Jose La Luz is a veteran organizer, campaigner and labor educator with five decades of experience on the left and in the American labor movement. Jose got his start as a member of the Puerto Rican Socialist party, a pro-independence Puerto Rico-based political party, serving as the Organizing Secretary of the party’s US branch, before going on to join DSOC and participate in the founding of DSA.

His proudest achievement is having led the campaign to achieve bargaining rights for public workers in the commonwealth of Puerto Rico, paving the way for one of the largest coordinated organizing campaigns in organized labor’s recent history. More than 120,000 workers were unionized and La Luz became the founding Executive Director of Servidores Publicos Unidos/ AFSCME Council 95.
Jose has continued his work in support of Self Determination and the Decolonization of Puerto Rico throughout the years. He helped to organize several DSA sponsored events to support Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’s Bill, the Puerto Rico Self Determination Act of 2021, earlier this year for example.

La Luz has served in the leadership bodies of numerous organizations: as Vice President for the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, on the national board of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, and as chair of the Latino commission of DSOC and then DSA. In 2020 he was a national surrogate for Bernie Sanders and concentrated his campaigning among Latinx voters in Nevada and Texas.

He is currently a member of DSA’s M4A Steering Committee and organized several town halls to outreach Latinx communities in Florida and Texas in cooperation with Labor For Single Payer, the Debs, Jones, Douglas Institute and National Nurses United. Most recently, he co-led a study group with Bill Fletcher Jr. on W.E.B. DuBois‘ “Black Reconstruction in America” in coordination with the AfroSOC Caucus. He is currently a member of the Bronx/Upper Manhattan branch in the NYC chapter.