In 2022, when the House of Representatives changed its rules to permit congressional staff to unionize, Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) announced her full support for the effort.

It was unsurprising from Titus, the dean of the state’s congressional delegation with more than 35 years in Nevada politics, including long stops in the Legislature and House of Representatives, and a reputation as the most liberal member of the Nevada delegation. A longtime champion of the right to unionize and a close ally of organized labor in Las Vegas, Titus routinely receives a perfect score on the AFL-CIO’s annual scorecard, frequents picket lines and is a regular at Culinary Union events. 

“We have seen firsthand how unions enable workers to bargain for better wages, stronger benefits and safer working conditions,” she told the AFL-CIO in its annual legislative conference in 2021.

Her public stance invigorated her staff, who began to discuss the prospect of forming a union in spring 2022. House members typically maintain a staff of 10 to 15 people.

But once staff members voted to form a union in April 2023, her posture in private — according to interviews with five ex-staffers, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly — changed. 

Her opposition within the privacy of her office was so stringent — holding a “retaliat[ory]” staff meeting where she promised to impose stricter rules on office operations all while members’ requests went unmet — that staff members abandoned their unionization efforts entirely by the end of the year.

The failed effort left staffers disappointed, but unsurprised. Though her office turnover rate is similar to rates in the rest of the Nevada delegation, ex-staffers described Titus as a vindictive and harsh boss, quick to berate staffers, who ran an office culture that many called toxic and raised ethical questions — including direct asks from Titus that they would do unpaid work on her re-election campaign.  

In a statement to The Nevada Independent, Titus said that she “actually welcomed a union because I thought it would help standardize operations and bring more accountability to the office.” She referred to ex-staffers’ stories as “unsubstantiated claims by former, anonymous, disgruntled employees.”

“Jobs in my office are hard jobs and I have high standards,” Titus said. “I demand a lot of my staff but no more than I demand of myself because I believe that’s what the people of District 1 deserve. I’m not apologizing for this. People don’t send us back here and pay our salaries to drink lattes and view Tik-Tok from 9-5, Mon.-Fri. That’s not how my constituents’ lives work.”

But the behaviors Titus, who turned 75 in May, displayed during and after the unionization effort demonstrate why, the ex-staffers said, they felt the need to collectively organize and push for more formal office policies in the first place. 

“It felt like everybody else should be unionizing [and] can unionize,” one staffer said. “But when it came to our office, and it came to actually impacting her — that's when labor did not matter anymore.”

Staff ‘used to be a family’

Staff members begin discussing the prospect of unionization in 2022, hoping to achieve a higher pay floor, salary transparency, an employee handbook and the ability to work from home one day a month, according to former staffers. In April 2023, staff voted to form a union by a 7-1 vote and had their bargaining unit certified by the Congressional Workers’ Union (CWU) on April 28.

The unionization effort was part of a sea change among congressional staff — who do everything from answer phones to assess legislation to correspond with interest groups — to assert their labor rights and reassess their treatment, including a historical expectation that the taxpayer-funded employees work long hours for low pay. At the beginning of the session, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) set a $45,000 pay floor — Congress’ first-ever — for House staffers. Then, in a party-line vote in May 2022, the House passed a resolution extending the right to organize to the nearly 10,000 staffers who work in the lower chamber.

In her statement, Titus said she voted for the resolution and has a “strong voting record with labor.”

Democratic offices began unionizing soon after. That summer, 85 workers in eight offices filed petitions for union elections on their first day of eligibility. Titus’ office was part of a second wave of petitions. 

After completing trainings with the CWU, the union members began to compile a request for information to file with their superiors, the first step in the bargaining process to identify the titles, dates of hire and salary rates for members of staff, as well as broader budgetary data and a copy of the office’s personnel and human resources policies. 

“It felt like everybody else should be unionizing [and] can unionize. But when it came to our office, and it came to actually impacting her — that's when labor did not matter anymore.”

- Ex-staffer

With no official employee handbook, union members said in interviews they were hoping for the standardization of policies for taking leave, time off, harassment and compensation time. 

And many Titus staffers were frustrated by the low pay, including several earning less than $50,000 a year, while others said they used publicly available data to find that other members of Congress, including in the Nevada delegation, were paying their counterparts more for the same title.

Union leaders sent the request via email to Chief of Staff Jay Gertsema and Deputy Chief of Staff Demi Falcon on Aug. 24, 2023, and asked for answers by Sept. 11. 

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The union received a reply the next day acknowledging the request, and then another response from Falcon on Sept. 6. Falcon noted that the union reached out four months after being certified and shortly after Gertsema went on parental leave, and said that senior staff would need four weeks to respond to the union’s requests after he returned in October.

In the meantime, according to four staffers, Titus took matters into her own hands.

In her D.C. office that September upon their return from the August recess, Titus — without explicitly mentioning the union — gathered her staff and announced there would be policy changes moving forward. 

According to four ex-staffers, she told staff that she would begin keeping records of errors in their written work and monitoring the time they left each night. Two staffers recalled that Titus asked them to produce every paper they’d ever turned in to her, so she could go through and identify each staffer’s consistent mistakes. And three said she told them that she’d personally be approving each staff member’s requests for time off, including for medical procedures, rather than delegating that responsibility to senior staff.

Multiple people present for the meeting recalled that Titus told the staff that they “used to be a family” — a common union-busting phrase.

