Solidarity with DSA Staffers and the Union
Last month, the National Labor Commission (NLC) Steering Committee held a retreat in Detroit to plan our work for the rest of the year. We put together ambitious plans to support strikes, contract campaigns, new organizing efforts, and union reform efforts across the country, and to build lasting infrastructure to support this work and the DSA members who take it on in a coordinated and ongoing manner.
DSA’s labor staffer updated us on the crucial work she’s doing supporting chapters’ labor programs, carefully assessing, mentoring, and leveling up chapter leaders and labor formations. Having been tasked with keeping in close contact with labor leaders throughout the country, she helped us set priorities and determine how we can best coordinate with and across chapters. DSA’s labor staffer provides ongoing organizing and administrative support to the NLC Co-Chairs and broader Steering Committee, and coordinates with other DSA staff and elected leaders to help ensure implementation of NLC Steering Committee directives.
If DSA moves forward with laying off staffers without a clear economic justification for doing so, it will damage our ability to support meaningful interventions on an ongoing basis. Our labor staffer performs countless necessary tasks that aren’t possible for the NLC Steering Committee or rank-and-file members to handle on a strictly volunteer basis. The importance of having paid staff therein lies in their ability to manage day-to-day logistics and operations. It follows that growing our membership and maximizing membership engagement must come along with a commensurate effort to grow staff so that we sustain our internal organizational capacity.
United Teachers Los Angeles: A Success Story
Moving forward with mass layoffs may temporarily pull DSA out of the current deficit crisis, but will be harmful to our ability to build power in the long run.
Staff with the requisite technical expertise ensure the day-to-day functions of our organization. As a rank-and-file trade unionist, I know how important staff are to carrying out the political vision of an organization. The transformation of my union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), began in 2014 when reform caucus Union Power (UP) swept all 7 officer seats for the first time in the union’s history and took a majority of the board of directors. The union leadership and UP led a victorious contract campaign, restored faith in the union, and rallied UTLA members to increase their dues in order to save the union from bankruptcy, provide for thousands of release days for members to organize and train, fund community organizing, and hire strike-ready staff, which members did by an 82% yes vote.
The staff brought on by UP had the strike experience necessary to help mount the historic UTLA strikes of 2019 and 2023—they were crucial to the success of those strikes, through which we won raises, smaller class sizes, Community Schools, the Black Student Achievement Plan, and so many more common good demands. Critically, the staff UTLA brought on have supported a dramatic expansion of member leaders in UTLA, and member leaders’ ability to lead organizing. Staff have been critical in coaching and supporting members, creating space for member leaders to lead on their own, and building broad and deep rank-and-file strength.
We’re in a class war, and we need a war chest to beat the boss. It is not unusual for school districts and other ostensibly humanistic institutions to spend over 80% of their budgets on staff. It is not unusual for organizing institutions, with goals of reaching and engaging tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, to budget similarly. UTLA spends roughly 80% of its budget on its staff in order to help empower rank-and-file members and maintain maximum participation and militancy in the union. 69% of DSA’s budget going to staff is actually not meeting the mark—we need a robust staff to help fundraise, grow our organization, and maximize the effectiveness of our campaigns. If DSA takes itself seriously as a member-led organization building towards a truly working-class party, we should take heed of the importance of staff in fighting the boss as demonstrated by unions and left parties throughout the world.
Members, dues, and staff are the lifeblood of any political organization. While it’s true that DSA staff are overworked and underpaid, the principal argument as to why they should be last on the chopping block is not a moral, but a political one. If we want to take and wield power like militant unions do, we should mirror their hiring and staffing model. DSA needs a robust staff working full-time to help carry out our political work and support our organizational growth and development.
Looking to the Civil Rights Movement for Organizational Effectiveness
Relying on members to take on volunteer work without guidance from full-time staff will result in factions vying for undemocratic avenues of power within the organization. The multitude of tendencies in DSA informs the types of campaigns we do, the programs and platforms we develop, and the overall political direction of the organization. Our membership will always set the political direction of DSA.
The mechanisms for how to build and run a successful socialist organization, however, should be agreed upon by everyone. Although the Democracy Commission is just now undertaking this effort to identify the necessary components of democratic, socialist, political parties throughout the world, there are already clear success stories of mass movements.
In the United States, the success of the Civil Rights Movement has been clearly documented. While its commonly understood history tends to spotlight individuals taking a political stand, there is a lesser-known aspect of the movement—namely the lengthy, multi-year organizing work done to ensure adequate turnout, mass media documentation, and proper event planning.
Rather than relying on volunteers to organize Rosa Parks’ civil disobedience, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the March on Washington, civil rights leaders recognized that the right staff, with technical expertise, was necessary for advancing the movement’s ground game. For the March on Washington alone, staff committed hours to setting up and resetting the audio/visual equipment needed to broadcast Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech to the world. Staff coordinated caravans of buses, bringing in thousands of Black Americans from across the country, to ensure that the National Mall was packed.
