The co-chair of New York City's Democratic Socialists of America was fired from his union apprenticeship for chronic absence, then persuaded rank-and-file members to vote him a $95,000 salary, without mentioning he'd just lost his day job.
Gustavo Gordillo, 38, was terminated from his electrician apprenticeship with IBEW Local 3 in March after what the union described as a "prolonged absence from and failure to participate in required work and classes." Weeks later, he stood before DSA members at a meeting in Queens and made an emotional case for why the organization should start paying its co-chairs full-time salaries with benefits. He talked about the burden of media interviews. He described wearing an earpiece on construction sites and called it too "distracting." He never told the room he had already been fired.
The members voted yes. Gordillo and his co-chair, Grace Mausser, will each collect $95,000 a year with benefits, a dramatic jump from the zero dollars both received in 2025 for what federal nonprofit paperwork described as five hours of weekly work. No DSA leader collected a salary that year.
Gordillo became a member of IBEW Local 3 in April 2024. He stopped showing up to work around November 2025, roughly the same time fellow DSA member Zohran Mamdani won his mayoral election, according to the union. The Joint Apprentice Training Committee's trustees formally terminated him in March.
IBEW Local 3 confirmed the termination on Wednesday, issuing a blunt statement:
"After learning of Mr. Gordillo's prolonged absence from and failure to participate in required work and classes, the trustees of the Joint Apprentice Training Committee terminated Mr. Gordillo from the program."
A source close to the union was less diplomatic. Gordillo, the source said, "didn't have a strong work record to begin with" and took the electrician job "just for show." The source added that Gordillo was hogging "a slot from someone who probably really needed the opportunity."
That last line deserves to sit for a moment. An apprenticeship slot in a union like IBEW Local 3 is a real opportunity, the kind of thing working-class New Yorkers compete for. Gordillo held one, stopped showing up, and then turned his blue-collar credentials into a talking point at a DSA meeting where he asked for money.
Gordillo's biography does not read like a man struggling to get by. Born in Peru and raised in Florida, he studied literature at Yale from 2006 to 2010 but did not earn a degree, according to the university's registrar. He later studied sculpture at Yale's graduate School of Art. He moved to New York in 2016, found work at a high-end gallery in Chelsea, and joined the DSA after Donald Trump's election that year.
His housing history is equally revealing. Until 2019, Gordillo lived on the Lower East Side, where his father paid his $2,600-a-month rent through a family LLC called Chucuito. His father admitted as much on Tuesday. That same year, Gordillo's parents used Chucuito LLC to purchase a two-story, nearly 2,000-square-foot row home in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood for just under $1 million. The home was bought for Gordillo and his brother.
As of Wednesday, workers were adding two decks to the roof. The block was described as gentrifying and tree-lined.
Kristen Singleton-Ferrari, a 59-year-old neighbor, offered a pointed assessment:
"I think it's really counter [to] everything that he's supposed to represent."
She added that "it seems more and more expensive" to live in the neighborhood. Another neighbor was friendlier but no more helpful to Gordillo's socialist brand: "Gustavo? He's a really nice guy! He's quiet. He gave us all free stuff."
At the Queens meeting where Gordillo and Mausser pitched their case, both co-chairs described the demands of their roles since Mamdani's election. One attendee recounted the appeal: "Both of them went into detail on their day jobs on how since Zohran won they were getting so much national attention." Gordillo talked about media interviews interfering with his work on construction sites, work the union says he had already abandoned months earlier.
Not everyone in the room bought it. One attendee called the appeal "a lie."
"This appeal to a struggle that he is facing doesn't seem real at all. It's a lie."
Another attendee said flatly: "It just seems like a ploy."
The resolution that passed requires each co-chair to raise 15 percent of their salary and tasks them with advancing the NYC-DSA agenda before city and state government and promoting the group's endorsed slate of political candidates. Whether Gordillo can deliver on those duties is an open question. One DSA source, reflecting on the organization's recent trajectory, including a Fox News appearance the source called a "trainwreck", offered a broader verdict: "None of these people are ready for prime time."
As of Wednesday, the same day IBEW Local 3 publicly confirmed his termination, Gordillo's profile on X still identified him as "@nycdsa co-chair, union electrician" under the handle @unionGustavo. He never made it as a fully credentialed electrician. He did not return requests for comment.
Neither did the NYC-DSA.
So here is the picture, assembled from union records, nonprofit filings, property documents, and the DSA's own members: a Yale-educated, gallery-employed, LLC-subsidized 38-year-old who held a union apprenticeship slot he stopped using, got fired for not showing up, concealed that fact from his own organization, and then convinced its members to pay him $95,000 a year to promote socialism.
The DSA's rank-and-file voted to fund a man who embodies every contradiction the movement claims to oppose, privilege dressed up as struggle, entitlement repackaged as solidarity. If this is what democratic socialism looks like with the lights on, the movement has a credibility problem no salary can fix.
