[[{“value”:”

By: Frederick Reiber

CAMBRIDGE — Harvard students are in their reading period in advance of finals as Harvard’s graduate union representing workers in around sixty programs of departments across the university surge to the end of their third week on a historic strike at the world’s richest university. Seeking to continue escalating pressure following a 79% turn out with 96% of its membership in favor of militant strike action for the union’s demands in April, workers have escalated to withholding teaching and research, disrupting end of semester activities, and slowing operations.

The Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU) – UAW Local 5118 strikes as other unions on campus have so far chosen other strategic routes in negotiations, despite the potential for contract alignment, but anger over workplaces issues in the rank-and-file movements is increasing across campus and its surrounding communities. The university focused entirely on attacks from above increasingly faces dissent from below.

And since workers make Harvard run, ultimately, the workers’ threat demands the university’s attention.

Demands for Dignity and Against ICE

HGSU has been bargaining for a total of 14 months, with only two tentative agreements—one on access to space for office hours and another on holidays, personal days, and vacation. Harvard has refused to bargain over issues including access to ADA-compliant spaces, union representation in cases of intellectual property disputes, rights to healthcare, and academic freedom. The university has also denied workers the right to open bargaining, recognizing the potential for increased worker power when negotiations are not done behind closed doors. 

The current campaign has coalesced around four primary demands:

First is the creation of an independent process for addressing workplace harassment, discrimination, and bullying. Union data estimates that at least one in five student workers experiences some form of harassment as researchers and teachers, while Harvard currently controls the only formal channels for reporting and resolving those cases. Graduate workers are calling for access to a neutral, third-party system, with the ability to appeal to an independent arbitration with the authority to issue binding remedies.

Workers spoke to the need for Real Recourse. In anonymous testimony published by HGSU, one student worker reported:

“I was repeatedly told I didn’t have a good Title IX case because I had a previous relationship with my harasser and because I was not assaulted. Though they suggested I could get help from CAMHS, there was no action taken to address my concerns or protect future victims… The person who harassed me did end up assaulting someone else about a year after I went to the Title IX office. If the university had acted on my concerns when I brought them, they could have prevented an assault. The way that the university failed me and the other members of my department in this process is incredibly frustrating… If I had had union representation to support me as I navigated the process, I believe I could have stood up for myself better.”

Second is the implementation of a “fair share fee.” This clause would require all workers covered by the contract to contribute to the costs of union representation, regardless of membership status. Doing so helps to spread the substantial costs of organizing and contract enforcement more equitably, helping to sustain the union’s operations. Such fees are common in states without anti-labor right-to-work laws, including Massachusetts.

Workers are also demanding wage increases, setting a baseline of $55,000 for all graduate student employees. RAs and TFs at peer schools such as MIT, Stanford, and Princeton make far more while boasting smaller endowments than a university located in the country’s most expensive city. In addition to a higher base pay, workers are calling for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) which ties annual raises to inflation, ensuring wages keep pace with rising expenses over the life of the contract. Similar clauses have been won at other universities. Organizers demand a living wage with COLA adjustment that reflects the realities of living and working in Boston’s high-cost environment while addressing longstanding pay disparities. Right now, research-based positions earn roughly $40,830, compared to about $26,300 over ten months for graduate workers in teaching roles—a gap the union argues is unjustified given the university’s reliance on both forms of labor.

Harvard heavily discourages and often forbids other forms of employment. Nonetheless, during bargaining with HGSU, university representatives called the living wage demand “unreasonable.” Harvard indicated in bargaining that its top priority is growing its endowment, even as the university during the same November 7, 2025 session rejected the union’s requests to bargain for paid family leave, healthcare during leaves, and full compensation for RAs and TFs whose appointments cancel last minute, necessary for financial stability for the most vulnerable student workers.

Harvard University has an endowment of $56.9 billion.

Finally, the union is demanding stronger protections for international student workers, with organizers pointing to an increasingly hostile national climate, including intensifying immigration enforcement and right-wing political attacks, which leave non-citizen workers vulnerable. Crucially, the union is fighting back against a university that has bowed to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant culture war demands. Of course, that also means that HGSU’s inclusion of the fight against ICE in its organizing forces Harvard University into the position of raising the stakes of its choice to hold its head down and hope the White House stops beating its crimson walls.

