Unionizing 101 webinar
Transcript:
Opening
Hermione: Welcome to the first ever ReproJobs webinar on unionizing. We had more than 100 people register and are thrilled to have you with us. We’ll be recording the presentation part of this webinar, and then turning off the recording for the Q&A session. If you have questions throughout the presentation, please feel free to chat them in the chatbox to us throughout the presentation.
This webinar is public, so it is fine for you to live tweet if you so choose, but we should remind you that organizing for a union can get you fired, and that includes your social media posts, so please think carefully about what you share. Ok, let’s get started.
We have four amazing speakers to talk to you about unionizing, and before we hand the mic over to them, we wanted to take a minute to share why we’re focusing on unionizing for our first webinar.
Over the last 5 years of running ReproJobs, we’ve heard time and again -- and experienced ourselves -- the disappointment and exhaustion that comes with coping with poor workplace practices, particularly when these practices originate in organizations that claim to operate by social justice values. On a larger scale, we’ve seen folks in our movement try to unionize and get shut down by management, both publicly and privately, or try to unionize and get fired. It’s not all bad news, though -- we’ve seen incredible work from folks across the nonprofit, media, and social justice sphere in organizing unions to fight for better pay and benefits, and sharing their experience doing so.
We wanted to bring in experts to help us understand what it might take to unionize our field, and how to go about doing that. We aren’t laboring under the assumption that unionizing can solve EVERYTHING, but we have a hunch it might go a long way towards addressing some of the systemic inequalities in the reproductive health, rights, and justice workforce.
With that in mind, we want to introduce today’s speakers. First, we’ll hear from:
Kayla Blado, She/Her, President, Nonprofit Professional Employees Union
Emily Likins-Ehlers, She/They, Trauma-Informed Birth Doula, Unionist
And two union organizers formerly of Planned Parenthood Global who will share their experiences.
Kayla, Nonprofit Professional Employees Union
Hi everyone, I’m Kayla Blado, the President of the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, or “NPEU.” I’ve been a member of NPEU for over three years and have been serving as president for seven months. NPEU has been around for 21 years, and my employer, the Economic Policy Institute was the first unit to organize within it. Feel free to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @NonprofitUnion. I’m at @KaylaBlado on Twitter, if you feel like following me and our email is contact@npeu.org, if you have any questions or are interested in organizing with us.
The Nonprofit Professional Employees union is made up of over a dozen different nonprofits and have about 500 members currently. We are working with a bunch of other nonprofits to get their first union contract, so stay tuned. In the middle is our slogan, “solidarity for good.” Organizing nonprofit workers is a little different than organizing other private sector workers. The reason we work in nonprofits to begin with is that we believe in the mission and want to see our nonprofits thrive. We understand that nonprofits are uniquely mission-driven and have specific financial concerns.
We know from experience that by joining together nonprofit professionals can enhance the work of their organization by negotiating a contract that best fits the needs of the staff and the organization’s mission.
We strongly support the missions of our nonprofits and want our organizations to thrive. By coming together, we are able to ensure we have the necessary resources for our organizations to be successful. Our negotiated contracts put in place a process for workplace collaboration which creates better, productive nonprofit organizations.
That being said, working in nonprofits can be stressful and burnout is common. Nonprofits are notorious for being understaffed and under-resourced. Nonprofit workers are often tasked with multiple roles and there are messy lines of command. Nonprofit managers can easily exploit workers to work longer hours and forfeit raise for the “sake of the mission.” Managers at nonprofits are often the people who have been there the longest, not the people most equipped for the job. All of this can lead to a toxic work environment, that can often be even worse for women, people of color, and those with disabilities. The people who are able to make it work at nonprofits tend to be able to “independently afford” to work there, which can skew toward white, more affluent folks.
I wrote this op-ed in August for National Nonprofit Day, to highlight one of the fallacies that we often hear—if you’re burnt out, you need more self-care. I just wanted to read a quote from the piece. (Sorry to quote myself.) “Sure, healthy food, exercise and sleep are important ways to deal with stress, and we could all use more of each. But eating a salad isn’t going to fix the systemic problems at your workplace, nor will getting a massage give you a voice on the job, or increase your paycheck...It is important to address these workplace issues comprehensively, but there is one clear and immediate solution: join a union.”
