Courtney Laudick assembled with about a dozen other congressional staffers in the hallway outside the House chamber on a sunny Tuesday in May. They looked like any other gathering of aides waiting impatiently for votes to wrap up so they could whisk their bosses off to their next meeting. But for months they had operated in secret, out of necessity, organizing what became the Congressional Workers Union. They all could have been fired for their efforts — a form of retaliation Congress had banned in most other cases, but not for itself.
They had been careful to a fault. When Laudick first approached her boss, Rep. Andy Levin, about sponsoring a resolution to allow House staffers to unionize, she did so anonymously, even though she knew the former labor organizer was hardly the union-busting sort. And so over the course of the spring, Laudick and another Levin staffer leading the unionization push, Janae Washington, had worked both officially for and clandestinely with the Michigan Democrat to recruit co-sponsors and win over skeptics.
Levin didn’t know — didn’t want to know — who was behind the CWU and, as far as he could tell, they’d never even met. Until that Tuesday in May, when the resolution was slipped into a rule for supplemental Ukrainian aid funding and passed by a vote of 217-202, and Laudick sent Levin a text telling him there were some people outside who wanted to meet him.