The demand to protect immigrant workers has, in many ways, crystallized into the nexus of the union’s fight. In June 2025, HGSU introduced into contract negotiations a call for Harvard to safeguard I-9 forms, fund legal counsel, and prevent ICE agents from entering spaces without a valid judicial warrant. Some students pointed out the University of California has held these policies for a decade.

The Structural Challenges of Organizing in Academia

Organizing at a university presents many unique challenges. Workers contend with an uncertain legal landscape, as the current National Labor Relations Board has a Republican majority, which may revoke graduate students’ dual status as students and laborers. In order to help avoid such an outcome, graduate worker unions across the country have pulled numerous unfair labor practice charges in an attempt to limit such a ruling. 

One effect of this is that workers at Harvard are now on what is considered—in legal terminology—an “economic” strike. Unlike an unfair labor practice (ULP) strike, which provides legal protections around employee replacement, economic strikes have no such protections allowing employers to—theoretically—higher permanent replacements for striking workers. While such action is unlikely, the inability to use ULPs can negatively impact organizing and outcomes.

Challenges also appear at the community level, with workers needing to overcome a highly dispersed workplace, with social connections often centered around the academic department. These siloes compound the experiences of academic workers as isolated and overextended, needing to balance multiple responsibilities, and challenges around how the broader ivory tower and surrounding communities view academic work. Indeed, Harvard has attempted to weaponize these characteristics. The university forcefully removed more than 800 student workers from the union, refusing to recognize their employment status, during a series of restructurings and reclassifications that multiple staff in multiple unions described to Working Mass as latent attacks by the university on its own workers in July 2025. These included also capitulation to federal demands including the closure of offices serving communities of color on campus, which HGSU bargaining committee member Denish K. Jaswal pointed out to the Crimson.

The answer to overcoming structural obstacles for HGSU organizers was an organizing model focused on developing strong inter-personal relationships through one-on-one conversations. As grad worker Marley Hornewer explained:

It’s a lot more one-on-one conversation than in any other organizing I’ve done before. [You need to be] really accepting of the fact that organizing takes time […] folks have so much else that they’re doing that responding to a text or getting coffee with you isn’t necessarily a priority, but when it happens […] it feels so powerful to people to see themselves as a worker.

Jessica Van Meir, a TF at the Harvard Kennedy School, emphasized the ways in which organizing and the strike has transformed rank-and-file grad workers, whose anger at the university on behalf of every demand increases with each day of evidence from Harvard of its own obfuscation:

The outpouring of participation in the strike and refusal to cave to the administration’s scaremongering demonstrates that graduate student workers understand our importance to the university. Harvard can easily end the strike and restore business as usual by offering us a living wage, independent arbitration for harassment and discrimination cases, and protections from ICE coming on campus without a judicial warrant. But until then, no teaching, no grading, no research assistant work. How embarrassing to have to explain that to the parents who are forking over their retirement savings for their children’s education. The choice is Harvard’s.

Creative Strategies for a Community Organization

Harvard workers have deployed numerous creative and community-based strategies for the purposes of solidarity. For instance, striking workers have been blocking deliveries, a tactic in which workers will form a picket line outside of university docking sites. Drivers attempting to deliver Harvard’s packages from unionized or pro-labor workplaces like UPS or USPS will refuse to cross a picket-line, either through previously established union contracts or out of solidarity for the workers, which disrupts university operations and pressures administrators to come to the table.

HGSU has also run a number of teach-ins, covering topics like labor history, socialist activism at Harvard, and an intro to agency or “fair-share” fees. One was an Undergraduate Strike School on April 24. Workers have also launched a number of community events focused on bringing in both academic and local communities into their struggle.

One of the largest events was the first week community rally, hosted on April 23rd at the Science Center Plaza, the day before the Undergraduate Strike School. A wide range of speakers representing labor unity spoke, including current HGSU president sara speller as well as brother and sister unions at Harvard including Harvard Academic Workers (HAW) and SEIU 32BJ and UNITE-HERE Local 26. The unions were also joined by organizers from the Harvard Temporary Protected Status (TPS) Coalition and undergraduates from the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM).

The event also featured a number of local and state politicians including Massachusetts State House Rep Mike Connolly, DSA-endorsed Cambridge City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, as well as challenger for incumbent Marjorie Decker’s seat and former HGSU president Evan MacKay. City Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler said, during his speech:

I’m glad to stand here and deliver the message… if Harvard wants Cambridge to have its back, its gotta have the back of its workers.