Having a union isn’t going to fix everything, but if will give you a toolbox to work from. While wages and benefits are important parts of your contract, there are often very important non-economic policies that you can bargain for that will give you a voice at work. Some of our nonprofits, for example, have bargained for a seat on the board. Your work-life balance can be improved by having a predictable and regular schedule, flexible work time, comp time for those weeks you end up working long hours, and transportation subsidies for various modes of transit.
To make sure that people are being paid fairly, you can bargain for things like wage ladders, wage floors, and pay ratios between the highest and lowest paid employee. There are an endless list of other benefits you can bargain for, such as improved vacation time, sick time, holidays off, better health care, 401k contributions, tuition reimbursement, and child care subsidies.
And finally, another place where our units have been making huge strides lately is in the racial, gender, and disability equity policies. We have contracts that have included provisions for hiring guidelines, equity committees, mandatory staff trainings, anti-sexual harassment language, and accommodations for folks with disabilities.
Just quickly, these are the simplified steps to forming a union. My colleagues will go a little deeper into these later in the webinar. Steps one and two can kind of be done together, but you should find a union that works for your needs while also building support. Once you have support, which can take months, you will sign authorization cards. Once we have a majority of cards signed from the non-managers at your organization, you can either ask for voluntary recognition or file for an election with the National Labor Relations Board. Generally, getting recognition is the slightly better way to go about it, since it is faster and builds good will with management. However, if management has been hostile, filing for an election is your legally protected way to forming union. Besides, at this point, you and your coworkers have already decided you have a union, you just need to formalize it. After getting recognition or winning your election, management legally has to bargain with the union on your first contract. The negotiation process can take anywhere from 4 months to a year, but it’s in your best interest to get it done quickly. Once your union and management agree on the contract, both sides will vote on it at it will be ratified. Most of the contracts we have last for two to four years, before bargaining starts again.
NPEU will help you through the process of forming a union. Before bargaining your first contract we can help you form an organizing committee “OC”, who are the core group of people driving the union organizing. We can help develop messaging to your coworkers, we’ll help collect cards, ask for voluntary recognition, or file for an election, and communicate externally through social media and press to put pressure on management and ask other unions for support.
During bargaining we’ll help you with identifying priorities for your contract, power-mapping relationships and strategies for bargaining, and supporting you at the bargaining table.
After ratification we will provide steward training to help enforce your contract, we’ll help with grievance handling if there is a violation of the contract, social events for your union, and solidarity actions if needed.
If you are a manager on this webinar wondering how you can help, there are a few ways. Number one, don’t snitch! If you hear rumors of a union forming before it has been formally announced, don’t rat them out to senior leadership. If you find out who some of the union leaders are, definitely don’t tell management about them. Secondly, if you hear other managers saying anti-union sentiments, express your support. Think about how it will impact your day-to-day. If your staff is happy, your job might be easier. Finally, look for ways to continue being a supportive boss. Maybe there are policies that the staff wants finalized that you can start putting into practice before they have a contract. Remember that managers are at-will staff, though. You won’t be protected by the union contract, so your support might have to be more subtle than you’d like.
Support for unions is at a 16-year high, with 67% of Americans supporting labor unions. A lot of this is driven by people like you, who realize that jobs like this aren’t sustainable and something’s gotta give. I urge you to listen to the stories of the next presenters and think about whether organizing a union is right for you. It’s not always an easy process, or a quick fix, but the contract you win will be worth the fight. Thank you.
Emily, Unionist
Hello! Welcome to Union Organizing 101, My name is Emily Likins-Ehlers. I was raised by a strong union family in Chicago and I have organized unions in more industries than I can count: but let me be clear; I do not work for, or represent, any union today. These days I work in a different labor movement, as a Doula and Reproductive Counselor. And today I’m going to take 15 minutes of your very valuable time to talk about the union solution to all your problems at work and the best way to lay a solid foundation for a Union organizing campaign at your workplace.
And when I say “the union solution to all of your problems at work” I really mean it. I'm not doing the idealism thing; a union is the very best way to solve all of your problems at work. That’s because a union isn’t an external organization that comes in, waves a magic wand, and makes your job perfect. No, a Union is a means to an ends; a paved pathway to change. The union paves three pathways through which you can solve your own problems at work—any problem at work.
