Communications Infrastructure for Graduate Labor Organizing

I spent two years at HHS (2021–2023) building mission-critical infrastructure for the national COVID response — FedRAMP-compliant ML systems, data pipelines ingesting health data from across federal and state sources, system transition management for Vaccines.gov and HHS Protect. I learned, in a high-stakes environment, what it means to keep critical information flowing when failure has real consequences. I then enrolled in a PhD program in Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota, and encountered quickly what many graduate workers find: that universities treat their own workforce with the same institutional indifference that characterizes bureaucracies everywhere — with less accountability and fewer external checks.

The union was different. When I needed support, the union showed up — without conditions, before I was even a dues-paying member. That kind of institutional solidarity is rare and worth protecting. My response was practical: apply the skills I’ve developed — data engineering, process automation, web infrastructure, communications systems — to help the union communicate more effectively than its institutional adversaries do. That’s not a high bar. Administrations have communications offices staffed with professionals. Unions have volunteers. Technical infrastructure is how you close that asymmetry.

The core framing is simple: labor organizing is an information problem. Members need to know what’s happening, what they can do about it, and how to act without friction. Most union comms fail on the third criterion — the action step requires too many clicks, too much context, too much prior knowledge. The campaigns infrastructure I’m building addresses that directly.

Action Network provides embeddable HTML campaign widgets that let visitors send pre-written letters to officials, sign petitions, and register for events without leaving the union website. The integration requires a front-end developer; I’m building a dedicated Campaigns page that embeds these directly. Every visitor becomes a potential participant. The friction is close to zero. For a union that needs to demonstrate active membership engagement to administration, this kind of low-effort participation infrastructure has direct strategic value.

Data automation is the second component. Union websites often have stale information — not because no one cares, but because updating a website manually requires a specific person to do a specific task on a specific schedule. That dependency is fragile. I’m designing automated pipelines that ingest structured data (member updates, campaign status, event schedules) and push it to the site without requiring manual intervention. The underlying principle is the same one I applied at HHS: information that people depend on should not require a human bottleneck to stay current.

The third component is not technical at all. I’ve made connections with established figures in industrial-organizational psychology, psychological safety research, and workplace bullying activism. These are credentialed experts with published work on exactly the conditions graduate workers describe. Facilitating formal collaboration between those allies and the union — written analyses, public letters, expert testimony if needed — gives the organizing effort a different kind of authority. Data engineering can show what’s happening; expert testimony explains why it’s harmful and what responsibility institutions have.

A Campaigns page that functions as a low-friction advocacy portal: embedded Action Network forms for letter-writing, petition signing, and event registration. Visitors arrive, see a clear call to action, and act in under two minutes. No account required. No learning curve. The administration has professional communicators managing its messaging. The union will have a more responsive digital presence.

Automated data pipelines that keep the site current without requiring a volunteer webmaster to manually update every field. This is a solved engineering problem — structured data plus a CI/CD workflow — applied to a context where it’s genuinely underused. The result is an organization that looks and operates like it has dedicated technical staff, without the budget to hire any.

An allied expert network that can produce materials — written analyses, public commentary, testimony — grounded in established research on psychological safety, workplace bullying, and institutional power dynamics. Labor disputes are won and lost in part on the credibility of the narrative. Expert backing from credentialed figures in relevant fields changes what administrators can plausibly dismiss.

The skills that make an effective Federal IT consultant — systems thinking, data engineering, communications infrastructure design — transfer directly to labor organizing contexts. The difference is the client. Most of what makes union comms weak is not a resource problem in the raw sense; it’s a systems problem. No one has applied a systems lens to the communication infrastructure. That’s a consulting problem, not a budget problem.

This project is one instance of a broader pattern I’m developing: applying technical depth to causes that typically can’t access it. Early-stage startups face the same structural disadvantage that unions do — they have goals but not the technical infrastructure to pursue them efficiently. The skills are the same. The stakes are different. The approach is identical: understand the information flows, identify the bottlenecks, engineer a system that doesn’t depend on individual heroics to function.

If you’re running an organization — a union, an advocacy group, a startup — that is spending volunteer hours on manual processes that could be automated, or missing campaign momentum because your website requires a developer to update, that’s a tractable problem. I’ve solved versions of it in Federal environments with much higher complexity and compliance overhead. The union case is where I’m applying those skills for a cause I believe in. The same work is available for organizations with similar problems and different missions.