Various other university communities have also thrown support behind the striking graduate workers. Earlier this week, around 200 first year Harvard Law School students signed letters urging their professors to press the University to come to the table with the union. Faculty—albeit at significantly smaller numbers—have also signaled their support to the striking graduate workers, agreeing not to replace or retaliate against workers on strike.

Diverging Strategies in a Shared Fight

Harvard’s graduate workers are not alone in facing an expired contract, or the brunt of the Harvard administration. Other Harvard bargaining units are also embroiled in contract fights, but have taken different tacts to striking. While multiple bargaining units are affiliated with the United Auto Workers (UAW) that have pioneered the strategy of coordinating unions to strike when bargaining happens at the same time and now lead the charge for contract alignment on May Day 2028, strategic contract alignment has not been on the table at Harvard.

The Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW), the largest union on campus representing over 5000 administrative workers essential to the university’s operations whose members often work closely alongside HGSU members, is scheduled to vote on May 12–13 on a modest agreement that would grant most members a $2,300 raise and expire after one year. The union has proposed this contract to membership after Harvard’s central fundraising office laid off a dozen HUCTW union members and announced mass summer layoffs likely to decimate HUCTW’s ranks. David Deming later confirmed the intent to target union workers in an open forum, where the Dean of Harvard College called essential labor work that “you would never really know or care about.” In one email obtained by Working Mass, HUCTW organizer Bill Jaeger intervened to ask members to vote yes on the proposed contract, while the HUCTW Rank-and-File Movement, focusing on building up the leadership of rank-and-file members over the union, publicly urged membership to remember “we can’t eat prestige” and instead vote no on May 6, 2026.

HUCTW has urged members to turn down work that managers ask them to perform that would normally be done by grad workers – crossing the picket line – but indicated members should continue to do “their own jobs as usual.” When asked about HUCTW, multiple organizers with HGSU declined to comment about their relationship with the other union.  

Harvard custodians with 32BJ SEIU ratified a 4-year contract in March that union leaders called the “biggest wage increase in decades:” a 4% hourly raise by 2029. While Harvard dining hall workers went on strike in 2016, their 500 rank-and-file workers affiliated with UNITE HERE Local 26 have not yet chosen that route even as their negotiations have dragged into. Most controversially, members of the Harvard Academic Workers (HAW) – UAW —a unit of non-tenure-track researchers and instructors that has been bargaining for 18 months—recently decided not to strike. In a controversial move, HAW’s bargaining committee overrode the vote of membership after citing concerns on sufficient votes for strike authorization and uncertainty about support from the union international. This decision was made by a bargaining committee made up of rank-and-file members after consultation with UAW staff.

The union also recently filed a Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) against Harvard. 

At the same time, workers within HGSU praised the academic workers’ commitment to solidarity and struggle. One worker said:

I do feel a lot of solidarity from them. We’re fighting for a lot of the same things … and continuing to work together towards a more just academic environment generally.

Whatever the tactical differences, these parallel struggles underscore the broader potential for cross-union solidarity and coordinated fights that can reshape power across the university. Further, every single union shares an employer – one seemingly intent on facing, and then offsetting, the wrath of the federal administration onto its staff.

Higher Education, Labor, and Struggle

Higher education is not a refuge from conflict, but a site of struggle. As Harvard PhD candidate Laura Chen put it:

Every morning when we do delivery pickets and get to cheer for the Teamsters as they turn their trucks around for us, it’s incredible. It’s so fun. And getting to explain to various burly truck drivers why we’re with the UAW – delightful.

These moments capture something larger than a single strike. They show how academic workers are linking up with a broader labor movement, building relationships that extend beyond the university.

At a moment when higher education is defined by precarity, political attacks, and deepening inequality, these contract fights are about more than pay or procedure – they are battles over the basic necessities of life and worker humanity. What is unfolding in higher education organizing is not an isolated conflict, but part of a wider struggle over power and dignity.

Readers can support grad workers by joining them on the picket line, held each day, or contributing to the union hardship fund.

Frederick Reiber is a contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Harvard Faces Grad Workers’ Strike as Discontent with the University Rises From Below appeared first on Working Mass.

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This guide explains the AI issues facing workers and how they can organize for a voice in how it's implemented at work.

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An Italy-based writer and activist on the recent pro-Palestine and antiwar protests in Italy, their impact on the Meloni government, and how the “Gaza Generation” is revitalizing the Italian Left.

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A new documentary shows what workplace democracy can look like through the lens of the Teamsters’ epochal 2023 contract fight with UPS.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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