First, a union helps you solve your own problems at work through Collective
Bargaining Agreements, or CBAs. A CBA is an employment contract that defines wages and working conditions. It’s renegotiated every few years, and must be approved by a vote of the unions’ members.
If your CBA, your employment contract, is violated at work, your union files what is called “a grievance” on your behalf. Grievances are the second pathway to change. It’s essentially small-claims court, but the union provides you with legal assistance, mediation, and job protection during all of this.
Which is the final, and most important pathway to change. I know from my own experiences in abortion access work, that the squeaky wheel doesn’t always get the grease—it often gets replaced by an unpaid intern. you can’t be fired for filing a grievance or for being cutthroat during contract negotiations.
And this is important—this job protection—because these jobs do more than pay our rent and keep food on the table. Maybe this job provides the insurance someone needs for their insulin. Maybe this job provides someone legal status to live here. Or maybe this job helps them keep their kids in their custody.
For each and every one of us in reproductive justice, work is more than a paycheck—it’s our purposeful response to a higher calling. For most of us in RJ,
It’s what we were put on the Earth to do. -- BUT We only have so many hours alive on this planet, and how many of them do we spend at work? How many of our non-working hours are defined by our wages and working conditions?! How many of your personal decisions are impacted by your health insurance?
Do you have a retirement plan or what? You’re just gonna work until the day you die?
Union organizing is about asking yourself these hard questions. what kind of life are you willing to accept?
Union organizing is about realizing you’re not underpaid because you’re underqualified or because the movement is underfunded. Union organizing is about realizing that you—the workers, the ones doing the everyday grunt work and the data entry and all the hardest parts of the schlep—you do the work worth funding. Your labor births the impact that gets funded in the first place. In this way, union organizing is also about asking our movement’s leadership to live their spoken values. As a worker at ninetofive said to me, “This contract is an opportunity for our organization to institutionalize and really embody the values that underscore our mission
statement.” By unionizing, you are giving your organization an opportunity to live their values. What a radical idea.
Union organizing is about embracing the fact that we won’t see real, impactful reproductive justice until the movement-builders themselves can demand more from their own jobs. If we can’t do it—how can we expect others to?!
We need to demand more because we deserve more. We need to demand more money, and better benefits, and more paid time off, and self care stipends, and flex time so we can pick up our kids, and childcare stipends so we can afford somewhere to drop them off.
Union organizing is shaking the patriarchy off of our organizations’ employment practices; it chases oppressive practices out from the shadows and pushes our organizations to reflect the future we want to see for our members.
We need to demand more, not as individuals begging for benefits upon hire, but as a swell of solidarity that demands a change in this toxic, patriarchal culture of the workplace—starting with our own personal jobs.
Union organizing is NOT about solving your personal problems at work, it’s about realizing that they were NEVER YOUR problems to begin with. They’re systemic problems; problems of capitalism and problems of scarcity mindsets forced upon visionaries due to aristocratic giving business models. But union organizing is about realizing your personal power to change all of this.
BUT if you think you all won’t get fired for trying to change your workplace…you’re wrong. It does not matter how awesome your Executive Director is or how progressive your board members are. It doesn’t matter how great last year’s fundraiser was or how badly you want this. A UNION IS ALWAYS A FIGHT.
Let me be clear: if you do not carry-out this organizing campaign correctly, YOU WILL GET FIRED FOR TRYING TO UNIONIZE. It’s easy and simple to say we have a first amendment right and we can’t get fired for union stuff, and all of that’s true—ONCE you have union recognition. But at the beginning, it’s so much more complicated than that. It is only after a certain point in your organizing campaign that your job is protected. In order to win this very important job protection for yourself and your coworkers for decades to come--you are tasked with running a very secret underground organizing campaign to persuade your coworkers. Y’all will pick a union and sign these little cards that get sent to the National Labor Relations Board. The National Labor Relations Board THEN sends your employer a letter that informs management of your intent to hold a union election. This letter also directs leadership to make no staffing changes. At this point, your job is protected. IF you are fired before your employer receives this letter from the National Labor Relations Board, you will have NO RECOURSE. Depending on how many coworkers and how much free-time you have, this secret organizing campaign can span anywhere from a few weeks to a few years.
