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By Nick Lavin
In the whirlwind of unconstitutional executive orders from the Trump administration, it’s easy to miss the storm brewing over the 2026 Massachusetts budget.
BEACON HILL—Governor Healey’s “fiscally sustainable” budget offers some more housing and transit funding as mandated by the 2022 Fair Share Amendment, but also major cutbacks to healthcare spending, especially for the most needy. Since her 2022 election, Healey has undertaken an increasingly neoliberal economic retrenchment in line with Democrats’ decades-long strategy of “me too, but not so much” Reaganism, cutting taxes for the wealthy while draining critical public services.
Trump’s election opened the floodgates for a conservative resurgence in the Democratic Party, with Party leaders and caucus members regurgitating right-wing talking points on LGBTQ issues and immigration while letting the White House’s Reaganite budget sail through Congress. As frightening as the backslide of our democracy is, unions are the best positioned institution to resist it. Through the Rank-and-File Strategy and community organizing, DSA can play a central role in rebuilding union militancy to win against authoritarian neoliberalism.
“Through the Rank-and-File Strategy and community organizing, DSA can play a central role in rebuilding union militancy to win against authoritarian neoliberalism.”
The Landscape
Even under Democratic President Joe Biden, federal funding for state social services was inconsistent. For example, the expiration of federal Covid-era ‘ESSER’ (Elementary and Secondary School Education Relief) funds spelled the end to hundreds of teaching jobs across the state. With an authoritarian Republican in the White House however, the need for blue states to fill in the gaps will only increase; but Healey is not stepping up to the task.
Healey has made affordability in Massachusetts her centerpiece issue, but not for everyday people. While the Governor raised millions from real estate developers, biotech corporations, and the Kraft family to support her 2022 election, she remained silent as union and community activists hit the streets to win new taxes on the wealthy through the Fair Share Amendment. Her 2023 tax cuts — including $350 million for wealthy estates, large corporations, and financial assets — led to a 2024 budget shortfall for which she reached into the Fair Share funding to cover.
Her 2026 budget continues spending for housing and transit mandated by Massachusetts voters in the 2022 Fair Share Amendment ballot question. To be “fiscally sustainable”, however, Healey also made substantial cuts to healthcare for the state’s most vulnerable.
Healey’s budget cuts half the state’s Department of Mental Health workers, meaning 170 case workers will lose their jobs. The closure of two facilities — Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital for Children and Pocasset Mental Health Center — was paused only after major community blowback that culminated in a large union-led rally at the State House on February 25th.
“The closure… was paused only after major community blowback that culminated in a large union-led rally at the State House.”
For the state’s homeless, Healey’s budget allocates $425 million more for shelters, a deal reached after upending Massachusetts’ forty-year policy of guaranteeing safe haven for pregnant women and people with children, and drastically reducing the number of people eligible by mandating proof of residency.
The Governor’s budget also freezes MassHealth rates paid to community and ‘safety-net’ hospitals, which provide services regardless of an individual’s ability to pay. The freeze suffocates hospitals and healthcare workers providing lifesaving care to the state’s most vulnerable as state remittances will continue to fall behind inflation.
Unions recognize the threat these cuts pose to their membership. In a statement, SEIU 509 President Dave Foley addressed Healey directly, calling her budget “an injustice to those who rely on these crucial programs” and demanded full funding to “ensure that residents across the Commonwealth can continue receiving the care they deserve.”
Teachers, too, are feeling the heat. With the depletion of the aforementioned Covid-era funds, school districts across the state are facing budget cuts. Like SEIU 509, the Massachusetts Teacher Association (MTA) directly called on Healey to stopgap the cuts with state funds.
The Problem
A close observer might wonder why these same unions now angry with the Governor also lined up behind her in the 2022 election. If workers can’t rely on these politicians to deliver on their promises, why endorse them?
A closer observer might also observe the dilemma of choosing between a conservative Democrat, a far-right Republican, or sitting out of electoral politics entirely. One might even ask why these unions limit themselves to strongly worded statements, rather than flexing their most powerful muscle – the strike – as unions do with relish in other countries.
It is easy to point to liberal union leadership “in bed” with the Democrats, and there’s a lot of truth to it – many union leaders have become bureaucratic and conservative after decades of beatdowns for the labor movement. But unions often take defensive positions and make defensive endorsements for the same reason their membership votes for whatever more-or-less odious Democrats are on the ballot – the feeling they lack the power to forge an alternative.
Our task as socialists is not to cajole union leadership merely to cut ties with Democrats. Our task is to organize constituencies both inside and outside unions to make the labor movement’s resistance both powerful and inevitable, setting the stage for a new party in the process.
