Gustavo Gordillo, the 38-year-old co-chair of New York City's Democratic Socialists of America chapter, was terminated from his electrician apprenticeship for skipping required work and classes, then turned around and persuaded his fellow socialists to pay him $95,000 a year to lead the organization. The Joint Apprentice Training Committee fired Gordillo from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3 program in March, according to a union statement, after he stopped showing up around the time of Mayor Zohran Mamdani's election.
The termination and the salary vote were first reported by the New York Post, which detailed how Gordillo joined IBEW Local 3 in April 2024 but never became a fully credentialed electrician. A union source told the paper that Gordillo took the electrician job just for show, and the union statement said he failed to participate in required work and classes. Despite the firing, Gordillo is no longer a union member, though his X profile had described him as a Democratic Socialists of America co-chair and union electrician.
Federal Election Commission filings cited by the Post's reporting show a stranger wrinkle: Gordillo listed the IBEW as his employer as late as March 2026 when making political contributions through ActBlue, the very month the union says he was terminated for failing to show up. Meanwhile, the Joint Industry Board of the Electrical Industry's apprenticeship standards require 8,000 hours of combined classroom and on-the-job training over five and a half years, including 35 mandatory weekly work hours and evening classes, a demanding structure Gordillo reportedly stopped meeting around Mamdani's election.
From Chelsea Galleries to a $95,000 Socialist Salary
In July, Gordillo appealed to Democratic Socialists of America rank-and-file in Queens for full-time pay and benefits, and the chapter's members approved annual pay and benefits for both him and co-chair Grace Mausser. NYC DSA had paid its co-chairs zero compensation for five hours per week of work in 2025, with leaders receiving no salary that year, according to the seed reporting. Gordillo and Mausser will each raise 15 percent of their own salaries and are responsible for advancing the NYC DSA agenda to city and state governments while promoting the chapter's endorsed slate of candidates.
City & State New York, which profiled both co-chairs in January, reported that Mausser previously served as an unpaid chapter co-chair while holding a separate full-time job before the group's shift to salaried leadership. The same outlet detailed Gordillo's path into the movement: he studied literature at Yale University from 2006 to 2010, though the Post's reporting notes he did not earn a Yale degree, and later studied sculpture at Yale's graduate school of art in 2012. Gordillo moved to New York City in 2016 and worked at a high-end Chelsea gallery before joining Democratic Socialists of America after Donald Trump's 2016 election, later leaving the art world over what City & State New York described as ideological conflicts with gallery donors overlapping entities the DSA fought politically.
A Family-Funded Brooklyn Row House
Gordillo was born in Peru and grew up in Florida, and the Post's reporting details how his family helped finance his New York City housing for years. His father paid his son's $2,600 monthly Lower East Side rent through Chucuito LLC until 2019, when Gordillo's parents purchased a two-story row home for Gordillo and his brother, also through Chucuito LLC, paying just under $1 million for the Bedford-Stuyvesant property. The nearly 2,000-square-foot home has since undergone interior and front-facade renovations that added two roof decks, as of the Post's Wednesday report.
Kristen Singleton-Ferrari told the Post that Gordillo's wealth and lifestyle seemed contrary to what he represented politically, a tension that arrives as New York City's housing market strains under record pressure. Manhattan average residential rents reached $6,655 per month in August as the city's apartment vacancy rate fell to 1.49 percent, its lowest point since 1968, according to figures reported by The Telegraph. NYC DSA has built its signature campaigns around exactly that kind of housing pressure, pushing for state intervention and rent regulation.
A Rising Political Profile Inside Mamdani's Orbit
Gordillo's influence has extended well beyond the chapter itself. In November, Mayor-elect Mamdani appointed Gordillo to his transition team's Economic Development & Workforce Development Committee, one of more than 400 advisers Mamdani placed across 17 committees to shape policy ahead of taking office, according to Brooklyn Org. In July, Gordillo appeared on Fox News' The Story with Martha MacCallum to represent NYC DSA, advocating for wealth taxes, public utility expansion and Senate reform as part of the chapter's Workers Deserve More platform.
He has also carried policy weight in Albany. In January, Gordillo and Mausser co-authored a public push demanding Governor Kathy Hochul raise taxes on high earners and corporations to fund public transit and child care, published in Jacobin as part of NYC DSA's broader campaign targeting the state budget negotiations. Back in 2023, Gordillo served as a key organizer in the chapter's campaign to pass New York's Build Public Renewables Act, empowering the New York Power Authority to build publicly owned renewable energy, according to YES! Magazine.
NYC DSA now counts 15,793 active members as of July, according to Wikipedia, making it the largest local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America in the nation, and the group's rank-and-file are the ones who ultimately voted to fund Gordillo's salary. A DSA source told the Post that the leaders were not ready for prime time. NYC DSA did not respond to requests for comment on the matter, and Gordillo himself also did not respond to requests for comment.
Hoodline has previously covered internal DSA tensions with Mamdani's administration, as well as the chapter's push into New York City classrooms and its budget campaigns alongside Senator Bernie Sanders in the Bronx. The latest disclosures add a new layer to that ongoing scrutiny of how the chapter's leadership squares its working-class messaging with the personal finances of the people delivering it.
