“It would be foolish to pretend that our jobs aren't political”: Social Workers Organizing for Power in the Nonprofit Sector

In 1965, more than 8,000 New York City welfare workers, including social service workers and clerical staff, spent 28 frigid January days engaged in a strike. While pay, benefits, and respect on the job for a largely female and people of color workforce were main issues, so were the rights of clients—also largely women of color. Reducing high caseloads that made the provision of respectful, quality services next to impossible was a key demand. This story, the founding narrative of New York City's Social Services Employees Union (SSEU) Local 371, AFSCME DC 37, paved the way for secure, public sector union jobs for social service workers in NYC in child welfare, shelter services, and public assistance (Schleicher, n.d.). In the decade that followed, social service workers in other states organized, contributed to a growth in public sector unions, and improved pay, benefits, and working conditions. However, just as public sector social service workers were beginning to consolidate power, the Social Security Act Amendments of 1962 and 1967 authorized new contracting arrangements that led to a system of private social service delivery, where labor organizing faced different challenges, and workers faced increasingly worse pay and benefits (Abramovitz & Zelnick, 2021).

Since then, nonprofit social service workers have seen declining wages and working conditions. Beginning in the 1970s, an organized attack on the welfare state emerged that sought to undercut public trust in government and to stigmatize users of social services (Abramovitz, 2004/2005). During the Reagan administration, social service block grants were introduced to reduce the flow of federal money to the states to fund social services. In the 1990s, moves to privatize social services put pressure on agencies to underbid contracts. Taken together, these processes transformed the nonprofit sector so that productivity, accountability, efficiency, standardization, and performance measurement were increasingly prioritized over agency mission, community accountability, and social justice. Known as managerialism- or the business model—social service agencies sought to “do more with less,” often stretching their workforce thin in ways that led to burnout, health and safety hazards, and low job satisfaction (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020). Privatization also amounted to a direct attack on public sector unions intended to drive down the cost of labor; cheaper, nonunion, contracted workers were seen as another way to hold down costs. With some exceptions, these years saw a decrease in the number of social service union members, as rates of unionization declined among U.S. workers overall (Rosenberg & Rosenberg, 2006).

Recently, there has been talk about workers’ new-found power vis a vis their employers, as an unprecedented number of workers in multiple low and moderate wage service and educational sectors are leaving their jobs. Reasons touted include a surplus of jobs compared to applicants, caregivers’ exodus from the workforce, or a re-evaluation of the so-called essential workers’ sacrifices during COVID-19. Given this, we were wondering about the opportunities for organizing nonprofit social service jobs, and the creative strategies being considered on the frontlines. We sat down with two labor organizers, Natasha Pasternak and Lili Gecker, to learn about how organizing assemblies of social service workers in the United States are focusing on working conditions and union organizing among the nonprofit workforce. Natasha (along with Sunny Maguire) is a founding member of Social Service Workers Uprising Now (SSWUN) in New York City; Lili is part of Social Service Workers United (SSWU) in Chicago. They are also both members of workplace labor unions that include social workers as well as people in other positions. They shared how they have applied their union experiences and commitment to social justice to organizing in the nonprofit sector.

“There's always this talk of a magical unicorn social work job”: Motivation for organizing nonprofit workers

Lili: I'm from Chicago. Before I went to grad school, I did some organizing. I worked at SEIU (Service Employees International Union) launching the Faculty Forward campaign in Chicago. I'm a licensed clinical social worker, a little over three years post grad, and I work at a large social service agency in Chicago that is unionized. I am chief steward of my workplace union and a delegate with the local. I’m also an early member of Social Service Workers United (SSWU), which is a group in Chicago started by some of my classmates at University of Chicago. When it started, the focus was on gaps in our social work education; we read-anti capitalist and anti-racist material. By the time we were graduating, there was a Social Work/Labor meeting that was done in collaboration with Chicago's DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] labor branch, and we have continued to partner with them to build national networks. We’ve done national Zoom training in partnership with the group in New York. A lot of these groups started popping up around the same time, in Chicago, New York, Boston, Austin, Texas, Baltimore, Western Mass, and LA. In some ways, moving to a more virtual world in the pandemic made these connections easier.

Natasha: I graduated in 2014 and was one of the founding members of SSWUN in New York City. SSWUN started as an offshoot of an [Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College-CUNY] MSW Alumni group that Sunny Maguire started in 2013, as a place for sharing self-advocacy, skills, and networking ideas, with the belief that community was needed to promote wellness, health, mobility, and justice in the profession. SSWUN was started as the activist offshoot. In the alumni group, people were posting about their crappy job conditions, and I was bouncing between nonprofits myself and also experiencing poor job conditions. Prior to grad school, I worked in non-profit child welfare agencies in Buffalo, New York and then I interned at DC [district council] 37, an AFSCME [American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees] local conglomerate. I interned in the legal services department; they paid me, and I loved being there. But then I had to leave because it was an internship, and I worked at several nonprofits and it was terrible, all of them, basically, had the same problems. My salary never went up; there’s always this talk of a magical unicorn social work job that's going to get needed clinical hours [for LCSW licensure] and pay a decent salary with health insurance and a pension. It was just increasingly clear that none of that was true. I did eventually get a job working for the state government. I’m now a union member in DC 37, local 1070, which includes the county court department of probation employees. I’m one of 11 social workers in that local out of 1,700 people.

