-Oregon.

In 2022, I visited my grandmother’s home country of Slovakia for the first time to learn about my family history and visit her cousin, Martin Bútora, who still lives there. This cousin is a sociologist, writer, and professor. At the time, he was also an active advisor for Zuzana Čaputová, the first woman and youngest person ever elected to be Slovakia’s president as a member of the Progressive Slovakian Political Party. In 1948, as a teenager, he worked as a reporter when the Communist Party took over Slovakia and transitioned it into a Soviet satellite state. By November 1989, he co-founded Public Against Violence, the leading movement of the democratic revolution (The Velvet Revolution) in Slovakia, then served as the human rights advisor for a former president of Slovakia, was appointed the Slovak Ambassador to the United States from 1999 to 2003, and even ran for president of Slovakia in 2004. I spent each night during this trip gathering as much information as I possibly could from him about his own years of organizing experiences and his relationship to my grandmother, which he self-described as someone he wrote back and forth with frequently to discuss the politics of the world, and learn from each other’s organizing in their respective countries. Through our conversations I learned that throughout his lifetime, he had lived under almost every form of government, so I asked a simple question: “What form of government is the best?” He answered immediately, “Democratic socialism is the only form of government that will save our world.” This moment solidified everything for me and made me realize I didn’t come into socialism and organizing on my own; my grandmother has been leading me here the entire time. After my trip to Slovakia, I chanced upon my grandmother’s CWA union pamphlet. I never knew she was also a unionist herself, let alone the same union I first belonged to. This further crystallized what I already knew: my life path has roots much deeper than myself.

Cerena E, National Political Committee:

My parents were newly-immigrated Filipinos to NYC when my mom gave birth to me at the hospital where she worked. Their first jobs as US citizens were as nurses, with my mother being the first union nurse in my family. For most of my childhood, my parents never seemed to be in the same room at the same time unless we were on vacation with extended family. After my brother was born, I was raised nearly full-time by my godparents, both of whom were also nurses. The stories my elders would repeat to my brother and me sought to color my understanding of the world: according to them, by overcoming poverty through sheer grit and hard work, they raised me to embody their aspiration for a better life in the US. We moved to Houston in the summer before I began second grade, when my parents were able to afford a decent standard of living for my family on the combined salaries of two nurses.

To my parents’ chagrin, much of my adolescence was spent questioning whether hard work actually pays off in the real world. I dove into the nonprofit world, part with the naivete of an ambitious high school student authoring a college resume, and part out of the simmering rage I’ve come to associate with unabashed expressions of wealth in the US. I volunteered hundreds of hours at a local food bank, and fundraised, before quickly learning that nonprofits could never address the root of poverty. As long as there existed a class of wealthy donors who would sooner lift a finger to write a grant than confront the ugly economic system through which they enriched themselves, what good was my volunteer labor?

The absence of any competent opposition from the Democratic Party during Trump’s first term left me hopeless until I joined YDSA in my sophomore year of college at the University of Texas, Austin, nearly eight years ago to this day. Armed with clipboards, a YDSA banner, and a Bernie Sanders cardboard cutout, the students who took me on as a future socialist organizer raised my expectations of what we must demand of the world to change it. I joined my first union, the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU), as an undergraduate student worker. Unsurprisingly, my mentors in TSEU were also my mentors in DSA. From campaigns to protect students and university workers in the face of austerity during the COVID-19 pandemic, to electoral campaigns like Heidi Sloan’s run for Congress as an open democratic socialist in Central Texas, I saw myself and the people I organized with in Y/DSA transformed into working class champions of socialism. Now with over a year of experience working as a union nurse, just as my mother once was, and standing toe-to-toe against capitalism on a regular basis — the courage I feel to organize and fight for a just world would not be possible without the thousands of socialists I’m proud to call comrades in DSA.

