Welcome to the OYO newsletter!

Why we're doing this and why nonprofit workers need unions.

When power rests at the top in our workplaces, conditions and culture crumble, we “suffer for the cause,” and tyranny reigns supreme. Workers around the country are exhausted, burnt out, and fed up with this status quo. If you’re feeling similarly, then maybe it’s time to organize your organization. We’re here to help you own your power as a worker.

We created Organize Your Organization! because we’re witnessing first-hand the surge in union campaigns across the nonprofit sector. So many workers are realizing that they want to take workplace democracy into their own hands - so much so that unions can’t keep up! But that doesn’t mean that you need to wait around and twiddle your thumbs until a union organizer reaches out to you. We wrote Organize Your Organization! A Guide to Unionizing Your Nonprofit Workplace to put the tools directly into your hands. 

We’re Caitlin, Isabel, Danny, and Meg, and we’re the founders of Organize Your Organization. Isabel is a union organizer who works for Communications Workers of America (CWA) in the Denver Newspaper Guild, and Caitlin, Danny, and Meg are co-founders of Breach Collective, a unionized environmental nonprofit that is in CWA Local 7901.

There are many different organizing guides out there, but traditional organizing models don’t always work in every situation. Your nonprofit workplace faces different challenges and different working environments than the industrial shop floors where traditional unionizing techniques were developed. In order to have the best chance of unionizing your workplace, your guide should be specific to your needs. If that interests you, download the handbook here for free. 

We’re excited to start sharing more in-depth discussions of topics covered in our handbook, Organize Your Organization!, and to bring you first-hand stories from nonprofit workers who have gone through the unionization process firsthand. 

Audio: Caitlin talks about why we started Organize Your Organization!

But why are we on Substack? As we were writing, we knew that there were topics we wanted to dig into further, but if we did, the handbook would be twice as long and feel way too overwhelming for a worker using it as a guide. Here, we'll go deeper into topics we covered broadly in the handbook, from how to assess your workplace for a successful union campaign to winning voluntary recognition and bargaining a first contract. We’ll also bring you stories from workers who have unionized their nonprofits, so you can see real-world examples that prove that it’s possible for you to take these strategies and apply them to your own workplace.

But first, let’s lay some groundwork.

Why Do Workers Need Unions?

You’ve probably seen the headlines about - and experienced the effects of - issues like the housing crisis, wage stagnation while corporate profits soar, companies violating labor law and receiving a slap on the wrist at most, and more. To oversimplify it, workers face a lot of challenges today, and it can be easy to fall into despair and hopelessness. While that may feel cathartic for a bit, we have a longer term solution that could help fix these issues: camaraderie and action.

Workers in America have been, for the most part, intentionally disenfranchised by the ruling class— left unable to stick up or advocate for ourselves for the fear of getting fired. Under our current legal and political systems, the strongest defense we have is to band together in solidarity to advocate for ourselves as a collective that demands legal recognition and action. In other words, by unionizing. 

Unions aren’t a cure-all. You don’t vote for a union in your workplace and suddenly have all of your problems disappear. But they’re the best tool we have to reach the solutions we need—from higher pay, stronger job security, and safer workplaces in our contracts, to political advocacy and environmental action in our unions at large. 

Audio: Meg talks about the challenges and rewards of the bargaining process.

Our bosses rely on us feeling hopeless and separated from each other in order to exploit our labor without getting blamed—instead, they rely on us fighting each other for scraps. By unionizing, you’re expanding the fight toward the common enemy, and instead of fighting for scraps, you’re demanding that we get a bigger pie. Each individual union in a workplace is contributing to the larger fight against inequality, and it’s making a difference. Unions built the middle class. We can do that again!

That’s our general argument for unions, but not every worker has the same experience. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t work for a corporation or private business—but you need a union, too.

Why Do Nonprofit Workers Need Unions?

Audio: Danny talks about the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.

If you’ve worked in the nonprofit sector in any capacity, you’re probably aware of a few general things:

• This is deeply important work. 

• Workers care deeply about their work and the mission of their organization. 

• Employers will, to some extent, take advantage of that passion to wring more work out of their employees for less pay;

• Being responsive to grants and the funding of the owning class can sometimes compromise the effectiveness of the organization to carry out its mission. 

Those last two bullet points create the foundation of the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, or NPIC. When thinking of the role of nonprofits in society at large, the ruling class would like them to be projects that serve the community to their liking, rather than centering the community’s true needs. The nonprofits then rely on exploiting the labor of their workers to carry out that work, which can often stray from what the workers believe is needed to actually fulfill their mission. This is the NPIC in action, and it leads to the upsetting trend we’ve seen of workers burning out and moving on. 

So what can workers do about it? We contend that you should take the passion and energy you have for your work, as well as the expertise you have as the people on the ground, and use it to balance out the power dynamic in your workplace. Ideally, a nonprofit union is a tool for workers to not only better their working conditions and compensation, but to have more of a direct role in the direction of their work to center it more on the mission and less on what the ruling class wants their mission to be. This philosophy, of using unions for a larger social mission and understanding your contract not just as a tool for your workplace but as part of the larger class struggle, is aptly termed Class Struggle Unionism. Read Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns to learn more. 

Audio: Isabel talks about the place of nonprofit workers in the labor movement.

You won’t be alone in the fight to unionize your nonprofit—while it’s a newer movement compared to the American labor movement overall, nonprofit sectors like education, healthcare, and the arts have a strong union history and presence. However, the advocacy or social movement nonprofit sector—what many people think of when they think of a nonprofit—has an even younger history. 

One of the first major nonprofits to unionize was the Sierra Club. They began their union campaign in the early 1980s, and were able to withstand union busting tactics to win a first contract around a decade later. That union has grown into the Progressive Workers Union, which now represents workers at organizations such as 350.org and Greenpeace USA. The first nonprofit union to represent multiple workplaces, the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, grew out of the Economic Policy Institute’s successful union campaign in 1998.

While nonprofit unionizing efforts stagnated through the 2000s and early 2010s, many groups began unionizing in the late 2010s. By our count, over 60 progressive advocacy nonprofit unions have won recognition from their employers by late 2023, in about a 5-year period. Even more remarkable is that many of these unions won their campaigns through their employers granting voluntary recognition—at a rate much higher than the national average. There’s no sign that this is a temporary trend, either. Many nonprofits are continuing to begin organizing campaigns, or maintaining momentum in their fights for fair contracts. That’s why we believe putting the tools into the hands of the workers directly is so important.

This is just a brief overview of the context in which we find ourselves as union organizers. There are many other wonderful resources out there that we urge you to utilize as you dive into the world of nonprofit unionizing. On Substack, we recommend Eric Blanc’s Labor Politics and Hamilton Nolan’s How Things Work. We also, of course, recommend reading Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns and No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey. Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement, edited by Jeff Ordower and Lindsay Zafir, is another great option for short essays about the intersections between labor and climate activism. 

We’re excited to keep contributing to the nonprofit labor movement, and so glad that you’re here with us. We’ll see you again soon.