DSA’s Staff Members Deserve Dignity

by DAVID DUHALDE

By now, many Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members have probably already seen the iconic AFSCME parody video (if not, go watch it now before reading the rest of this piece - you’ll thank me later), which cheekily celebrates an old union PSA. The commercial highlighted the critical work of public sector union members, which is often overlooked and invisible to their neighbors. The narrator’s punchline that union members “do a lot of shit work you take for granted” applies not just to AFSCME members, though, but also to DSA’s own employees. 

DSA staff’s labor can go unseen, like that of many administrative and public sector workers. But if digital tools break, if phonebanks aren’t set up, if conference logistics are not planned, if returned mail isn’t sorted, and if every tiny daily task– ones that even the most committed member volunteer cannot commit to doing regularly–isn’t completed, this organization would fall apart.

Today, DSA staff members - both union and not - deserve their own praise and support. Like public sector workers, they do a lot that can be missed and taken for granted, especially if that work means no problems arise. Yet, on social media and the DSA forum, you can find as many direct, vicious attacks on them as celebration of their undercompensated and underappreciated labor. Worse, at last weekend’s National Political Committee meeting, there was a vote to initiate staff layoffs without consulting the union.

I’ve had the privilege to work for DSA full time twice in my life. Each experience was in different roles and decades, but shared a commonality that I viewed my job as in service to the membership and the socialist movement. I am confident current DSA employees feel the same. When I first worked for DSA as staff, I was one of only two full-time employees. Today, DSA has over 30 comrades on payroll. A constant is that these workers are serving the DSA membership and democratic mandates. How they do so has been up for debate as DSA faces a historic million-dollar plus deficit and possible layoffs.

Why Staff Are Central to DSA’s Democracy

When we think about member democracy, we usually focus on the democratic process–the convention, resolutions, debate, and voting. But what happens after we all leave Chicago? 

Doing their best with the long list of campaigns passed each convention without prioritization, staff members work diligently to execute the resolutions passed by delegates representing the membership long after the votes have been tabulated. 

Precisely because we are a people-powered, working-class organization, we need staff to execute the day-to-day of our political program, while members are at work. It helps our internal democracy to have comrades (who sacrifice their vote when they become employed) to give full-time to DSA so such responsibility does not fall onto those who can afford to volunteer full-time. Beyond democracy, in order for the work of DSA members to be maximally impactful, it takes significant nuts-and-bolts organizing on the back end. Here’s some important work our staff has done in the last year that you may not have heard about: 

• Setting up our No Money for Massacres phonebank campaigns including pulling lists, creating VAN universes, and providing on-call support

• Organizing chapters to host No Money for Massacres phonebanks so that we can engage members at the grassroots level

• Creating a secure and safe digital organizing space for our Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Campaign

• Providing critical technical tools and organizing support for our Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Campaign

• Supporting the National Labor Committee in connecting chapter labor organizers with the national organization through one-on-ones and recruiting and training solidarity captains

• Supporting the National Labor Committee by identifying upcoming strikes, workplace actions or new organizing drives in need of national support

• Supporting the National Electoral Committee by building the backbone of a central repository of chapter electoral committees and working groups and having one-on-ones with chapter electoral organizers to connect them with the national organization

• Supporting the National Electoral Committee by providing and updating organization tools to streamline the endorsement process and enhanced communication with chapters

• Providing communication and compliance support for our International Committee’s delegation to Cuba

• Spent hundreds of hours planning and executing our 2023 National Convention that allowed us to have a productive and democratic debate among hundreds of delegates

• Coordinated our annual YDSA Conference and annual YDSA Winter Conference which allows young socialists to experience political debate, meet socialists from across the country, and become life-long socialist organizers like I did as a YDSA college member

• Supporting the Solidarity Dues campaign by outlining strategic options and data-driven best practices for fundraising in a member-driven organization

Our staff does all these and additional, even more tedious tasks, like processing checks, sorting mail, and supporting chapters in incorporating and establishing bank accounts–tasks that are central to the functions of the organization but which we can’t rely on volunteers to complete.

