Reflections from a Former DSA Staffer

Who holds the power in DSA? 

I joined DSA staff as a field organizer in July of 2022. Coming from a top-down political non-profit in which I faced retaliation for union organizing, I was beyond ready to work for an organization that, as a member, I had only known to be and was told to be, democratically run by the members. Throughout my interview process I heard that everything is decided by our elected body, the National Political Committee (NPC) in between conventions and that my work directives may change depending on NPC decisions. This excited me: there were real political leaders, elected directly by our membership, that would help decide what organizing work took priority over time! I could not wait to have the autonomy to support the growth of my chapters using the strengths I have as an organizer, while ensuring that the overall success of these chapters remained my ultimate priority.

When I took a job with DSA, I understood the reality of the precarity of this type of grassroots funded job, maybe because I have been a campaign worker for so long. On a campaign and also in my role at DSA, I understand that I am here to serve the movement. Paid staff can and do play an essential role in scaling up our movement and building collective power, but we are not the movement ourselves. At the beginning of 2024, as DSA’s financial crisis became more and more apparent, DSA’s staff salaries accounted for 70% of our member dues. Members were forced to think critically about the budget and where our funds are allocated. DSA had to ask itself: what are the tradeoffs between varying budget items? 

This question of tradeoffs between resources going to staff or other budget items is a fine line to walk. To put it in perspective of my campaign experience: if a campaign’s staff is taking up more of the budget than the organizing tools that puts the campaign in contact with voters so the campaign wins, some of the campaign’s staff will need to be laid off or the wages need to be decreased. The goal is to win the campaign. 

Having worked for many non-democratic movement organizations and campaigns, this precise question would often be resolved by unelected managers with no directive from leadership of a democratic mass member base. This was another reason I was elated to begin working at DSA. Knowing that the members were supposed to be in charge, I believed that these kinds of tough decisions would be resolved by the members based on democratic deliberation and strategic analysis of what would best serve DSA. 

To some, this internal debate devolved into whether or not we want a staff-led or member-led organization, and I believe the meaning behind this has been construed into a false dichotomy. Though some have advocated policies and perspectives that would privilege staff interests over member democracy, the reality is, staff are important, but they should facilitate member-led programming and organizing. Anything else is antithetical to the building of a mass movement. DSA’s broad theory of change that the organizing staff discuss with chapters all the time is that the working class is the agent of change. Was this a theory we actually put into practice in our daily organizing while doing this job to serve that movement? 

The Inherent Power of Staff

Staff in DSA inherently hold a level of power unique to only our positions; whether we want to or not, whether we asked for it or not, whether we misuse that power or not and frankly, whether we know it or not. The work of NPC members is almost all volunteer, while staffers are paid full-time. Combined with regular rotations of NPC members, anyone on staff who has been here longer than two years unarguably has certain institutional knowledge that our elected body, the NPC, does not have and maybe never will, as well as day-to-day control over parts of the national organization. When members first join the NPC, staff are responsible for providing the necessary context and knowledge to onboard them. Because of minimal time and capacity, that information will be limited by our politics and what we deem most relevant.

However, this structural dilemma has allowed some on staff to exert their institutional power in a way that has limited member democracy, whether they have meant to or not. Until very recently, some director level staff had the power over hiring any new staff, with very few decisions being made by the NPC and not until the very end of the hiring process. Staff sometimes decide what members have a say over or not, and have made decisions that prevent members from engaging in the organization under the pretense that it will be too much work to bring members in, members don’t know enough, or that members can’t be trusted with this information or that technology, etc. 

One example of this was when the National Tech Committee (NTC), per a director's order, was not allowed to help the Data and Tech staffers during convention, when staff was asking for the support and the NTC was offering the support. This led to not only capacity strains for our Data and Tech staff during convention, but added to a culture of distrusting members to hold the organization afloat, an unfitting view to our organization’s theory of change that has been fostered through the years by the power that staff holds. Like me, there are some on staff, past and present, who understand this power dynamic and grapple with it daily. We understand the power is inherent in staff roles and what we do with it is what matters.  

Unfortunately, in other cases, it has been used to limit member ownership of DSA, and at times made me uncomfortable in my past position. For those who read the forums, you may remember Tacoma-Pierce DSA posting about an experience they had with a director level staff member. After some innocent mistakes with compliance requirements, the director presented the 2021-2023 NPC with a case against them, and they were cut off from receiving dues, membership lists, and accessing organizational tools for an entire 10 months. This was particularly alarming as it was during their first attempt at a truly transformative ballot measure campaign (the exact type of strategic campaign that the organizing team spends so much time supporting chapters to do). I began to question who really directed our organization. Was it actually the members? Did our NPC have power over the decisions that I thought they had? This was one single appointed staff member holding power over a group of members, and exercising that power to harm their organizing.

