December 13, 2022

On December 12, after many weeks of tireless work by Akron city residents, Akron city council narrowly passed the toxic White Pond legislation and then took a targeted approach to silence those who spoke up against it. Council members largely fell in line with the wishes of the mayor, and when those who showed up to speak had an understandably emotional reaction to the vote, they were removed from council chambers by police — a clear violation of first amendment rights.

During continued chants in the hall, a police officer issued several orders to disperse, including an “official” order to vacate the floor and the building. At this last request, many residents began to descend the stairs from the third floor. Eleven individuals who had planned to speak made it out of earshot or off of the premises before those who remained were told by two councilpeople that there would still be a chance to speak during the public comment portion. Several residents requested Zoom call-in links be sent to those 11 who had registered to speak and were now absent, but these requests were denied. then denied the right to speak via Zoom during public comment.

In the interim, behind closed doors, Council passed legislation to add mandatory minimum jail time  for individuals found to be “menacing” toward city workers and public officials. Only one councilor, Councilman Russ Neal, voted against this legislation with concern about it being used only to advantage the city and silence those who speak out against them. Indeed, the wheels of fascism are turning. The City is afraid of dissent, and, with menacing’s vague definition, can now jail residents for disagreeing with public officials. 

We know as socialists that those in power fight to maintain the status quo; but that does not mean we will tolerate it. Like the rubber workers who fought for better conditions against political and police violence, the Civil Rights movement that fought laws based in white supremacy, and all other working class movements around the world that don’t back down, we will continue to fight. We know that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Our capitalist, neoliberal society breeds inequity, but as socialists, it is our moral and ethical obligation to continue to fight to build an equitable and just Akron. 

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It was 2020: the Year of the Campaign Worker.

At least, that’s what one union organizer told us – our shop of rank-and-file campaign workers tired of constant exploitation in the industry. This was before the labor uprising, before workers formed a union at an Amazon factory in Staten Island, before the wave of unionization that has swept across the country at Starbucks and Trader Joe’s and Home Depot, before the so-called Great Resignation. But in 2019, starting with the unionization of the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, workers began unionizing at campaigns across the country. That continued into the general election period at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Political campaign work is a burnout industry. It chews up idealistic young people and spits them out with ruined personal lives, addictions, and whatever other vices they need to survive. Oftentimes, campaigns provide next to nothing in wages. Instead of an adequate wage to pay for groceries, workers are fed narratives of self-sacrifice needed to “elect a candidate that can change this country.” I’ve met very few campaign workers above the age of thirty who last longer than a month on the campaign trail. Most young people work one cycle and do their best to escape to something that doesn’t kill their bodies right after. Those who continue tend to become bosses where they recreate the same exploitation they were dealt and talk about “paying your dues” so you, too, can become a boss.

In other words, campaign workers are ripe for labor organizing.

At the beginning of the pandemic, even though I had just left another exhausting campaign during the primary season as a field organizer where we worked seventy-hour weeks for far less than a living wage, where we had unionized, striked and staged walkouts in order to win severance pay for single-parent coworkers who needed paychecks, I took a job on a political campaign to survive the long winter of COVID-19. It was one month into the pandemic. The team was small, we weren’t unionized, and the bosses were typical – perpetuating the same old tyrannical norm.

The structure of large campaigns is authoritarian. Bosses atop the chain of command give orders to one mid-level manager after another, eventually leading down to the big pool of exploited workers called field organizers (FOs) at the bottom of the chain, which is what I was. 

Field organizers are the rank-and-file. While some bosses think that campaigns can run without field organizers (and many small shop campaigns do), large left-leaning campaigns that actually take on the monied interests of the Republican Party in battleground districts cannot function without field organizers because field organizers deliver what’s called the “field margin.” That’s the margin delivered by the labor of field organizers – the disciplined and exhaustive labor force that sways big elections.

Without a field margin, there’s no victory. Without field organizers, there’s no field margin.

In other words, the tried-and-true labor truism that the “bosses need us, we don’t need them” is 100 percent true on the campaign trail. The campaign that I joined in 2020 might have been able to shoot out as many mailers and endorsements and ads and social media posts as they wanted, but without us, the campaign had few relationships with the community. Without us, no doors got knocked. Without us, no phones got dialed. Without us, no volunteers were recruited. Without us, no voters got contacted.

