A Note About the Future of ReproJobs

Dear ReproJobs Community,

When I first co-founded ReproJobs in July 2014, I never imagined it would be the labor-organizing home it is today. It was an impromptu idea to help a friend find a well-paying job with healthcare and benefits in a movement she loved. The work we do is hard enough; finding a job that allows us to earn a thriving wage and build our families on our own terms shouldn’t be an added stress. I designed a logo, set up a Facebook and Twitter account, and started posting jobs. It was a hobby done in free time.

A year later, ReproJobs shifted when we started challenging the racism and anti-Blackness that is pervasive within our workplaces. We called on our community to address the way our offices continued to operate as normal while Black people were being murdered by police with abandon. We knew that as a movement we could not achieve our goals of reproductive freedom and abortion justice so long as anti-Blackness exists in our world, our health system, and in our movement. With all of you, we began organizing workplaces to challenge systems that burned us out, replicated the racist systems we’re trying to remove, and made it difficult for all of us to make a living working toward justice. We felt the call to shift our work to be more proactive in creating a better movement that ensures that we can access the same policies that we lobby politicians over. 

Because of this shift, a program officer at a foundation reached out to help us grow our work because she knew the power of a paid internship for folks coming from low-income and working-class families. With her investment in 2019, we were able to transform our work in a new way.

We set our sights on educating our movement about the connections with labor organizing. We set up a blog to give you all a platform to discuss the policies you’d like to see and answer your questions about union organizing. We held webinars on forming unions. We wrote about how to break into this movement with great application materials. We analyzed our movements’ workplace policies and issued a report on paid parental leave. We asked all of you to share how much money you make so we could analyze disparities in pay resulting in two reports. We set up a jobs board so you could find jobs, internships, and fellowships with pay and benefits listed clearly. We built a salary database so you could go into salary negotiations with confidence and data. We set up the Repro Worker Aid Fund to support workers who lost their jobs because of the fall of Roe. We hired a career counselor to support everyone who needed help retooling their résumé and finding a job in this new landscape. Everything we did was to make sure that workers had what they needed.

When we started, we knew of only three unions in the repro movement. Now, there are over 50 with more forming every day. When we started, salaries and benefits were listed on a handful of job descriptions. Now, it’s on every single one. We’ve heard from you that with our resources you’ve been able to change organizational policies and structures, advocate for higher pay, and find your dream jobs. You’ve organized your colleagues and formed unions. What we started, you all took and ran with. You’re finishing the job. 

That’s why we’ve decided, after ten phenomenal years, to sunset our work on our tenth anniversary in July 2024.

We are so proud of the work that we have accomplished with all of you. We are honored by the trust you put in us to support you as you dream up solutions for better working conditions during one of the most difficult political moments our movement has ever seen. We are humbled by the community that we built, and we know that the community is strong enough to last beyond us.

We know this may come as a surprise or shock to a lot of you, but we think it’s the right thing to do. To be clear, this was our decision and our decision alone. It is a decision that we have been thinking about for nearly two years, and we felt that our 10th anniversary was the best time to bookend our work. We did not lose funding. We did not receive threats based on our political stances or our work. We simply believed that it was time to move forward and make space for new leaders who could dedicate the time and energy to this work, with fresh ideas, from a worker’s perspective.

Organizations do not need to live forever. Leaders need to know when it’s time to step aside and make space for new voices and visions. Not only that, but my role has shifted within the movement and it is critical that this work is led by people who are workers within it. I am confident that new voices with brilliant and imaginative ideas will take our place. Indeed, some already have.

As for our next steps, we are proud to continue programming, publishing our newsletter and jobs board, posting on social media, answering your emails, and accepting applications for the Repro Worker Aid Fund through July 31, 2024. We will continue to make our career counselor sessions available to you all, free of charge, through the end of 2024. Our website will live on for as many years as it can, however it will not be updated after our sunset. We will begin a spend down of our budget on our programmatic work which will include sponsorship of trainings and workshops, as well as donations to organizations that are supporting repro workers.

This isn’t an absolute goodbye. Rather, it’s us fading back into the masses of repro workers, and allied managers, organizing for a better future for all of us. We’ll still be around. We’ll still be organizing beside you, just like we always have.

In solidarity and labor justice,
A Co-Founder of ReproJobs