Organizing Organizers
Amy Pritchard
Across the political ecosystem, the very professionals charged with organizing others—campaign staff, field organizers, digital strategists, policy wonks, and advocacy experts—often lack the labor rights, professional infrastructure, or career pathways they spend their lives fighting to guarantee for others.
Democracy, Power, and the GAINiverse by Amy Pritchard is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Campaign workers are organizing unions, democracy organizations are bargaining for their first contracts, and staffers are standing up. But the movement they power hasn’t organized itself.
We have unionized DNC staff, though with more than a few challenges, America Votes workers, Democracy Works, and a mix of other party and nonprofit professionals represented by SEIU, Teamsters, NewsGuild, and even IATSE. Yet these efforts remain disconnected. Each new bargaining unit launches as if from scratch. There is no shared home, no unified standard, and no powerful worker alliance that spans the political industry.
Unions and Bargaining Units Representing Democratic Workers:
I’m here for all these unions (love them), but most unions organize a sector or industry. Doesn’t anyone else see the sad irony of how our people don’t fit into any one place? It’s time for organizers to organize themselves. We don’t need another or a new union, but we do need a coordination hub. We’ve been discussing a leadership and talent table at GAIN Power for a while, but it has been like herding cats to get traction on this idea.
Organizing the Organizers
Our democracy is under attack—and we're fractured, siloed, and disorganized. Now is the time for unity, not infighting.
We need something like a Political Worker Alliance—not a new union, but a connective space where democracy professionals can:
Share standards and salaries
Receive legal and HR support
Coordinate across bargaining units
Track and respond to employment trends
Build leadership pipelines for underrepresented staff
Expand access to training and talent development resources
Right now, every bargaining effort is isolated. Campaigns wrap, advocacy budgets collapse, and consultants shuffle off contracts. The organizers who make this work possible are ghosted, jobless, or quietly exit the movement. This disorganization weakens the movement like any bad message or flawed ad buy.
Our Values, Our Industry
We pride ourselves on values: justice, equity, and fairness. But we don’t practice what we preach in our workplaces. Democracy professionals deserve what they fight for:
Pay transparency and equity
Real DEI hiring pipelines
Clear anti-harassment protections
Work-life balance and mental health support
Career mobility beyond election cycles
Without shared expectations or structures, even well-meaning employers reinvent the wheel—and often do harm.
This Isn’t Just About Wages
It’s about sustainability. We lose too many organizers after one or two cycles. We force talented professionals to choose between stability and purpose. We create trauma and churn when we need institutional memory and long-term growth.
We need a resilient leadership staff pipeline.
Too often, experienced professionals leave because there’s no next step. Entry-level staff burn out because they weren’t supported. And mid-level talent disappears into adjacent sectors. So many are focused on candidate pipelines now but they will all need staff support.
Let’s Stop Pretending This Is Normal
No other industry operates like this. Imagine if Hollywood asked each actor to fundraise for their movie salary. Or if tech startups dissolved their whole staff every 18 months. Or if a professional sports team disbanded its roster at the end of every season and expected players to fend for themselves without agents, union protections, or training facilities.
Politics isn’t just a passion—it's a profession. And professionals need systems.
We’ve Built Cross-Movement Infrastructure Before
The Democratic Data Exchange (DDx) is just one example of what’s possible when party committees and outside groups align. So why not build something similar for people?
A shared infrastructure for:
Job security and placement between cycles
Benchmarks and accountability
Contract negotiation support and template sharing
Salary bands and standard salaries.
Career development and cross-organizational mentorship
If we can coordinate data across silos and sectors, surely we can coordinate talent.
And This Isn’t Even Getting Into...
...the federal workers who’ve been DOGE’d, RIF’d, or the contracted impact but the cuts to federal funding, grants. The international democracy development space functionally evaporated overnight. We should be the nonprofit staffers caught in a budget collapse. The campaign workers left without debriefs, references, or recourse. Our talent ecosystem and leadership pipeline are a mess.
This also doesn’t even touch the hiring and accountability issues surrounding consultants, vendors, firms, and freelancers, which are adjacent but bring their challenges that need just as much attention, and we’re working on that too.
The Work That Powers Democracy Deserves Power Too
We can’t protect democracy if we can’t organize the people doing the work. We can organize to win if we can’t organize ourselves.
We need to protect the people doing democracy work.
Let’s start by organizing organizers. Whether you represent a campaign, party committee, IE, Union, nonprofit advocacy organization, consulting firm, foundation, other funder, or yourself, we need talent to help us organize ourselves. Amiright?
Are you with us? We’re just launching a new advisory group with some working groups. We can’t organize all this alone and shouldn’t try, but we want to be part of it. Our country is under attack, our democracy is backsliding rapidly, ICE has turned into a Gestapo, and concentration camps are being built here on our watch. We need to develop our community more than ever.
Sign up for our Advisory Committee and pick a working group, or let us know how you're taking on some of this work. We’re collaborators, not competitors to all.
Everyone is busy, so this isn’t about meetings but about socializing ideas and launching them, making incremental and movement-wide improvements, supporting each other’s programs, forming community, new connections, networks, and collaboration.
Join our Slack community—we have dedicated channels for working groups. Let’s build something together.
Invite us to your work too - collaboration is a two-way street, and we’re here for it.
Democracy, Power, and the GAINiverse by Amy Pritchard is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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Democracy, Power, and the GAINiverse: Updates, observations, and stories from about my diverse work with the people and organizations powering Democratic and progressive politics, US & global democracy. Always feminist & anti-racist.
