By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
DSA’s youth section trains students to organize on campus. What happens after graduation is its own story, one its own members describe directly.
“YDSA’s job is to train socialists on campus and create a pipeline into DSA,” Dare Cima, a University of Louisville YDSA member, said at the organization’s national conference this spring. “We should be preparing members to enter strategic sectors of the labor movement after college. That means encouraging people to become teachers, nurses, engineers, logistics workers, and preparing them to organize in those fields.”
More than 400 people attended that conference.
Gerica Noerdinger, cochair of YDSA’s Youth Labor Committee, said more than 65 percent of them signed pledges to “industrialize” in one of those sectors after graduation.
DSA calls this the rank-and-file strategy, adopted at its 2019 convention and published as a how-to guide on its own website.
Members are encouraged to take jobs in unionized workplaces, run for leadership inside existing unions, and build networks with other reform-minded workers.
Since 2023, DSA has run a formal salting program, in which members deliberately take jobs at nonunion employers to organize them from the inside.
Where the strategy has produced results
The clearest result is inside the United Auto Workers.
A reform caucus called Unite All Workers for Democracy, founded by autoworkers in 2019 and publicly backed by DSA by February 2020, helped elect Shawn Fain as UAW president in 2023.
Fain has credited the caucus. “I would not be standing here today as president of the UAW if it wasn’t for the badass members of UAWD,” he said in his closing speech to the 2024 Labor Notes Conference. “I’m a proud member of UAWD.”
Two DSA members took senior staff roles under Fain.
His chief of staff, Chris Brooks, a member of DSA’s Bread & Roses caucus, previously wrote for Labor Notes.
Jonah Furman, a former Labor Notes writer, served as the union’s communications director until he was demoted in December 2025.
Brooks resigned effective Dec. 31, 2025, after the union’s court-appointed federal monitor — installed in 2021 following a corruption investigation that sent two former UAW presidents to prison — found he had worked with the union’s compliance director to build a false case against Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock.
The reform caucus that helped elect Fain did not survive its own success.
UAWD voted to dissolve in April 2025, 160 to 137, after members split over how closely to align with his leadership. The wing closest to him left to form a new group, UAW Member Action. The wing that wanted the caucus independent of union leadership disputed the vote, said the bylaws required a supermajority and kept the UAWD name. It is still operating, with roughly 200 dues-paying members as of June 2026.
Fain has called for American unions to prepare for a coordinated general strike on May Day 2028.
YDSA’s national cochair at the time, a Florida International University student known publicly as Daniel S-C, told the February conference that the strategy depended on campus organizing now. “There are concerns from certain organizers that the mass strike that Shawn Fain and the UAW are calling for will be a dud, nothingburger,” he said. “If we want it to be somethingburger, we have to start building the foundations now.”
At the University of Oregon, that foundation already exists. Student workers there unionized in 2023 and are now part of UAW Local 8121.
Jace Deininger, cochair of the campus YDSA chapter, also serves as the union local’s sergeant at arms. “We will not win socialism by just sitting in a room of only YDSA members,” he said. “We need to think about how we are going to move masses of people into action and gain power.”
Mae Bracelin, a YDSA member who previously served as the local’s president, described a strike the union led last year saying, “[W]e won increased wages, sure, but we also won the strongest harassment and discrimination protections of any union on campus.”
DSA members were salting Amazon warehouses before the program existed..
One salt, identified under the name Noah, told The Nation he took an Amazon job in the summer of 2020 after Bernie Sanders campaign organizers encouraged him and other students to start salting. He described his warehouse unionizing with the Teamsters — one of nine Amazon facilities that struck in December 2024.
Shayna Elliot, cochair of DSA’s National Labor Commission, estimated the program has placed dozens of salts in strategic jobs.
Another worker in the same piece, a barista identified only as Maya, had been involved with YDSA in college and took the Starbucks job to get shop-floor organizing experience before nursing school.
The pipeline runs the other direction too, from campus into a chosen career.
A pre-med student at NYU, identified by In These Times in 2021 under the pseudonym Claire, switched her track to nursing specifically to land a union job after graduation. She was a member of NYU’s YDSA chapter, which the outlet says encourages members to find union work.
The reform-caucus strategy that reshaped the UAW has also reached the country’s largest teachers’ union local.
The Movement of Rank-and-File Educators, a caucus inside New York City’s United Federation of Teachers with documented ties to DSA, joined with two other reform groups last year to run a slate called ARISE against the union’s longtime leadership.
The Unity caucus won with 54 percent, its narrowest margin, while a separate reform slate took 32 percent and ARISE took 14 percent.
DSA members were not confined to one side of the race. Ryan Bruckenthal, a special education teacher running for the union’s executive board on the ARISE slate and a DSA member himself, told THE CITY that DSA members were running on all three slates. Because the UFT is the American Federation of Teachers’ largest affiliate, its internal elections still help determine delegate strength at the union’s national convention.
The Colorado coalition
A syllabus lists Christopher Barnes as a DSA member and an organizer with United Campus Workers Colorado.
He spoke to students in a 2023 course at the University of Colorado Boulder about trade unions and socialism. UCW Colorado organizes faculty, staff, and student workers at CU Boulder and Colorado State — the same two campuses where YDSA has chapters.
Autumn Archer spent five years as a Starbucks barista and shift manager. In January she helped organize a rally at Civic Center Park that drew Starbucks Workers United, Denver DSA and Denver City Councilmember Sarah Parady.
In January, she helped organize a rally for Starbucks workers at Civic Center Park, drawing Starbucks Workers United, Denver DSA and two city council members.
Boulder DSA says its members are active in local unions and that the chapter turns out for picket lines and organizing drives.
This year the chapter co-sponsored a screening of a documentary on the Starbucks union campaign and co-hosted a May Day rally with speakers from United Campus Workers Colorado, Starbucks Workers United and the Boulder Valley Education Association.
Colorado Starbucks workers in Denver, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins and Lafayette joined the strike in December, part of a wave that hit more than 100 stores nationally. Baristas at the Denver store on 16th Street kept up a partial strike for three months. It ended in March without a contract.
The Denver strike ended in March without a contract.
Starbucks closed 11 Colorado stores in 2025, including the Colfax location in Denver where a federal labor judge had ruled the company broke the law.
Separately, SEIU Local 105’s political director and the Colorado AFL-CIO’s executive director filed Initiative 43 last year, a measure that would have ended at-will employment in the state. United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 also backed it. The coalition withdrew it last summer amid a broader political compromise.
Stephanie Felix-Sowy, president of SEIU Local 105, said in May 2025 that Polis had ‘caved to corporate pressure’ in vetoing the Worker Protection Act, and that he was the only Democrat governor in the country defending a right-to-work policy.
Not everyone inside the labor movement is convinced the strategy works as intended.
In 2021, Ryan Mosgrove, then secretary of Metro D.C. DSA and an organizer with a local teachers’ union, told In These Times that the expectation members switch careers into strategic industries was ‘really not something that most of our members can do.’ Many of them, he said, already work low-wage jobs or live outside the metro areas where union density makes the strategy workable.
The unions themselves existed before DSA’s involvement, and the grievances driving strikes at Starbucks, Amazon, and elsewhere are about wages and working conditions, not ideology.
The UAW’s own reform movement grew out of a documented history of corruption among past leaders, not manufactured discontent. And DSA’s own flagship success, UAWD, split over whether to keep criticizing the president it had elected.
DSA and its youth wing have described their strategy openly, in their own publications, under their own names.
What comes next, in a labor movement building toward a coordinated national strike in less than two years, is what the rest of this series will follow.