Along with the resources they were cut off from, my managers actively told me to stay out of it, therefore also removing the chapter’s access to a field organizer. I risked being disciplined, but supported them anyway. For months, I wondered if I made a mistake by ignoring my manager's directive or if I did the right thing by building a trusting, meaningful relationship with a chapter who frankly, made some mistakes. When I think about it now, with all the events that have transpired since, I am proud that I listened to my intuition and followed the path I did at the time - because it was the right thing to do.

This was a catastrophic move to harm a chapter, and if it was not for their commitment to socialism and the movement of DSA, it could have, at worst, permanently shut them down or, at best, drastically damaged their organizing potential. It is demoralizing to be a volunteer dues paying member trying to generate buy in locally and have that be undermined from above by staff. I still didn’t know all the details of the mistakes the chapter made, but over time my resolve has become clear. I realized that I knew deep down that I didn’t need to know the details, because there was one thing I did know: there is close to nothing a DSA chapter could do to deserve the treatment Tacoma DSA received during this critical time. 

This experience solidified a belief in me that I continued to hold and act on throughout my time on staff - I stood with the membership and my job was to support chapters. Thankfully, Tacoma-Pierce DSA was able to organize through these challenges, relying only on an old membership list and no access to any of National’s organizational tools, to go on and win Washington State’s Strongest Renter Protections- a win that is already serving as a model for other chapters. More than anything, I hoped this one event was the fault of just one person who was being supported by other directors and staff, either out of fear of confrontation or misdirected trust. As more months went by, I learned more about the inherent undemocratic power that directors and staff have over the organization and how the issues of democracy in our organization play out because of our staff structure. 

I am not sharing my experience on staff because I think I have all the answers to our problems (I don’t). My purpose in sharing is to give members more knowledge of how our staff structure functions in the organization and a perspective that differs from what you may have heard from others during the layoff process. My perspective is one that I hope can be added to the ongoing conversations, as we decide where our organization goes from here. 

I believe that these issues also perpetuate a commonly held opinion across staff that the NPC is illegitimate because they are short term, do not have enough context, haven’t been around as long, or worse, that they are not to be trusted because they are too political and bad faith actors engaging in our movement with their own factional agenda. However, similarly to union staff, we are not appointed to staff roles to “trust” or agree with the NPC. We are hired to facilitate democratic processes and decisions laid out by the members, and their stewards in between conventions, which is the NPC. 

There also tends to be a culture among staff that views members in general as not knowing enough and therefore unable to lead the organization effectively. I earnestly believe some of this plays out because of a fear of members making mistakes that could hurt the organization. To quote Parker and Gruelle from Democracy is Power, “there is no evidence that any system other than democracy is less prone to mistakes” and that, “members have the right to make their own mistakes; they deserve to decide for themselves how best to improve their lives”. Doing so allows our membership to expand their abilities and to develop a collective memory for what works and what doesn’t. This is much harder to do when decisions are limited to a small group of staff unaccountable to membership.

The consequences of this culture perpetuates the problem: It keeps the power out of the hands of members and in the hands of a group of staff who were appointed rather than elected. To be clear, I do not believe this culture was created with ill intent: parentalized models of organizing are all that many of us know. Movement staff typically come from non-profit top-down organizational structures and we are learning how to put democracy in practice, while trying to do right for DSA. Regardless of how or why we got here, there have been irreconcilably differing political perspectives on how DSA should be run and some staff have used their power to protect their preferred strategy. 

Democracy in practice is extremely difficult and, at times, very slow moving and time consuming, and DSA is very much still learning every day how to make our democratic practices stronger. Every time I did a goal and priority workshop with one of my chapters, we would discuss how to use all possible opportunities to develop members' feelings of ownership over the work, and investment in the future of the organization by bringing them into the development of the organization. This is what I want to see more of at the national level: all of our staff acting as organizers at all times, seeing the majority of the work we do as an opportunity to bring members in to develop them so they too can have the knowledge, context and organizing ability that national staff holds. 

Staff Unions & Member Democracy 

The inherent undemocratic issues our staff structure perpetuates does not stop at the directors’ level. A staff union in a member-run organization can also lead to inherent power imbalances that undermine member democracy. From day one of the potential layoffs, I made it clear to my coworkers and other DSA members I was close with that I would be willing to be laid off if it meant DSA would not become insolvent. When I expressed these views, I was told that our jobs were necessary to keep DSA from falling apart and that I shouldn’t judge others for not feeling the same as me. To be clear, this is a political position and it is valid for members (and staff as members) to hold and advocate for, but in our layoff fight it was conflated with the narrative that we are workers and the NPC are our bosses, instead of acknowledging it as a political opinion about the organization’s structure that the union was fighting for. It was assumed that everyone in the unit was opposed to layoffs, and that we had to do everything we could to fight for every last job. 

