Alex Brower Biography

Alderman Alex Brower was elected to the District 3 Common Council seat in a special election on April 1, 2025, becoming the first open socialist elected to sit in City Hall since Mayor Frank Zeidler's final term ended in April of 1960.

Alex grew up in a working class union family in Jefferson, Wisconsin. His father worked as a union carpenter and his mother as an English teacher and Jefferson Education Association President. He attended Beloit College after graduating Jefferson High School, earning a degree in Political Science in 2010. He moved to Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood in 2013 and has been a resident of Riverwest or the East Side since.

While in high school in 2003, Alex became involved in local politics through union activism, joining a picket line for a UFCW Local 538 strike in his hometown. Observing workers standing up, even in the face of impossible odds, inspired Brower’s early work as an organizer and activist. The connections Alex made participating in the Act 10 protests led to his first professional organizing job with United Food and Commercial Workers. He has also been a professional organizer for UFCW Local 1473 and an organizer with Wisconsin Jobs Now. Alderman Brower has served as the President of the Milwaukee Substitute Teachers' Association under the MTEA -- with which he worked to successfully win health care benefits for full-time substitute teachers and oppose a school privatization attempt --and as the Executive Director for the Wisconsin Alliance for Retired Americans, which organizes retirees to fight for their own issues and support union actions, including recruiting retirees to picket with workers striking at John Deere in 2021 and supporting the IBEW Local 494 union drive for Colectivo's workers.

Alex has also worked in and with various community groups on organizing efforts and issue campaigns. In 2013 he joined a coalition of community organizations from around the state to oppose the proposed Penokee Hills mining project, walking from Milwaukee to Madison to deliver petitions to the Governor's Office to bring attention to the dangers of the proposal. As part of the New Economy Credit Union organizing committee (starting in 2015), Alex worked on an unsuccessful effort to start a credit union for the 53212 ZIP code, in collaboration with the Riverwest Cooperative Alliance. Further, he has served as the co-chair of Milwaukee's Democratic Socialists of America chapter for several years, until his election to the Common Council, helping drive the Power to the People campaign to replace We Energies (using Chapter 197 of the Wisconsin State Statutes), in addition to supporting multiple successful electoral campaigns for DSA endorsed candidates.

Alderman Brower is committed to following in the footsteps of Milwaukee's historic Sewer Socialists like Mayors Hoan, Seidel, and Zeidler. Socialism in practice means responsive, transparent city government that operates for the public benefit; fierce opposition to corruption and an insistence on fair, uniform application of the law; democratic control of the workplace so workers can collectively determine their conditions and own the materials they produce; democratic control of the economy for policy that advantages all of us, not just a wealthy few; and supporting a society in which all people
are treated with honor and dignity irrespective of identity, health and ability, demographic group, socio-economic class, or national origin.