The NGO Model of Exploitation

Let’s get one thing straight: DSA is not and has never been a “staff-driven” nonprofit. We are legally registered as a nonprofit, but there is no other organization in the country that maintains the level of direct political leadership we do. The NPC is not a nonprofit board composed of uninvolved social notables, it is an active organ of elected leadership to enact political decisions and programming that relies on member, not staff, input. Staff members, especially senior-level directors, do have major responsibilities managing day-to-day operations. But what DSA decides to do was and is determined by the convention and the democratically elected leadership of the organization. The great irony is that the people expressing concern about DSA becoming a staff-driven NGO are exactly replicating the worst NGO behaviors, ones that have led to an increase in unionization in that sector over the past few years. 

Nonprofits are famous for having work conditions that are misaligned with the values of the organization. Charities and NGOs drive their staff to make “sacrifices” for the greater good without any material gains. Then those who made the sacrifices can easily be dumped when a major donor loses interest and funding dips.

So why have concerns about becoming a “staff-driven NGO” dominated discourse around DSA staff? Because demonizing staff will make it easier to shirk the responsibility of our elected leadership to make difficult decisions with limited resources. Making them an “other'' separate from DSA members - “third-partying” DSA’s staff (even though nearly all staff are also dues-paying comrades) - creates an easy scapegoat for our political deadlock and eases the idea of accepting layoffs and poor working conditions.

This job insecurity is apparently coming to DSA. While our decline in membership has been the primary driver of our budget woes, it hasn’t been the only factor. Setting aside that the 2023 convention voted for more spending than predicted income, DSA staff face another dilemma that plagues nonprofits: poor management.

NGOs are infamous for having supervisors who avoid best practices and good management techniques in favor of exploiting and mistreating their supervisees, sometimes even with the best of intentions. DSA NPC members can exhibit this behavior, too. The recent decision to make public on the DSA forums conversations that are tantamount to job interviews, defies any worker’s reasonable expectations of privacy. NPC members have to accept that as uncomfortable as it may be, they are themselves bosses, and they owe their workers a modicum of decency and respect. Caucuses shooting from the hip, rather than respecting the collective will of the NPC is not just bad for staff morale, it’s bad for our internal democracy. 

Instead, we have seen a nastiness towards the DSA staff that often overrides some DSA leaders' basic decency toward our workers. Our outgoing National Director Maria Svart describes the working conditions affecting both union and non-union DSA employees:

it’s not just humanity 101, it’s also supervision 101, you don’t give negative feedback to someone in front of their peers, let alone 90,000 people. I don’t know if you’ve been in jobs where you’ve been publicly humiliated by your boss, but that happens all the time in DSA to practically everyone on staff and I put up with it for 12 years and it’s gotten worse and worse.

Why would anyone, let alone socialists, want people to labor under those conditions? Out of context, no leftist would. This impacts you as a member because comrades who otherwise might be great DSA staff will not apply to work for our organization if it treats people like garbage. This only happens because of the very intentional devaluing of the staff, behavior we rightfully criticize when engaged in by other nonprofit executives and boards.

Maria went to explain why this is not just bad for DSA workers, but the organization itself:

But my point is, that’s not how you manage staff because it gets you bad results. It is about being nice people and treating each other like comrades but it’s also even about the results for the organization. Public humiliation does not get anything out of workers.

We want DSA to be the gold standard to which an increasingly unionizing nonprofit sector can look. Right now, we’re heading instead straight to the bottom of the barrel. Let’s avoid that through better democratic management and respect. Otherwise, we’ll become what we claim we hate.

But refraining from sudden layoffs and public humiliation of our staff isn’t just about what we want, or consistency with our values. Even from a ruthlessly pragmatic perspective these practices are needlessly self-inflicted wounds. Political parties and mass movements can’t afford the workplace culture of a shady foundation or a Silicon Valley startup; those organizations will be gone in 10 years, and the people running them know that. DSA does not have that luxury. If we want to win, DSA needs to be around and be healthy fifty years from now. 

For that to happen, we need to have an efficient machine for doing basic staffwork. That requires DSA be the kind of place where staffers, working in their essential but delimited role, want to come to work, and can stay at their jobs long enough to become experts at them. This recent behavior has done just the opposite, and driven some of the most devoted staffers to leave.  

The staff aren’t magicians. They aren’t the secret keepers of knowledge to socialist victory, nor are they a shadow government plotting against the members. 

But they do keep the lights on around here. Without them the whole thing would fall apart very quickly. And like all workers, they deserve basic dignity on the job.

So the next time you’re on a national call, or getting your chapter’s membership data, or at the next Convention, take a look around. And while you’re at it, tell some of our comrades on the NPC to get looking, too.