4. Losing Your Whole World To Win a World – A Review of Defiance by Loubna Mrie

5. Emmanuel College Dining Hall Workers Win First Contract with UNITE HERE Local 26

6. Boston Labor Unites to Face ICE As Minneapolis Leads First General Strike in 80 Years

How Did You Become An Organizer? (Part 3)

Megan Romer, National Co-Chair:

My first official title in DSA was 100K Captain, during the original 2021 100K Drive. I’d started organizing with my local chapter, Southwest Louisiana DSA, a little over a year before, but knew quickly that I had a lot of catching up to do — though I had been in activist spaces before, becoming an organizer (and becoming a socialist in any meaningful way) was new to me. My job for the first several months: snacks. (Self-imposed.) In that year, because of my comrades, I’d gone from a wobbly “Elizabeth Warren is probably the compromise choice we need” voter to a full-time Bernie 2020 super-volunteer, helped my chapter pivot to digital organizing during the pandemic, and worked on the leadership team of our chapter’s massive mutual aid response to Hurricanes Laura and Delta.

When the 100K Drive rolled around, my chapter’s leadership team, exhausted from our ongoing hurricane response, asked if I’d be willing to be the 100K Captain, our chapter’s lead for recruiting efforts, and I nervously accepted — I wasn’t sure I was ready for a formal position, but I stepped in. Our little bayou-side chapter grew by nearly double during that drive, solidifying a Top 3 spot on the chapter leaderboard and the legendary pink prize hat for several of our members. We had a distinct advantage, in that we were actively working on a campaign that was extremely easy to tap people into in the short term. Where we struggled was, of course, retention.

No chapter in the country figured out the magic potion that retained members through the Biden presidency. With Trump out of office and the daily news “back to normal” (such as it was), combined with the long tail of pandemic lockdowns, our numbers dwindled — we didn’t get all the way to 100K during that drive. It took years of rebuilding, combined with obvious external political conditions (some of which were of DSA’s own making, like the Mamdani campaign) to finally hit that big number, but we did. And now we’re here, we made it! But the work isn’t done. A DSA that is able to stop massive wars, shut down the supply chain to demand working class rights, protect our most vulnerable, and build a real democracy? That’s a DSA in the millions, and those millions need to be activated, trained, and ready to take on that fight.

We still haven’t solved the equation of retention, but when I look back at my own arc – just a regular slightly weird and artsy working-class mom who went from left-lib to communist through the social practice of collective organizing and collective learning. The question of how to pull people into that social practice — to make folks feel empowered about organizing and enthusiastic about learning both skills and theory — is one I’m still working on but which I try to bring back to my own experience. You are probably also working on this question – how to make DSA stick – and I’m so glad to be in this organization to work on it together. To the next 100K!

The post Announcing Issue 8: DSA at 100K appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]] 

MD-DSA 4th Annual Convention Shows a Strong, Ideologically Diverse Chapter Organizing Together for Power

By Lila B.

At this year’s annual convention, over 200 members of Metro Detroit DSA took the time to deliberate, debate, and vote on a variety of key chapter decisions.

As a big tent organization, our convention is one of the most valuable opportunities for members of varying tendencies to come together and decide collectively how we move forward as a chapter for the next year.

Through consensus resolutions, we agreed: to prioritize educating the millions of working class people open to democratic socialism about the core tenets of our movement, to build our chapter to 2,000 members by our 2027 annual convention, to re-affirm the Socialist in Office committee’s valuable work in coordinating with our elected officials, to establish a new Mobilization Working Group, and more.

We also strengthened our administrative functions by dividing the secretary role into separate administrative and communications roles. This creates more manageable, sustainable workloads for tasks that support the entirety of the chapter without putting an undue burden on any one member.

As a proud member of the Groundwork caucus, I wanted to share a few key takeaways from convention for the broader membership to consider.

We agreed to address structural issues in the chapter with the Unity in Action commission

One of the most exciting votes was the decision to approve the Unity in Action resolution.

The debate and deliberation around this specific proposal ended up taking far more time than for any other resolution at this year’s convention. That’s because we, as a chapter, took the time to make compromises in real-time, incorporating feedback from a member on the floor to remove some language from the resolution. I found it to be a commendable example of comrades working together across tendencies to build consensus.

This cross-tendency collaboration resulted in an amended resolution that the majority of members felt confident enough to vote YES on.