In the alumni group someone posted about a nurses’ strike at the University of Albany. We thought that was so cool—it just seemed like we could do that. A group of us got together, this woman let us use her beautiful psychotherapy office. It was really awkward at first, because we were random people from the Internet. We started talking about work, and we decided that we would continue to meet. We started a salary share spreadsheet that evolved into the labor organizing work we do now. It was clear that everybody’s nonprofit got money from the government to do services, and all of these nonprofits pay exactly the same and it’s terrible. We thought what needs to happen is for all of us to unionize or come together in some other way. I had a previous relationship with DC 37, so I reached out and invited people from the organizing department to a SSWUN meeting last November. That turned into the labor working group, and that’s where we are now.

“Can you do more for your staff so they stay?”: Reviving a neglected union—Lili

I’m employed by a large, faith-based multi-service agency in Chicago. My union is very interesting because our bargaining unit covers multiple, different kinds of affiliated agencies. It’s a very diverse set of workers including custodial staff, clerical workers, case management, social work, healthcare, including nursing and certified nursing assistants (CNAs), among others. When I started, this bargaining unit had around 1,000 people covered under the contract, they sold some sites and now it’s around 750. This unit is decades old. At some point, everybody was a union member, but something happened, some kind of union-busting bad deal that sold off the majority of the membership, so that now the structure is if you are classified as a non-professional worker, you are required to be a member, if you are classified as a professional worker it’s optional, but you get all the same benefits of the contract. So, members were the people working in the residential facilities, CNAs, dining services, disability services, clerical workers, and custodial staff. Those benefiting but not in the union were social workers, nurses, teachers, development associates, programmatic staff, so a huge divide across class, race, and religion. Those “required” union jobs are lower paid, dominated more by people of color. It’s a divide that's unsettling and oppressive, and I think it has created a dynamic where some of the people classified as professionals think the union is not for them, “the union is for the CNA but I’m a nurse.” It also created a dynamic where people who made $60,000 were getting the raises off of the backs minimum wage workers who were paying dues.

When I started, it took me six months to figure out how to join the union. I asked for the seniority list, but they didn’t have it updated, it was a mess. I found out that our membership at the time was 39%. Organizing hadn’t happened in a while, and there was no infrastructure or workplace leadership, and little connection between the workers and the local. That was February 2019, and our contract expired at the end of the year, so I thought, “let's do this” and jumped into gear. By the time we were doing our contract, our membership was like 52%, so it had gone up 13% in a really short time.

We were successful. When I accepted the job, my salary was $34,500—and that had been the salary for a long time. I thought, “okay, well when I get my clinical license in two years, it will probably go up.” And then I found out that the raise for getting your clinical license was $1,000. That was one of the lowest paid LCSW jobs you could find in Chicago in 2018. But, in bargaining, they threw a bunch of money at us. They raised base pay to $42,000; my salary went up $7,000 overnight. Then, we also won 5% raises for the first year, so that came in July 2020, then we negotiated a 10% increase for clinical licensure, so my salary went up 15% in the pandemic, then another 3% this July. Across the board, everyone got a 3% increase. We also got paid parental leave, MLK day recognized for the first time, the day after Thanksgiving, and my nonprofit got a floating holiday. We also happened to negotiate for a Health and Safety Committee, which turned out to be very convenient during the pandemic.

Many of us were new to the agency, none of us knew what we were doing, but we accomplished a lot, a lot of organizing around pandemic issues (we just did bargaining around vaccine mandates), and in our negotiations we submitted a proposal for workloads for clinical counseling staff. The struggle over workloads is a separate story in and of itself; they actually hired a consultant and tried numerous tricks to undercut our arguments and get us to agree to their proposals. Somewhere in the midst of this, our union delivered a petition and did a Zoom meeting, where we all had the purple SEIU backgrounds. People shared testimonials, we had client feedback surveys. There was a client who wrote, “Can you do more for your staff so they stay?” Our waitlist for counseling services was getting up to nine months. We had 50% of our staff leave in a year. So, we're understaffed, managers have left; it’s a mass exodus and their answer is just to increase workloads for the people who are here. Their plan is to hire contract hourly workers to replace full-time jobs, then they don't have to pay benefits. These contracted workers don’t have to go to staff meetings, they are just going to see 8–10 clients, or whatever it is. This is our current struggle.

“Bargaining for the common good as social workers”: Natasha

Bargaining for the common good as social workers, whether we work for the government or nonprofits, we’re at the forefront of social issues every day. We are not experts, our clients are the experts, but we are observing, and we're in a unique position to bring some of these issues to the attention of our managers and people we’re bargaining with, but also people who make decisions. If we have a voice, there's a lot we can say, and I think that when social workers are in unions, they’re more able to speak out. What made me feel empowered to speak out was that I knew that I wouldn't lose my job. Other types of workers have had that protection for a long time, and they’ve used that in different ways, but I think their jobs are inherently different from ours. Not just because we are helping people, but because we are complicit in the systems that we know are hurting them.