So a union is more or less, a contract and contract enforcement. And it’s powerful because that contract can say whatever you want it to say. YOU are your union. But a union isn’t won overnight, and before you can ever negotiate for your first CBA, you have to build a very secret movement that is rooted in deeply trusting one another. You have to trust your coworkers with a very big secret that could cost you your job. A very big secret that could cost your friends their jobs. You need to trust your coworkers enough to stand before them and re-embody the injustices visited upon you at work— workplace trauma is a real thing; and shared vulnerability is the first step to finding solutions together.
This circle of trust that you build among coworkers becomes what you call an Organizing Committee. It’s exactly what it sounds—a small group of coworkers figure out how to win a union election.
How do we organize this committee without getting fired? Because remember, you’ll totally get fired for doing this if you’re sloppy. I mean, you might even get fired just for attending this webinar. CONGRATULATIONS you are now…
…..a spy. So, obviously: no social media. Not even on your anonymous identity accounts. Don’t even talk about this on facebook messenger or in your insta DMs. Create a secret email account. IDK if you know this, but ReproJobs is run by students at Hogwarts School ofWitchcraft and Wizardry. Obviously, don’t talk about it at work, even under hushed tones in the break room. Resist the urge to spill it to a coalition partner even if you think nobody can hear you over the DJ. This is the ultimate need-to-know. Obviously, don’t use work resources or on the clock time to do any of this organizing. And be careful who you tell. Who you bring into the fold and when you bring them into the know is the whole game right now.
You’ll start by making a secret list of all your coworkers. Include PERSONAL contact information like home address and phone numbers. You’ll want to leave space to keep notes on what issues matter to them personally and a place to rank their level of support after you talk to them.
The next step is the easiest; but also the most important. Get together outside of work and build friendships. Like, real ones. Ask open ended questions about their job, draw out details about their daily routines at work, and help them verbalize a vision for their future. But don’t mention unionizing yet! Just track issues that come up in your conversations on your secret list and keep making friends at work.
Get together as a group to build trust and identify workplace issues in a low-pressure setting. Maybe you start a feminist book club or have a monthly potluck. Keep conversations focused on workplace issues and really work on holding space for one another through disclosures of workplace problems and abuses. These meetings should value confidentiality, and nobody with hire and fire power is invited. This is a “safe space” for workers.
At some point, you tell your trusted group of coworkers about your desire to organize a union. Maybe this happens one-on-one, maybe you bring it up casually at dinner; maybe you hit them with a snazzy power point presentation—whatever your vibes are. At this point, meetings become directed. You use the time together to research unions that can potentially represent you. Spend the time thinking and talking about class politics and learning about other unions in your area or in your industry and start identifying pros and cons to different union locals by google search, media reviews, and good old fashioned phone calls to organizers. Keep recruiting more coworkers into your committee.
Next, the Organizing Committee will choose union representation. There are hundreds (literally, hundreds) of unions you can choose from. Some are big, some are small. They both have pros and cons. Every union local has their own culture of organizing, negotiation, and direct action; but unions are associated with internationals that grow contract expertise in certain industries. For example, if you’re a mental health care worker it doesn’t make a lot of sense to unionize with UNITE HERE, who does mostly hotel and hospitality industry contracts. It’s important to have an expert on contracts in your industry, because a Union is not much more than a contract and contract enforcement. What’s important when choosing union representation is having a union that attaches weight to your words. Your union representative should listen well, and always let the workers take the lead. The union organizer should become the quietest one in the room as your bargaining unit gets their bearings, and your union should be anti-oppressive both in theory and practice. Remember: a union isn’t an external organization that comes in, waves a magic wand, and makes your job perfect.
No, a Union is a means to an ends; a paved Pathway. The union itself is nothing more than pavement—You; the workers, the union’s members--are the ones directing the path.
I hope you now see how simple it is to lay a solid foundation for a union organizing campaign at your workplace. If you’d like to chat more with me about organizing your workplace, please reach out. You can reach me through my website: www.Traumainformeddoula.com
Thank you to Hermione Granger and Luna Lovegood for the opportunity to be with you today, and I look forward to at least 100 emails tomorrow.
Former Planned Parenthood Global staff:
Before diving in, we’d like to acknowledge that a case study attempts to weave together a unified narrative from a series of events that are often multifaceted, fast-paced, chaotic and not always well documented. We are eager to share our story with you, AND we want you to simultaneously hold that others might tell this story differently.