Organizing the Rank-and-File
Power at the bargaining table – whether battling the boss or the politicians – is defined by the most radical action the majority of your membership is prepared to undertake. The membership of our unions, the rank-and-file, is the key to rebuilding a powerful labor movement. If we want the labor movement to fight back against local budget cuts and the Trumpist onslaught, we need to focus on organizing from the bottom up.
DSA’s rank-and-file strategy is a proposal to do just that. It identifies two problems — a low level of working class self-activity and organization, and DSA’s social, economic, and political separation from the working class. Rather than taking the position of highly-educated (if downwardly mobile) middle-class activists lecturing everyday people about the importance of political activity, we can directly foment democratic mass action from the shopfloor by taking rank-and-file jobs in strategic industries like logistics, K-12 education, and healthcare.
The bottom-up movement for Palestine is a powerful example of the labor movement building political power. Rank-and-file unionists across the country organized in their workplaces to pressure congresspeople for an arms embargo against Israel. In my union, the Boston Teachers Union (BTU), we organized members to rally against Katherine Clark, passed an arms embargo resolution, and called our representatives en masse as union members demanding an end to the war. Just days after our resolution passed and our President personally called the Senators, both Warren and Markey voted to stop weapons shipments to Israel.
BTU members rally in front of Katherine Clark’s office on a cold January day.
We can organize the labor movement’s resistance to Trump’s authoritarian neoliberalism, but only from below. Rank-and-file organizing will therefore be the catalyst not only for renewed shop-floor militancy, but also for stronger political interventions against the bipartisan neoliberal consensus. Until the rank-and-file is itself organized to directly confront political power, we cannot expect union leadership to offer more than pointed statements against our government’s routine acts of injustice.
To this end, Boston DSA should bring programs like the Rank & File Project to the chapter to develop members into rank-and-file organizers. We should also continue our labor solidarity campaigns (such as with UAW and the Teamsters), which will help DSA’s membership identify the merger of the labor and socialist movements as our primary task and rank-and-file participation as its primary vehicle. Labor solidarity demonstrates socialists are the most reliable fighters for working class issues and helps us identify the militant minority – existing leaders in the labor movement – with whom we should build relationships.
Last year, DSA delivered the perfect synthesis of these strategies to Amazon’s front gates just in time for Christmas. With DSA Amazon workers organizing their coworkers on the inside and chapter’s Labor Working Group handing out hot coffee and walking the picket outside, DSA helped workers pull off the most exciting labor action against Amazon this country has seen so far.
Organizing Our Communities
Just as DSA employs inside-outside strategies to support labor organizing, we can fight on the terrain of social movements to create space for labor activists to move their unions on political questions.
In 2023, the moral outrage that poured into the streets across the country over Israel’s genocide quickly resonated in places of worship, community centers, and union halls. The union resolutions, rallies, and statements carefully shepherded by rank-and-filers drew from the energy of the pro-Palestine movement: ceasefire resolutions would have been impossible without the mass protests; pro-free speech resolutions without the encampments, etc.
By supporting organic social movements – around Palestine, immigration, housing affordability, and more – DSA can create clear opportunities for the merger of socialism and the labor movement. But our movement-style campaigns must have clear political targets and seek to ally with – not co-opt – existing community organizations.
We should work with organizations with real community ties. What groups have challenged and won against the status quo? What groups have real constituencies? Which take on a ‘radical’ posture and name, but have neither a constituency nor clear strategy?
Our campaigns should also be broadly and deeply felt, uniting the broadest possible swath of the population. Arms embargo tied military spending to the depletion of social services; shelter policy fits neatly into the fight for housing affordability, etc. These base-building, agitational campaigns will not only build DSA’s reputation as a democratic and mass-based center for organizing, but also help identify and develop natural community leaders to support in future electoral races.
The Boston DSA Palestine Working Group (PWG) spent many cold winter and sweltering hot summer days on street corners, collecting signatures to demand our congresspeople call for an arms embargo. This painstaking work not only involved connecting to and supporting the various community organizations involved in Palestine solidarity, but also helped us identify union members in our neighborhoods. In fact, several rank-and-filers in BTU’s arms embargo effort came not from shop-floor organizing, but through conversations they had with PWG petition clipboarders who then passed their contact information off to friendly BTU Palestine organizers.
Boston DSA and A/B for Palestine petitioning at Allston Open Streets.
To Fight Big, Start at the Shop Floor
Healey and the State House hold tremendous power over unions through the budget allocation process. For decades, this has placed unions on the backfoot, attempting to negotiate small victories against the bipartisan neoliberal consensus. Economic retrenchment and the ossification of a conservative labor leadership has led us to our current political moment, defined nationally by Trumpist authoritarianism and locally by Democratic not-quite Reaganism. But if we build militant, class struggle unions and social movement campaigns we can create a vibrant socialist labor movement to defeat both — and the place to start is on the shop floor.
Nick Lavin is a Boston Public Schools paraprofessional and a member of the Boston Teachers Union.
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