This behind-the-scenes work deserves more attention in our world today. It was vital to the civil rights movement’s success, and it will be vital to DSA’s success in this century.
We Can’t Let DSA Become the Boss
There are still available alternatives to eliminating 9 staff positions from DSA’s budget, as has recently been proposed. The question is: which expenses are most essential to the basic functioning of our organization?
We’ve seen it argued that YDSA’s strategic importance justifies the preservation of the stipends that nearly 20 YDSA members have been receiving since the implementation of the 2023 convention resolution (YDSA Co-Chairs and the NCC have fully retained their stipends; committee chairs maintain their stipends until July). However, the NLC is surely as strategically important as YDSA is, and yet the Convention-approved salaries and the later-proposed stipends for NLC Co-Chairs were cut.
Cutting NLC Co-Chair pay was the right thing to do for DSA. I voted against paid NLC Co-Chair positions at the 2023 National Convention out of deep concern over the state of DSA’s budget. With respect for the democratic will of convention, faith and hope in DSA’s membership to meaningfully address our budget problems, and a willingness to reorient my life and switch from full-time teaching to substitute teaching in order to commit to 40+ hours of NLC work per week, I ran for and was elected to the Co-Chair position alongside Sarah Hurd.
As the reality of the budget crisis and the NPC majority’s inability or unwillingness to propose comprehensive solutions in a timely manner set in, I and other SMC members in national leadership were forced to reckon with the reality that we simply do not have the money to pay NLC Co-Chairs, despite the fact that we all agreed, as we always had, that paid NLC Co-Chairs would be a boon to DSA’s labor organizing if and when our financial situation allows for it. This is still in the cards for our organization, likely not within Sarah’s and my current terms, but in the not-too-distant future.
In the meantime, consideration of cutting staff vital to the functioning of our organization needs to be a last resort. Having 29 staffers in an org with over 77,000 members doesn’t make us “staff-driven,” and we can’t regress into voluntarism or replace full-time unionized staff with non-union stipended elected leaders. It’s difficult to see how some NPC members could justify maintaining stipends while proposing to lay off nearly 40% of our full-time staff, which will devastate our ability to organize and to fundraise.
Union leaders have been known to put friends and relatives on the union payroll rather than prioritize the hiring and retaining of organizing staff who are fully committed to class struggle. We should not accept or normalize similar practices in DSA.
More simply put, we should not act like bosses. Replacing paid, union labor with volunteer work cannot be interpreted in any other way. Organizing is a long-term commitment to building a mass base.
While it is true that we need to maximize membership participation, better prepare members for the longer-term nature of our socialist project, and commit members to multi-year campaigns, volunteer labor is not a replacement for paid labor. With leadership changes every two years, we need more than volunteers overseeing the administrative and organizational functions of DSA. We need continuity, processes, and dedicated, full-time staff who are committed to keeping our organization running smoothly.
Identifying a Financially Solvent Path Forward
Everyone in SMC agrees that it would make sense to start paying elected leaders, much as many unions do, if and when we have the money to do so—but we don’t have the money right now. The NPC’s SMC members ultimately voted against stipends for NLC Co-Chairs, a decision I fully supported. Part of the reason I joined SMC was that I saw that they consistently put DSA before the caucus. We’re asking all DSA leaders and members now to do the same.
The solution to the budget crisis isn’t to drive out staff—especially considering the irreplaceable organizational support they provide to DSA. We must continue to fundraise via Solidarity Dues, recommitment, and recruitment drives, and we must eventually hire more staff to support and scale up our organizing and fundraising capacities.
Through a combination of responsible budget cuts and Solidarity Dues phonebanking, we’ve already met the target deficit for 2024 without having to lay off a single staffer. If we act responsibly and make the difficult but necessary decision to temporarily cut remaining stipends, a small percentage of chapter dues shares, and a percentage of committee grants, and if we commit to aggressive fundraising through Solidarity Dues, recommitment, and membership drives, we can right the ship financially without irreparably devastating our organizing capacity.
My fellow national DSA leaders should feel responsible for modeling for rank-and-file members the importance of fundraising as well as member recruitment and retention. We must also emphasize rather than downplay the importance of staff at every stage of our growth. So long as we’re committed to growing our membership, we will always need competent and dedicated staff members to keep DSA churning.
I urge NPC members to reconsider the newest mass staff layoff proposal and fully commit to bargaining in good faith with the union, which should include timely responses to their proposals. In my view, it is neither economically nor politically justified to lay off any staff this year. I stand in solidarity with the DSA Union and trust that our national elected leaders and staff will be able to collaboratively get our organization to solvency and on track. We must keep growing and keep winning for the working class.