I’d like to also highlight that our unionizing, and all unionizing, is made possible by the sacrifices and labor of workers who came before us, who often had zero protections when they fought to improve working conditions. They secured our rights with their blood. What we do, and what we accomplish in our workplace, our field, our period in time, this too can ripple out in ways we can’t yet imagine. We encourage you all to think more broadly. Yes unionizing will improve your conditions and those of the people you know and love and care about. But it will also benefit people who come after you, who you will never meet, and because of you, they can have a better starting point then you did. Nothing is ever won in one go.
We’ll be telling our story of unionizing the Latin America Regional Office of Planned Parenthood Global, based in Miami, FL.
What caused us to unionize, our context and what we did before unionizing
What we planned for and how things played out
And finally, we’ll offer you our advice and lessons
We unionized because…
The values our organization was telling the world that it had, [click] didn’t align with our own experiences working there. Social media and the outward facing narrative contradicted our experiences as employees.
We unionized because…
we had come to the organization to make a difference, and fight for the world that we want. That world is one in which every person is valued, respected and treated equitably, and where employees have the power to make change, not only in their roles, but institutionally as well.
we believed in the mission and found unionizing to be in line with the values of Planned Parenthood, respecting and honoring all of us by giving everyone a voice and a seat at the table.
we believed that by organizing a union we strengthened our organization.
We met over and over again, in pairs and in groups, nervous, resigned, excited, to talk about what each person was experiencing, to support each other, to brainstorm and hope, to build collective power. From the start, we aimed to be horizontal, participatory, transparent, inclusive. While only two people from our group are speaking on this webinar, we’re bringing in the voices from the rest of our bargaining unit.
Why We Decided to Unionize
“I got great evaluations for years and no raises, and the year I was promoted I got a raise of less than 1% when the merit raise everyone else got was 3%. My supervisor said there was nothing that could be done — it was policy.”
“...We saw colleagues being let go who had dedicated years of their lives to our organization, and leadership had no explanation for their dismissal. The lack of accountability from the supervisors was astounding.”
“Discrepancies in performance evaluations and firing practices between lower level staff and management. Lower level staff had no job security, and could be fired on the spot whereas management have had their jobs 10+ years despite their poor performance and mistreatment of staff.”
“No uniformity in management practices and style led to unequal treatment of employees based on one's manager. Gaslighting, threats, guilt tripping, illegal behavior. ”
“Poor human resources policies/practices — no determined path towards promotions, pay raises.”
“No way to air grievances, and conflicting information coming from HQ and local office management — employees didn’t know who to turn to or who to trust.”
“Dangerous working conditions and an ambiance of fear. Employees sent into the field on dangerous public transport to save money.”
“Employees strong armed into choosing work trips over keeping doctor's appointments. Office structure set up like a feudal lord system with people being fearful to express their opinions.”
“Inconsistencies in implementing policies across managers, the lack of compliance and ethics when issues were escalated to leadership and HR. It was a missed opportunity not to provide us with requests/benefits that were low hanging fruit for the organization.”
We unionized because…
we saw our organization valuing loyalty to management over performance and skill set
because beloved staff were fired without notice and without reason
because Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) weren’t measurable or specific, and were viewed as procedures with no intent of use by supervisor(s)
because everyone kept being given more work without any increase in pay
because staff were sent to remote locations where no other international NGOs travel, without hazard pay or security, and were sexually harassed, and when reporting it, were asked what they had done wrong
we spent years trying to improve our working conditions — we detailed suggestions in an annual employee morale survey, sent emails and articles with ideas, joined staff engagement committees, worked with Employee Resource Groups, talked about our experiences during 1:1s, and met with HR, our supervisors and directors
We wanted objective parameters for evaluations, clear guidelines for firing staff, transparency. After years of talking about how overworked and underpaid we were, after exhausting all options within the organization, we unionized.
I researched unions and called around. One local in Miami told me they only work with nurses. Another never got back to me. OPEIU called me back right away, and their Organizing Director happened to be in town. A group of us met up with Cindy Schu after work. She told us — and this was our experience — that even talking about unionizing can cause an employer to improve working conditions. It’s often easier and less expensive for an employer to just address the issues that workers bring up. We saw our working conditions improve quickly — people got promoted out of the unit, requests were suddenly approved, [click] a salary structure — albeit one with hilariously wide ranges, where all of us were at the bottom of the band — was unveiled, meetings were called, people had managers dangling promotions. But none of the core issues were addressed.