Even though campaign workers hold the keys to the kingdom, field organizers have historically kept to organizing volunteers instead of our own workplaces. We didn’t view ourselves as workers any more than anyone else in the industry did. We were “staffers”, not campaign workers.

Many field organizers suffer from a malady I call  "West Wing Syndrome." Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing,” which ran on TV from 1999 to 2006, is a potion of romantic nostalgia and bourgeois liberalism about a fictional Democratic presidency closely resembling an idealized Clinton period. It depicts the world of campaigns as noble and chivalrous and its suit-jacket-slung-over-the-back clipboard-holding staffers as unsung heroes. 

Field organizers often make the awful mistake of viewing ourselves as those fictional staffers when, in reality, we are the people that protagonists of that show chew up to propel themselves to the White House and the Hill. Instead of realizing that the vast majority of campaign workers do not rise through the ranks, such campaign workers view themselves as workers only incidentally and staffers-in-waiting maximally. It goes against all rhyme and reason, all evidence-based analysis, and, conveniently, the result is a green light for exploitation by the bosses.

Labor organizing on the campaign trail requires undoing the liberal indoctrination of West Wing Syndrome. My fellow field organizers and I on the ___ campaign had minimal class consciousness until we began organizing our workplaces, despite the politics that we supported. For us, labor organizing was the art of becoming conscious of our roles as part of the working class, to become political in the Sorkin-style apolitical space of political work. Political campaigns have expanded larger than ever before, and as campaign work becomes increasingly professionalized, opportunities for labor organizing grow from the seeds of exploitation. 

When the campaign began that April, the campaign higher-ups slighted us one time after another.  Though our salary was adequate, managers viewed every action as a transaction. Every nice word from a manager felt like a ploy to make us perform better. Every meeting was a metric above our head for us to punch out better metrics. That was the norm in the industry, so our bosses weren’t prepared for workers’ discontent. 

But we had already begun to see ourselves as campaign workers more than campaign staffers, because of both the professionalization of field organizing and the ways in which we transformed problems on the campaign into labor issues. Our workplace was filled with black powder. We decided to form a union around the time that police murdered George Floyd and the rebellion of the summer began across the country. The fact that the bosses only grudgingly tolerated campaign workers’ participation in the Black Lives Matter uprising, often treating our activism as a nuisance to the need to make hundreds of calls a day, was a final straw for many workers.

We organized for card check. One of the ways to form an officially-recognized union in the United States requires more than fifty percent of the bargaining unit – the workers in a shop – to sign cards indicating they want to form a union and submit them to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). 

We faced challenges right off the bat. There was a constant turnover on the campaign that presented a challenge. People quit all the time and the workforce exponentially grew by the month, which means the bargaining unit grew exponentially by the month. We needed to keep the number of workers on the campaign that signed union cards above fifty percent to have the best chance of success if the campaign tried to play games. In other words, we needed to constantly hold organizing conversations with new hires to beat the high turnover.

Meanwhile, the campaign was rapidly atomizing. Initially, the campaign consisted of a dozen or so field organizers. We all shared a Signal chat and coordinated to initiate the unionization process. We were all on the same page. But as the campaign hired more and more field organizers, beefing up the department, each of us original workers were joined by new hires. Within a few months, there were over a hundred field organizers split across several teams who only interacted within their teams. Workers were less and less bonded to coworkers in other teams. And, most were indoctrinated with West Wing Syndrome and every single one required an organizing conversation of some kind.

A lack of solidarity with coworkers is poison for labor organizing. The atomization of the campaign into separate teams could have tanked the union. Sure, we had filed with the National Labor Relations Board with over fifty percent of workers signed on to the union. But if management argued to the government that we weren’t actually the number of workers in the company (namely, by using new hires as an anti-labor tactic), we would be in a dangerous zone.

We managed to keep up with new hires because of one aspect of campaigns that favored our effort: most of us original unionists were placed into different teams. As a result, we were strategically located in every team on the campaign. 

