Unionizing when you love your job.
A real-world story from Western Watersheds Workers.
Earlier this year, we wrote about why it can still be valuable – if not more so – to form a union when you love your job. We want to show you what that looks like in practice.
Meet Cyndi Tuell. She’s the Arizona & New Mexico Director at Western Watersheds Project (WWP), a small nonprofit working to protect and restore western public lands. She’s also the president of Western Watersheds Workers union. Like many nonprofit workers, Cyndi came to the sector driven by a passion to make a positive impact. When she landed a job at Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) fighting for a cause she loved, she felt like she had hit the jackpot. But as most nonprofit workers know, often our investment in the cause is exploited by our bosses, and we end up “suffering for the cause.” That’s what happened for Cyndi, too.
Cyndi wasn’t ready to give up on doing the kind of environmental activism she loved. Happily, her next job turned out much better. Right from the start it felt different than her experience at CBD. With better pay, more flexibility, and a mostly horizontal decision-making structure, Cyndi flourished at WWP. She and her colleagues had a real voice. Her superiors, who were people she trusted and even counted as friends, genuinely wanted to build a healthy workplace. And for the most part, they had. But Cyndi was still thinking about unionizing – even the best workplaces can benefit from forming a union, and Cyndi was fortunate to have a boss supportive of the idea from the very start.
What’s striking about Cyndi’s unionization story is what doesn’t show up. There was no anxiety about her boss finding out or having to keep conversations absolutely covert, and no concern about whether or not they’d receive recognition or have to go through an election. From the beginning, she and her coworkers were able to talk openly about forming a union, without worrying about risking their jobs. The type of support and enthusiasm that her boss showed is what every worker organizing a union hopes for from their employers. Bosses like him are unfortunately too few and far between.
Of course, peace of mind doesn’t mean there weren’t legitimate reasons for organizing a union. As Cyndi makes clear, the issue wasn’t a toxic work environment or any type of hostility, it was structure. We often talk with workers about the principle of “nothing about us without us”: even the most well-intentioned bosses can make decisions that affect you without being accountable to you. That’s exactly what Cyndi and her colleagues experienced.
The specific moment that triggered the organizing effort was the sudden announcement of a switch to a 4-day work week. It looks great on paper, and the intentions were good, but the decision was made without consulting staff. It made something clear: no matter how much they liked and respected their bosses, the lack of a formal structure for their voices to be heard left them vulnerable to sudden shifts in working conditions. This built a shared understanding among staff that forming a union was about creating a collective and lasting process for decision-making.
Cyndi and her coworkers were also thinking long term. Their boss might be supportive now, but what about the next one? What about future boards, or future budget shortfalls? Unionizing wasn’t a way to fix a broken workplace, it was a way to protect the current working conditions and work culture they valued long into the future. As Cyndi put it, locking in good conditions through a contract meant that staff wouldn’t have to rely on goodwill alone. They could rely on tangible power in their workplace.
The reality of shifting power structures still created some tension, despite shared pro-union values and good pre-existing relationships between staff and management. As Cyndi explains in the clip below, it can be easier to support the idea of a union than to comply with the practice of sharing decision-making power. The subtle union-busting rhetoric that cropped up after management voluntarily recognized the union reveals that even in healthy, pro-union workplaces, emotional tensions and unspoken power dynamics can still surface.
Even in an organization that strives to be non-hierarchical, if there are bosses then there are elements of hierarchy. Unionizing creates a healthy and necessary boundary between workers and their supervisors. For close-knit teams like the one at WWP, that boundary can feel like a rupture. But Cyndi and her coworkers were clear: protecting worker power sometimes requires stepping back from informal closeness in order to build something more durable. A contract ensures that worker power is built into the structure of the workplace itself.
As we explain in our OYO Guide to Unionizing Your Nonprofit Workplace, most workers who unionize choose to affiliate their union with an established “parent union”, like Communication Workers of America (CWA), Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (NPEU), or Progressive Workers Union (PWU). These parent unions can offer resources and support. Unfortunately, as Cyndi and her colleagues discovered, many of the parent unions that commonly work with nonprofits lack capacity right now to take on new members. For that reason and others, many workers decide to form “independent unions” that are not affiliated with a parent union, and that’s exactly what the staff at WWP decided to do. As Cyndi explains, that was the right choice for WWP, but that doesn’t mean it’s the easiest route for every organizing workplace.
In a small organization, every relationship matters. Cyndi and her colleagues knew that they didn’t want just a majority to vote in favor of a union; they wanted full consensus from every eligible worker. They knew that this would strengthen both the union and the workplace moving forward. Their process proves that you don’t need conflict to unionize.
When we spoke with Cyndi, we asked what advice she might share as someone coming out of these early phases of a successful unionization process. If you’re a nonprofit worker thinking about or already trying to organize your workplace, this is for you!
Cyndi’s experience at Western Watersheds Project demonstrates that it’s possible to improve even an already happy, functional workplace by unionizing. This doesn’t mean there won’t be bumps in the road – shifting power dynamics rarely comes without tension. But when relationships with management are already good, it can give workers a leg up when trying to navigate a union campaign effectively and with mutual respect.
We hope that this discussion inspires both workers and bosses alike to imagine what could be possible at your workplace.
BONUS CLIP
Cyndi talked to us about the precarity of the conservation movement right now under the Trump administration. She discusses the crucial role of nonprofit workers (especially unionized ones!) in building power within and bridges between the environmental movement and social justice and labor movements. This insight feels more important than ever, and for workers in any movement trying to resist fascism.
You can follow Western Watershed Workers’ union journey on Instagram.