We expected the organization, the office, the managers to support us, to be proud of us for tending to the team, jumping in, returning to our mission. We expected to be given voluntary recognition & to enter into a difficult but civil negotiation.
We signed cards and continued talking and meeting and planning and hoping, and in January 2018, all of us who were eligible to be in the union crowded into our director’s office to request voluntary recognition. She said, “why are you telling me this?” “this is an HR issue” and “I don’t have time for this.” We were told that she had other priorities to attend to, such as a meeting that was starting soon.
Our union sent a letter we’d written, through certified mail, requesting voluntary recognition. Management contested the eligibility of a few of our members. I went to a hearing, in court, in a different city than where I live, to watch our director answer questions about me and my work, all without once looking at me.
Our nonprofit had hired a lawyer from a big New York firm, and she’d flown in for the occasion. In the afternoon of the hearing, before it was my turn to take the stand, their lawyer said Planned Parenthood had decided to let me be in the bargaining unit. I then received an email from my own manager, who for years I’d had a close, collaborative relationship with. I was threatened with a disciplinary meeting with HR for leaving work to attend the hearing they had compelled me to be at, and later I was told to use vacation time to cover those hours.
After the hearing, we had 11 eligible voters. The National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB, scheduled an election. In our work emails and above the copier, this note appeared.
We had a mixed election — people could vote in person in Tampa (which is 5 hours away from our office) or by mail. A few people never got their ballots by mail. Despite all of these hurdles set by PPFA, we won.
We worked together to write our proposal, putting in writing everything we’d been talking about. We learned as we went — reading other contracts, asking colleagues at unionized workplaces for advice, reading books about organizing. From March to August of 2018, we had eight or nine bargaining sessions. We rotated which two people would be at the table — we wanted all of us to be able to attend, but PPFA refused each time we asked.
Each session, it was two of us and our union rep, sitting across from the NY lawyer and an HR person. We would be paid for two hours of work time when we attended bargaining sessions during work hours, and would have to use vacation time for the rest. Those of us who weren’t allowed to attend the bargaining sessions provided support and resources — collecting information about parental leave and abortion coverage at sister organizations, reviewing counter proposals, drafting contract language, calling in to caucus.
The lawyer hired by PPFA was pregnant, and a few months into bargaining, she told us she could no longer travel. She said we needed to finalize the contract right then, that session, or else we’d have to wait until she was back from maternity leave. We offered to meet in New York to be able to continue negotiating. So, meetings were held in Miami and New York; and a few times staff used their own money to travel to and stay in New York City, so as not to delay the process.
At a bargaining session in June, we brought up an email from our Vice President saying there would be changes in the organization. In July, we were told that management “never thought about a position being lost” and that there is no “plan to restructure the work and/or phase out bargaining unit work.”
In late August, we had a tentative agreement on a three-year union contract.
We celebrated. We had seen so many things improve — we had the right to have someone from the union present for disciplinary meetings, we had guaranteed annual salary increases of at least 3%, we had to be given six weeks notice prior to layoffs and would receive severance benefits, we had written, contractually binding policies for taking a leave of absence, comp time, telecommuting, and working from home, we had guaranteed time off for voting, and an inclusion rider. There were sections of the contract we negotiated on, and ultimately didn't get what we wanted — parental leave, funding for professional development, limits on workload, having International Women’s Day as a holiday.
We’ll make our whole contract available to you.
On September 24th, our union representative notified us that layoffs were going to be happening very soon, but none of us expected it to be the very next day. As you can imagine this was upsetting, especially since those who were laid off in person weren’t even able to go to their desks and collect their personal belongings, but rather had to have them mailed to their homes in boxes. We were escorted to the elevators to ensure that we didn’t try to set foot in the office, all less than an hour after having arrived to work that day.
I was laid off on a day off. I had requested and been approved for a sick day to get day-long medical testing done. I found out when I had a lunch break, when I saw that all my accounts had been wiped.