Every unionist was responsible for organizing their own team. In our team, within a day of onboarding, either I or another unionist engaged new coworkers in conversations about labor and the importance of signing a union card. These were by and large bread and butter organizing conversations. Some required nothing more than a few words as coworkers signed union cards with little prompt; others required more persuasion. 

Meanwhile, the campaign never knew who exactly was organizing. I had personally seen campaign union representatives fired as retaliation against unionization on previous campaigns, and so had other unionists. We had to keep the campaign guessing. We had to keep our identities as union organizers under wraps. 

But keeping up with the pace of union cards and anonymity was not enough. Campaigns are rapid-fire. They form quickly and collapse quickly. If we wanted to win any concessions, we needed to avoid delay. The longer that either the government or the campaign delayed, the less likely that unionization would make any difference for either us or future hires. But we inevitably had to wait months – a lifetime of quits and new hires in the industry – for our union to be ratified. We needed to be able to not only maintain discipline, but also organize in the interim. 

We took advantage of every slight, and there were many. The campaign was already a tinderbox. With each match that management struck, they threatened to engulf the workplace in the flames of labor unrest. They overhauled our work by sharpening the metrics by which they judged our work without adequate explanation and with no input from us and ordering us to give up on training our volunteers in favor of making more calls, which pissed us off. They told us to brush aside voters’ concerns about the candidate’s stance on healthcare and focus on metrics, which pissed us off.

The managers also displayed a callousness toward lower-level staff that fired us up. They infantilized a coworker in a private meeting with no input from us as the people who were actually on the ground, which pissed us off. They pressured immuno-compromised workers to knock on doors and expose themselves or their families to COVID-19, which pissed us off. They made us oversee fellows, unpaid interns exploited for their labor for no wage at all, which pissed us off. 

One manager said the f-slur out loud. That obviously pissed us off, too.

Every single one of these incidents became opportunities for organizing conversations. As a team, we would discuss each incident when it happened. We would support one another, empathize with one another, validate one another. 

Even though our team had not known each other just months before, and even though the makeup of the team constantly shifted with new hires, we unified through one conversation unpacking each incident after another. We came to collectively understand each unrelated situation as a labor issue. The incidents might not have been wage-related or benefits-related, but they happened in the workplace, so they were labor issues. These organizing conversations ensured that our team consolidated in our own understanding of our workplace and labor conditions, which provided fertile ground for collective action. 

And these incidents became politicized. Because I was an original hire and an open socialist, when I framed conversations about labor conditions in terms of class struggle, I had buy-in from new hires who did not share the same ideological background. Our understanding of our labor conditions, as a collective team, was thus shaped in part by a socialist analysis. Organizing around collective material interest brought the union to being. Each incident became fuel for our own rising class consciousness through one politicizing conversation after another. 

That core unity in our team became indispensable. We continued to organize as we waited for our union’s ratification. Each incident created conditions for collective action. When one coworker was affected by an issue, we all felt affected. An injury to one was, indeed, an injury to all. We would respond to labor problems as a group through a number of different methods that created pressure on management. Sometimes, in response to some slight, we agreed privately that we “didn’t feel like working” and collectively slowed down our work to a snail’s pace. When our bosses demanded to know why, we explained that we were so affected by whatever incident they had carried out that we didn’t have capacity to do more, but since we were still working, we were still trying.

These intentional labor slowdowns affected the bosses’ bottom line, which affected how they were perceived to their own bosses, all the way up the chain. They could berate us but not much else. Acting collectively was key, and ensured that retaliation was difficult. The strategy of slowdowns in response to conditions has much in common with spontaneous shop-floor tactics deployed throughout international labor history, notably “soaking mushrooms” (泡蘑菇), a tactic developed by Tianjin factory workers in the early 1900s during the Japanese occupation of northern China where workers would coordinate to slow down production in a way that overseers could not retaliate. On the campaign, we were soaking mushrooms.

Other days, we organized to interrupt team meetings. Usually, one selected person would voice our collective concern and everyone would back them up in the Zoom chat to show a united front. Just as with slowdowns, these interruptions backed by collective support prevented bosses from retaliating or even targeting the instigator. If you can’t detect the source of dissent, you can’t mitigate the effect. Hell, we didn’t even know the source. We were all instigators, because we all talked through labor conditions together. 