“She really came in and said, ‘I'm gonna lay down the law,’” one ex-staffer recalled. “‘If you guys want … to have this be a more official process than the ‘family style’ way we've been doing it before, I'm going to come in and really show you what a process is going to look like.’ And it definitely felt like direct punishment for our attempt to unionize.”

In her statement, Titus did not address ex-staffers’ recollections of the meeting and said that she had supported the unionization effort.

“I never discussed the union with my staff while they were trying to organize because that would have been inappropriate,” she said. 

"It definitely felt like direct punishment for our attempt to unionize."

-Ex-staffer

One staffer elevated their concerns to the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights, wondering if Titus’ behavior had crossed any legal boundaries — and recalled that the representative told the Titus staffers that because Titus was an “equal opportunity asshole” instead of singling out individuals for harsher treatment, it limited their ability to take any action against her.

In the meantime, senior staff in her office appeared to slow walk union requests. When Gertsema returned from leave, union leaders sent an email Nov. 10 reiterating their request for information and asking for a response by Dec. 4. Gertsema acknowledged the email on Nov. 15; union leaders followed up on Nov. 30 but received no reply. 

“Months passed where no movement was offered,” one ex-staffer said.

Gertsema says he did reply with the requested information in December, though he no longer has access to the email record. He said he never received a reply.

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Staff began to get fearful. Multiple staff members said their superiors began to act coldly toward them. One ex-staffer recalled that individual meetings with supervisors turned into two-on-ones; another felt that union members’ work was under “extreme scrutiny” by Titus herself.

At the end of the year, one of the organizers was fired for performance issues, according to numerous ex-staffers. In her statement, Titus said she handles “personnel matters as internal confidential issues.”

In 2024, the unionization effort withered. 

“No one really picked up the mantle, because there was a bit of fear,” an ex-staffer said.

While some units from the 18 staff unions organized through CWU successfully negotiated memorandums of understanding and contracts with their bosses, the overall effort has slowed as Republicans have taken control of Washington. The CWU declined to comment on the unionization effort. 

No other Nevada office had a unionization effort recorded by the CWU.

Throughout that year and into the next, Titus continued her public advocacy for unions, including kicking off 2024 on the stump for President Joe Biden at an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers rally in Las Vegas. 

“Nothing like being in the hall of labor to feel good!” Titus told a crowd chanting her name. 

‘What is truly going on in my office’

The heart of the union effort was to better define policies for the office, especially because staffers were asked to do work that they worried violated ethics law, according to four ex-staffers.

Three former staffers said they believed that Titus repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, the federal ethics law that limits the politicization of taxpayer-funded work by mandating that members of Congress separate their official business from their campaign work. Congressional staffers often do work on their bosses’ campaigns, but are paid from campaign accounts, cannot use their government devices to do so, and cannot use congressional resources for campaign purposes.

Titus denied these allegations.

“I am unaware of any Hatch Act violations or accusations thereof,” she said in a statement.

But Titus, according to multiple former staffers, asked staff to do unpaid campaign work as well. In interviews, ex-staff said that legislative staffers would receive emails to their personal accounts from Titus’ campaign asking them to write campaign memos — with the expectation being that it was part of their job duties, as they were not paid separately for it. Senior staff members would attempt to shield junior staff from campaign-related requests by asking them to keep superiors abreast of those incidents, several sources said, and her chief of staff in particular was careful to not leave a paper trail. 

Staffers typically had the wherewithal to answer campaign emails from their personal email accounts and do campaign work — which they were not compensated for — on their own time, away from the Capitol. During work hours, Titus sometimes directly requested office staff write campaign-related memos or do other work that staff later realized was for campaign purposes, three former staffers said. 

Not all staffers who spoke with The Indy said they experienced conduct that raised Hatch Act concerns. Two former senior staffers with direct knowledge of Titus’ scheduling said they never personally witnessed campaign activity taking place on Capitol grounds. One former senior staffer said they went to great lengths to keep campaign business separate and would intervene to redirect campaign requests to proper channels.

Most of the staffers interviewed for this story eventually left the office amid the thorny ethical questions and the failure of the union effort to protect them from what they described as a toxic work environment.

Numerous staffers said Titus berated them (telling one to stop making the “same fucking error”) — including in messages reviewed by The Nevada Independent — and would regularly demean and curse out staff when discussing their work product. 

Oftentimes, Titus would ask for something that staffers had already sent her, according to three ex-staffers. When staff would explain that she had missed an email or misunderstood something, she would find ways to blame them anyway or tell them to stop putting the fault on her.

Despite that attitude, she expected loyalty — and would bad-mouth anyone who left the office and give the cold shoulder to ex-staffers when she saw them, according to four ex-staffers.

“She would come in and just say some of the most horrible things about those people — that they were never loyal, that they didn't care about her, that they didn't care about the constituency, that they weren't good at their job,” one former staffer said.

Titus said her office is currently staffed with hard-working people who have driven her strong performance in effectiveness rankings.

“If someone wants to know what is truly going on in my office, they should talk to my current staff, which is comprised of the smartest, hardest working, most compassionate team members I’ve had during the entire time I’ve been in Congress,” she said. 

Congressional offices can often be intense workplaces, where members can be strict bosses because they’re trying to get the best results for their constituents. Congress is home to its fair share of pen-throwers and people prone to profanity-laden rants. These allegations are typically more common against female members.

But one former staffer said they have advised numerous people against applying for a job in Titus’ office, saying any career advancement is not worth it. 

“What I will tell people is that she is manipulative, uses gaslighting tactics and screams at staff and treats them as if they're expendable,” the former staffer said.