Two people were laid off while on vacation, through a phone call from HR and the director. Between 8:30 and 10 am on September 25, 2018, six out of 11 people in our bargaining unit very suddenly were without a job. The official statement was that the division was “restructuring” — something an employer is entitled to do. This was an intentional political decision, by our employer. PPFA, who collaborates with unions when it’s convenient, and takes on the cloak of progressive values when it’s easy. The point of a system is what it does, and the system we’re in — our field — demonstrated its allegiance to power and privilege.
We experienced layoffs when we had a tentative agreement on our contract, but before it had been ratified.
What Unionizing Was Like
“Long and scary...the tension is palpable and you feel like your job (livelihood) is on the line. However, the alternative of seeing my colleagues being fired without recourse was also not an alternative. We work for such a mission/values driven organization, I couldn’t not see them continue to selectively choose their values without any accountability… I know that firings will continue to happen but [this] at least got them to establish a procedure where employees could get representation, demand a process and get severance.”
“It was necessary. Regardless of whether or not it made a difference, it was the right thing to do… I work with people, not with an organization. We deserve to be treated with respect.”
Advice for Others
“Get your top 3 priorities straight from the beginning. There’s so much we deserve and want to change but there’s really such a limited space for negotiation. We for example thought that maternity leave would be easy - we worked for PP after all - but it was one of the issues they fought us on the most.”
“Define your comfort levels mobilizing. For us it was difficult to agree on that. Some people felt comfortable walking out, some didn’t, some felt comfortable talking to the media, others didn’t, so that divided us and hampered our ability to mobilize obviously.”
“Be considerate with the people who are being the face of the bargaining unit. Take them out for drinks. If they have to travel, pitch in for traveling expenses.”
“Do it.”
“I suggest folks unionize or join a union, if possible. The intended outcome is better working conditions, better pay/benefits, having a fair due process, and systems in place in case of an organizational shift. We are much stronger together!”
“If you are able, do what's right. Know that it is always worth fighting for what you believe in. Understand that it won’t always give you the results you want, but that you do have more power as a group than you do alone.”
In closing, we’d like to thank a few people who radicalized us:
We’d like to thank our Regional Director at the time, who after the layoffs was promoted
under whose leadership our office laid off every single queer person, even before we started unionizing
And who laid off the only two Black Latinx people in an office of mostly white women and non black Latinas
We’d like to thank our previous Vice President
who stood before us grinning when a beloved coworker was laid off
who said any future layoffs would be “decent and human” and she’d be “happy to be held responsible for the decisions we’re making in management”
who spoke of “resources being used wisely with the most impact” and then didn’t use our resources wisely
We’d like to thank our HR “business partner”
who said interns should be happy to work for free for such a prestigious institution
who served us champagne to boost office morale, the same week HQ emailed about policies stating drinking wasn’t allowed during work time
who flew from NY to Miami many times to hide in a conference room for a few hours to lay people off and tell them it was due to funding constraints
who sat across from us at the bargaining table and told us she “didn’t know” the organization’s budget a month into the fiscal year
In an environment where leadership is morally bankrupt, we need to tell the truth. We need radical transparency. On pay, on parental leave, on working conditions, on anything that those who have power tell us to keep quiet about. We need to disinfect our field, of authoritarianism, capitalism, sexism, racism, heterosexism, cis-ism, and more.
Management's power depends on us having no alternatives. Unionizing is an alternative, a transformative act of love & the enactment of my most deeply held values. I hope tasting the heady wine of the possibility of achieving liberation propels you to make yourself proud. Bravery is a muscle, and it atrophies when we are silent about injustice. When trouble-making, remember to identify who you are protecting. Does your actions protect the powerful, or the vulnerable? Does your silence appease the oppressor?
Comrades, we work in a field ostensibly devoted to health, rights, and justice. Generosity is not justice. Our leaders were morally compromised despite holding themselves up as beacons of progress. Doing the right thing is important for our own humanity. ¡Si se puede! Union yes!
Thank you so much for joining us this evening. Thank you to all of our panelists. You can learn more about their work and union organizing at npeu.org and traumainformeddoula.com. If you have questions for any of the presenters or about union organizing, you can follow up with them via the contact information they gave on the webinar or by emailing us at hello+union@reprojobs.org.
Thanks again and don’t forget to pay your interns!