We tried to unionize and failed. Here's what I learned.

The author has worked in social justice organizing, including immigrant justice, for over a decade and resides in the western United States.

Working at an immigrant rights organization while Trump waged unprecendented, white supremacist, anti-immigrant attacks on immigrant communities was hard enough. Having to fight internal battles while we were exploited as workers was doubly exhausting. We failed to unionize at a significant cost to the organization’s integrity. But the collective experience of our attempt granted us a deeper commitment and alignment with liberatory politics, a victory in its own right.

Workplace organizing is fundamentally about building relationships so that we can transform material conditions to ensure all employees can thrive. Union organizing is critical to progressive change—we cannot have one without the other. But given our impossible workload, unionizing felt overwhelming. How do you find time to organize and unionize when you are regularly working 10-12 hour days? 

We were underpaid and overworked: the underlying expectations and organizational culture dictated that we make ourselves available all day, disproportionately burdensome for staff with children or caregiving responsibilities. Management dismissed issues of burnout and sustainability by telling staff to "practice more self-care” without adjusting workload, expectations, salaries, or benefits, shifting the blame onto individual workers instead of examining the organizational culture and practices. Many of our staff were undocumented, formerly undocumented, immigrants, or came from an immigrant family, so the work was very personal. This personal connection to the work was exploited unscrupulously by the organization: the management often talked about how “we were all a family” and failed to address oppressive power dynamics in place regardless of how close we might (or might not) be. 

We were underpaid and overworked: the underlying expectations and organizational culture dictated that we make ourselves available all day, disproportionately burdensome for staff with children or caregiving responsibilities. Management dismissed issues of burnout and sustainability by telling staff to "practice more self-care” without adjusting workload, expectations, salaries, or benefits, shifting the blame onto individual workers instead of examining the organizational culture and practices. Many of our staff were undocumented, formerly undocumented, immigrants, or came from an immigrant family, so the work was very personal. This personal connection to the work was exploited unscrupulously by the organization: the management often talked about how “we were all a family” and failed to address oppressive power dynamics in place regardless of how close we might (or might not) be. 

While I worked there, the organization doubled in size from 12 staff to almost 24 staff in a span of a year. New staff—meant to alleviate existing workload—instead took on new areas of work, which meant our initial work overload remained the same and, in some cases, increased because returning staff had additional responsibilities of onboarding or supervising.

Even without unionizing, workers sharing information with each other  helped us advocate for ourselves. We recognized that the lack of transparency around salaries is fundamentally disadvantageous to workers, so we voluntarily disclosed and discussed our salaries. We discovered that managers shared conflicting information regarding salaries: cost of living adjustments were granted to some people but not others; our salaries were pitted against each other’s (I was denied a salary raise after being told that another coworker needed to get a raise first, only to find out that that same coworker never got the raise); our lowest paid staff made only $33,000 a year, and this was even after a 10% increase that came one full year later than promised, while our executive director made a six-figure salary which was almost 5 times as much as the salary of our lowest paid staff member. Our organization focused on economic justice for immigrants yet reinforced income inequality within its own ranks. 

Based on our new knowledge, we pushed the organization to establish and disclose a pay scale for each position. We requested union-friendly managers to uplift these concerns during the 

management meetings, which put these issues as a staff retreat agenda item. We directly voiced and discussed our concerns during the staff retreat, which forced the executive director to issue an official response and create a work plan to address internal organizational issues.

We worked to expand health care access for low-income undocumented immigrants alongside reproductive justice organizations, while our own health benefits were in limbo with no information about upcoming changes. When several of us protested a newly introduced mandatory drug testing for new employees (a racist policy that has been systematically deployed to exclude people of color from the very social safety net programs the organization advocated to protect and expand) a management team member defended the policy and said that “as a woman,” she needs “a safe space given the #MeToo movement.” She weaponized her identity as a straight, cisgender woman and implied that substance use is the cause of sexual violence to justify a racist policy while shutting down concerns from other women and queer staff.

What my experience taught me again is that our work is urgent, and that treating workers fairly should be afforded the same urgency.  We can be more effective when we ourselves as workers are treated with dignity and respect.

I wish we had started our unionizing process earlier, not waiting until more crises and more serious incidents happened. We never went public even though we had enough votes. Many of us decided to leave the organization, a quarter of the staff exiting in the span of six months. But we still learned a lot through the process. We developed deeper love and respect for each other, which also made us more effective as a team. I felt less isolated and more empowered to engage in a process to advocate for ourselves. Even though almost every single person involved in our unionizing effort has left the organization, many of us are still in touch with one another.

As we struggled through our unionizing effort, what helped keep me centered was knowing that everyone moves at different speeds and needs to go through their own process. Being clear about why each person was invested in unionizing, sharing fears and anxieties, and having clear boundaries about what tactics and strategies people felt comfortable with were key. As a team, we also talked with seasoned union organizers to develop a shared understanding of what the process looks like. 

We also connected and strategized with other nonprofit workers, who shared similar struggles at their organizations. I am happy to report that two of those organizations have unionized, exposing structural issues within the nonprofit sector. 

We must organize, even if we may lose. Even though we were not successful in our efforts to unionize, every single one of us now has the tools to unionize at our current or future organizations. As we advocate for a more just world, all we can ask of ourselves is to keep pushing and to celebrate smaller wins along the way.