Between our socialist understanding of labor conditions and penchant for collective action, our team developed a reputation as the most militant segment of the rank-and-file. The individuals who made up our team were not all self-described socialists, but we formed the most left-wing team on the campaign. That influenced the overall bargaining unit as we interacted with other coworkers in turn. And since we also happened to organize the best of any other team, we were indispensable to management. We could agitate for better labor conditions and apply pressure to management without extreme fear of retaliation, as long as we acted together.

Eventually, the union was ratified by the National Labor Relations Board. We elected representatives to form our bargaining team and negotiate a new contract based on our democratic input. We won a contract that included a pay raise and more equitable benefits for our work. Most importantly, we won the right for the union to represent the workers regardless of turnover. As long as the organization that runs the campaign apparatus exists, election cycle after election cycle, our union remains the legal union representing the campaign workers; it remains to this day.

While we celebrated the contract, even more important than those wins was the transformation of ourselves from field organizers to an organized base of campaign workers capable of collective action. In Teamster Rebellion, labor leader Farrell Dobbs documents the strategies utilized to build the industrial union movement during the 1934 labor strikes in Minneapolis. Dobbs describes how workers were baptized in the fires of class struggle through the strike and emerged with a newfound confidence in their own power. 

That was precisely my experience. Organizing my workplace alongside my coworkers was crucial to becoming conscious of our abilities as working people to change the world. Collective action makes the impossible possible. 

The Year of the Campaign Worker is over, but many campaign workers have gone on to organize in other movement spaces. The president of the Campaign Workers Guild (CWG), my old union from another campaign, now sits on the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). As for me, during the campaign, I began volunteering for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a national DSA project in partnership with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) to build a distributed program to support workers organizing their workplaces. That began my involvement in DSA, which has since expanded to local organizing in DSA chapters like the second largest in the South – our very own DSA NC Triangle. 

My advice: Organize your workplace. If you want to have a voice, organize your workplace. If you want to make a massive difference in North Carolina and beyond, organize your workplace. If you want to build the left, organize your workplace. While each workplace represents different challenges, every workplace can be organized. If you do, you’ll be in good company. Pro-labor sentiment in the United States has reached its highest since the 1960s. The wildfire of the labor uprising has spread across the country, from workers in digital media, to baristas and tech workers, to Amazon workers. And since we organized in 2020, the National Labor Relations Board has become far more pro-labor than before and stands increasingly on the side of working people again. 

Most importantly, we can learn from one another, share materials, and support each other’s efforts as we organize our workplaces. Through collective action, we can improve all of our lives and change history.

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The rail freight carriers that employ approximately 125,000 unionized employees have spent years prioritizing shareholders and executives, making record profits for the railroad industry. At the same time, the carriers have downsized the rail workforce by furloughing approximately 30% of rail workers, increasing the workload for those who remain. Workers do not receive paid sick time and are expected to be available to work any time of day or night at short notice. On top of this, workers have received a 0% pay increase over the last three years. 

The Biden administration brokered a tentative agreement that excluded a substantial amount of the unions’ demands. In a vote of the rail union membership, over half the rail workforce and four of the 12 unions representing those employees voted down this proposal. If there is a strike by the rail workers, any damaging effect on the economy will have been caused by the greed and intransigence of the rail companies, and the failure of Congress and the Biden administration to broker a decent agreement that addresses the workers’ demands.  

Boston DSA fully and adamantly supports the democratic right of the rail union workers to vote down any proposed agreement, including the tentative agreement brokered by the Biden administration. Boston DSA opposes any legislation that would impose terms and conditions of employment on the rail unions and thereby take away the workers’ right to strike. The National DSA has also recognized the rail workers right to strike and has put out a statement in support of the rail workers, and Boston DSA concurs with the statement issued by the National DSA.

Most importantly, if and when Congress and President Biden enact legislation taking away the right to strike by the railway workers, Boston DSA will support the actions of the rail workers, including any decision to strike. Boston DSA will be there to support the workers, including joining them on the picket lines. Solidarity now, solidarity forever.