The passage of the Unity in Action resolution underlines that as an organization, we agree that there are indeed a variety of serious infrastructural challenges facing our rapidly growing chapter necessitating further inquiry, deliberation and proposals. By adopting the Unity in Action Commission, we collectively agreed to create a democratically-elected commission dedicated to shoring up the infrastructure that we desperately need to keep scaling the fight to win socialism in our lifetime. Ultimately it will take all of us, across tendency and caucus, to build MD-DSA into the mass socialist party that can speak to the millions of working people now open to our politics.

It’s critical to note that if we’re serious about addressing these structural issues, we will need buy-in, input and compromise from every ideological tendency in the chapter. Moving forward, it’s important that we take this mandate from convention seriously and continue working across our differences to build up every corner of our organization.

We agreed that our chapter must strengthen a broad array of work including labor, political education, electoralism and more

Walking out of convention, it was also clear to me that the majority of our chapter agrees that every part of our work is of vital importance, from labor and political education to electoralism and ecosocialism — which is why we all feel so strongly about how these groups should be structured.

The debate surrounding the political education resolutions in particular underlined the broad desire of our membership to see a strong political education program in our chapter. We all want new and long-time members alike to feel confident thinking through robust critical analyses of both our current political moment and the history that brought us here.

Where Groundwork differs in opinion from other caucuses and the Democracy Coalition is that we believe strongly in building a party capable of recruiting and engaging the masses. Our vision for the chapter is one that meets people where they are, that makes every corner of our organization as accessible as possible, and that unequivocally believes in every new members’ ability to be active and engaged from the first day they join the organization.

Whether it’s voting on chapter and committee decisions or joining the work, we believe that simply by virtue of being in DSA, every member is more than capable of engaging in our chapter regardless of when they joined, what meetings they’ve attended or what theory they’ve read.

We look to each and every member and say: we trust you with the work and we trust you to have a say in our democracy. That’s why I’m ultimately excited to get to work and support everything the convention passed on 4/11.

We agreed that steering committee should be empowered to make administrative decisions and that real democracy means having the option to re-elect leaders

I was also happy to see that the resolutions focused on taking decision making power away from our elected leadership and depriving our organization of institutional knowledge by imposing term limits were both voted down.

Our members affirmed at convention that they want to leave the administrative work to the folks tasked with doing it so that we may focus on doing the important work of winning socialism in Detroit.

Likewise, members recognized that real democracy means having more options, not less, in any given leadership election. Members were savvy to the fact that we don’t need term limits because nobody gets on the steering committee (or stays there) without our consent.

Members want a Metro Detroit DSA for the masses

The UIA commission and the campaign proposals on the consent agenda are all meaningful steps forward toward building a mass movement and a party for Metro Detroit DSA. Next year, I hope to see even more proposals around campaigns that bring as many working class people across Metro Detroit into the fold.

Our internal work is important, but it’s clear that despite our differences, a vision of centering ambitious, external-facing campaigns is resonating with members across a variety of tendencies. Members across the organization are here to build a chapter for the masses, not the few. To create a chapter for not just the already converted, but for a true mass movement to win socialism in Metro Detroit.

Everybody in, nobody out!

MD-DSA 4th Annual Convention Shows a Strong, Ideologically Diverse Chapter Organizing Together for… was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A union can democratize your workplace, protecting you against at-will employment, ensuring just cause, and raising standards for all workers.

The post Your boss is lying when he says unions are no longer necessary appeared first on EWOC.

DSA has become an important vehicle for climate politics. A new book uses the campaign for a New York state climate law as a lens for understanding the organization and its approach to the crisis.

The post Feel the Burn appeared first on Democratic Left.

State Rep. Rabb has fought for working-class Philadelphians in the legislature for years. Now, he’s taking his fight to DC to continue the struggle for housing for all, universal healthcare, and for real democracy in America! DSA is incredibly proud to endorse Rep. Rabb and make sure our voices are heard in the halls of power!

Rep. Rabb is our second Congressional endorsement this cycle. He has some tough opponents, and AIPAC and other dark money groups are already boosting his opponents. Philadelphia DSA has built up a powerful canvassing operation, but we can all help!

Rep. Rabb is joining Oliver Larkin on our Congressional slate. It’s going to take a lot of us standing together to bring more voices and votes into the halls of power.

Rep. Rabb is part of a slate of candidates in the Socialist Cash Takes Out Capitalist Trash fundraising project!