There wasn’t a broad desire to examine the differences between a union in a democratic member organization seeking to overturn capitalism compared to unions within capitalist organizations with capitalist bosses, or even public sector or traditional non-profit workers. I truly empathize with the difficulty in this experience over the last year, especially with those who lost jobs and those who stayed on DSA’s staff with less workforce than we had become accustomed to. 

To back up a little, we had the opportunity to pursue bargaining for only 3 layoffs, months before this process became drawn out to the point of almost losing 12 through layoffs and fighting until we got back down to 5. Instead panic set in, understandably, and in January, we released a statement immediately asking the NPC to “not consider the resolution “Proposal for Voluntary Layoffs,” or abstain from voting if it does come up for a vote”. I voted yes on this statement and even helped draft it. 

My opinions on the matter have drastically shifted since I have learned more about democracy in practice: I believe this was a display of the inherent power a union of unelected members holds over the elected representatives of the membership body. I made a mistake by agreeing with the plan to broadly categorize the conflict as workers versus employers, effectively not recognizing the membership body in the equation. In publishing that statement, we focused on our status as workers fighting against our employer, instead of opening up the conversation for members to determine what is best for the organization. At times, I tried to put words to the uncomfortable feelings I was having during this process, but, most of the time, I didn’t have the knowledge or ability to effectively explain myself. Now I am trying to explain what I was feeling all along: We, as a union, did not have the right to use our union power to force what we thought was best for the organization outside of our normal rights as members, because staff are not an elected body of members. I believe that we should not have used the power we had to put our legitimate individual interests over the democracy of our organization. 

This time in our organization blew open the door for many on DSA staff to publicly share perspectives that defended the worker vs employer conflict framing. Throughout my experience on staff, I felt stuck inside a political bubble, that I did not choose to be in. I felt as though I was expected to stand with my coworkers on this perspective, or risk being alienated as anti-union from within my own union. I stayed silent, at least publicly, on the issue out of respect for my coworkers who were facing job losses, but I feel as though it is now time I provide a differing perspective from a past staff member, and I believe that it is owed to our members.

Moving Forward

To close, I want to say that I deeply believe DSA members are good and 99.9% of us are acting in good faith, with the knowledge and experience we have to try and build a healthier, stronger mass movement while living through capitalist hell. A hell that does not provide us with the amount of capacity it takes to learn, make decisions and act with the utmost attention and level of intention we all deserve as comrades, and that causes conflict after conflict without the time and ability to repair in a healthy way. I strongly believe that the nature of the big tent structure of our organization keeps us in a healthy balancing act of “struggle and unity, internal deliberation and external action” as DSA member William Lawrence put it in his article on the balance of the big tent. 

Regardless of where you stood on the issue of layoffs and the DSA budget, this was and still is a turning point for our organization. I have empathy for the fears that the change brought, but I am excited to see what we can do next. We have a chance to do things differently going forward: to explore possible ways to create a staff structure that is more democratic and further matches our hopeful organizational democracy. What does more democratic and less bureaucratic leadership mean for our capacity or our ability to lead on the issues we care most about, especially right now? How is our staff structure holding us back from meeting the moment of high capacity organizing on issues like Palestine, for example?   

I see democracy in action much more profoundly in YDSA, so I asked some friends what they think has led to that. They shared that part of it is YDSA being under-resourced in terms of staff, which they don’t view as a good thing, but it has forced them to be more creative with volunteer capacity. YDSA has consistently met the moment on Palestine organizing in a way that DSA has not. Their stipended, elected leadership has a group of chapters they build relationships with, like our organizing team. With even less capacity than full time staff, they are engaging in deep organizing on Palestine, on campus labor fights and more. Volunteer members are empowered to lead key sections of the national organization, like Communications, alongside elected leaders, with democratic accountability, and under the direction of convention mandates and the YDSA elected body, the National Coordinating Committee (NCC). Maybe our path forward should be to experiment more with what stipended or paid elected leadership roles look like; a more explicit division of labor between stipended elected members and appointed staff; and empowering volunteers to contribute and lead. We can learn from YDSA.

In the wake of this transition for our organization, I think DSA members need to be openly debating these types of questions and working together to find the answers. DSA staff is appointed and a small sliver of DSA’s membership. Some on staff know that their priorities shouldn’t overrule the will of the elected leadership of our membership. However, we have inherent power to do so, and sometimes that power is used, intentionally or not. These problems of democracy and staff are not unique to DSA and, as socialists: we will continue to encounter these types of issues throughout our lifetimes in democratic organizations that we will create or take part in—when you think about this time in DSA’s history, what will you have learned?

Hayley Banyai-Becker

Former DSA Field Organizer, campaign manager, CWA-TNG union member, labor organizer, and a member of the Bread and Roses Caucus.

DSA Members: If you would like to respond to this article, please use the discussion board post here: https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/reflections-from-a-former-dsa-staffer/35680?u=hayleybanyaibecker