40 TIME April 11/April 18, 2022
But the path forward is hardly easy. One prob-
lem is that CWU members face legal risk. While
federal labor laws protect most U.S. employees’
labor- organizing activities, Congress exempted
itself from its own legislation, leaving Hill staf-
ers without formal legal protections until the reso-
lutions pass. Many fear being ired or blacklisted.
(TIME has granted anonymity to these organizers.)
Another issue is that the unionizing efort cre-
ates a problem of political optics, particularly for
Democrats. So far, the CWU movement has been
dominated by Democratic stafers, and only Dem-
ocratic lawmakers have expressed support for the
efort. In a recent House hearing, Republican mem-
bers dismissed the unionizing efort as “impracti-
cal” and a “solution in search of a problem.” Dem-
ocrats, who generally fund raise and campaign on
pro- worker platforms, are perhaps particularly
vulnerable to allegations of hypocrisy if they don’t
support their own staf ’s organizing.
But there are legitimate reasons lawmakers
might be skeptical of a unionized Congress. The
oices of Representatives and Senators don’t func-
tion like normal businesses; each is provided a
strict yearly allowance, which they use for most ex-
penses, including district travel and paying aides.
That model doesn’t leave much wiggle room to
boost salaries. Each lawmaker’s oice also operates
independently, meaning that each must be union-
ized independently. A “unionized Congress” is, in
reality, hundreds of discrete bargaining units.
CWU organizers say they aren’t intimidated by
the signiicant hurdles ahead. With public support
for labor unions reaching a nearly 60-year high and
the Great Resignation reorganizing Americans’
priorities, now is the time to act, they say. Since
congressional Democrats have failed thus far to
pass any signiicant labor legislation— including
Build Back Better, which included increased pen-
alties for union busting— supporting the efort to
unionize Congress ofers lawmakers an opportu-
nity to make good on their pro-labor campaign
promises. If it can’t act to legislatively protect
U.S. workers, says a member of the CWU, “then
the next thing that Congress can do to help the
labor movement is to look at their own workers.”IT’S NO BIG SECRET in Washington that Hill staf-
ers are underpaid and overworked. But the past
two years have brought those conditions into
even sharper focus. Grueling, COVID-19- related
working conditions, combined with the ter-
ror of the Jan. 6 insurrection, galvanized a long-
simmering desire for change. In the days after the
attack, which forced hundreds of lawmakers and
stafers to hide behind barricades or evacuate their
oices, aides began reaching out to one another to
discuss how to make their oices safer. Eventually,three young aides convened on a FaceTime call to
talk about creating a formal union. One of them,
a young woman who took the call in a Rayburn
House Oice Building bathroom stall to avoid
eavesdroppers, remembers being so relieved to dis-
cover she was not alone that she cried after hang-
ing up. “To be at a point today where we’ve come
from these dark moments is so exciting,” she says.
A year later, in early 2022, an Instagram ac-
count, @dear_white_stafers, which originated as
a meme account bringing levity to the challenges
of being a stafer of color in a predominantly white
space, transformed into a Capitol Hill Gossip Girl of
sorts: sharing anonymous, irst-person accounts of
lawmakers treating staf poorly to 80,000 follow-
ers and capturing the media spotlight. The posts,
unailiated with the unionizing efort, were both
hilarious and horrifying: multiple stafers claimed
that they were required to “sign out” in order to
leave their desks to use the restroom; another
claimed their pay was docked for taking their child
to the doctor. On Feb. 3, a reporter, citing the ac-
count, asked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi if
she’d support a congressional union. When Pelosi
said yes, CWU organizers seized the moment.
Until then, their work had been underground,
conducted via encrypted text and clandestine
meetings, but on the night of Pelosi's remarks, orga-
nizers stayed up until 3 a.m. drafting press releases
and creating social media accounts. Within days,
both Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer and
White House press secretary Jen Psaki expressed
support. “None of us thought that this would
happen at the pace that it is,” says one organizer.
There are few useful road maps for what lies
ahead. Starbucks workers’ successful push to
unionize seven individual cafés in the past year
ofers some guidance on how stafers might go
about collectively organizing hundreds of inde-
pendent oices. And Bernie Sanders stafers’ suc-
cessful push, in 2019, to unionize the Senator’s
2020 presidential campaign is also instructive.
But neither is a perfect analogy. Unlike Starbucks
and campaign workers, even unionized Hill staf-
ers are barred by federal law from work stoppages
and picketing.
But Congress’s uniqueness is also what makes
the efort so critical, organizers say. Low pay and
grueling hours aren’t just dispiriting for individ-
uals; they fuel the brain drain that has contrib-
uted to Congress’s crippling lack of institutional
knowledge. Stafers are incentivized to “become
the lobbyists that the next stafer who has no in-
stitutional expertise has to rely on,” says a CWU
member. This cements government’s “built-in re-
liance on lobbyists” to navigate complex policy
issues. In 2021, House stafers left their jobs at
the highest rate in at least two decades, accordingPOLITICS
$38,730
Median salary
of a Hill staff
assistant in
202055%
Increase in
House staff
attrition from
2020 to 202155
Number
of House
Democrats who
voted for a bill
bolstering labor
protections to
private-sector
employees, but
have not publicly
supported the
effort to unionize
Congress