There are many reasons to have issues with the way many unions currently run; some of them have done ridiculous or terrible things, part of that is because the voices that have been invited into those spaces are not actually representative of the workforce. So, getting more people into those spaces is key, increasing that pluralism, particularly social workers, because I think this is such a cool job and what we do is so important, getting those sorts of professions into unions, we're going to be able to make important changes. Once unions see that people like Lili are energized, people like me are energized, they may invest more resources. Unions want members, we have a compelling story to tell as social workers, and it is effective for making change, and it is effective for building membership and strong, active unions.

With a union, I feel empowered at my job to call a group of people together to talk about our working conditions. A lot of nonprofits are very small, and it can be a good thing, but that can also be a bad thing—if working conditions are bad, but you sit right next to your boss and everybody's getting a margarita after work, it's complicated. These relationships get really messy. I didn’t feel safe to be unhappy—or to make change—because I knew the boss as a person, I was part of a nice show. It wasn’t the place to talk about how foundation grants come with caveats that are really problematic, or that some of these contracts that we’re getting from the state or local government are unacceptable, or the way people are using our services is inappropriate. It wasn't really okay to talk about those things because these tiny nonprofits are financially fighting for their lives, all of the time. And you're very much a representative of that agency, all the time.

“We’re doing this for our clients”: Lili

We compare ourselves to nurses, who try to organize for power on behalf of their patients and patient safety. Another comparison is teachers—bargaining for the common good, like the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). They went on strike [in 2019] for a nurse and a social worker and a librarian in every school. I think it’s a really important frame and motivation: we’re doing this for our clients!

When I started at my agency, everybody in my office was working a second job. My co-worker, a single mother, worked a second job to make ends meet. But one full-time job should be enough, so I can get some sleep, take care of my family and also take care of my clients. And what about the right to self-care? When you interview for social work jobs, they explain that you're going to be exposed to a lot of trauma and ask if you have a self-care plan. But, that isn’t enough, you need the pay, you need the benefits, you need the boundaries—to not be on call all the time.

I had a crisis recently and had to work late, and I was able to log that time and take an hour and a half off of my next Friday. Setting those boundaries is really important; I think it keeps us invested in the work. I think people stay longer. I’m not sure what the market is like in other cities, but in Chicago anybody can get a job at a private practice—you don’t have to even be fully licensed. I’ve gotten contacted by recruiters on LinkedIn, someone emailed me at my work email. The jobs are out there, right now. It's a choice that people are making to stay in nonprofits, and having sane working conditions is really important.

“Social work is in a fight for its life—at least a fight for its soul”: Natasha and Lili

Lili: In terms of issues like bargaining for the common good, something I’ve come to realize is that social services in this country are privatized and that makes union organizing really, really hard. It’s the austerity, our nonprofits are fighting for all the same grants, and there isn’t enough money to go around. In bargaining, they literally said to us, “we can't tax people more to pay for this” and “we're relying on what the donors give us.” I think there would just be a lot more opportunity to unionize and to organize if we had Medicare for all and higher Medicaid reimbursement rates. If they defund the police, they could move that money to social services, but in Chicago all the community health centers were shut down—there’s only four. There are no public sector community mental health centers, it’s all private nonprofits. There are a lot of people in SSWU in Chicago who would love it if SSWU became an actual union like National Nurses United or the American Federation of Teachers. Social workers could just join, from workplaces like yours, Natasha, where there are only a few social workers. At the same time, I think it is much better to have a wall-to-wall workplace union and have everybody in the social service agency organized.

Natasha: I think we’ve lost our social justice focus. Social work has moved towards a medical model. I think professionalization has not always been our friend. There's a lot of being pitted against other professions and being pitted against our clients. “Oh well, you're BA level and you're a case manager, oh you're doing the peer health model, and yeah you're in recovery, but that's not the same as a license,” right? I think there's just a lot of competition within the field and separation from our clients and the way that we’re trained, there's a lot of issues there. For me, my dream is bargaining for the common good. Poverty doesn’t have to exist, it’s not a naturally occurring thing in nature. A lot of us are working in these organizations that are all about serving low-income people, or this or that marginalized or oppressed population. But we’re not doing anything to address the systems of oppression, and nonprofits tend to be very apolitical. Nonprofits are scared to touch it because of 501c3, because of the board, what the funders like. It goes back to the nonprofit industrial complex.

Lili: There was this fair tax legislation in Illinois that would have been a progressive tax structure, and it went to vote in a referendum, and it failed. My union supported it, and we wanted to talk to our coworkers about it and got in trouble. We were told that because we are a 501c3 we need to be careful talking about political issues. If the union is working on that political issue it would qualify as union activity on work time. But I also felt like they pushed back because it would only raise taxes on people who are making 250K, and our board is wealthy, those are our donors … It's still the wealthy capitalist philanthropists who control the whole thing in the nonprofit sector, social service agencies, and social work. I think it would be foolish to pretend that our jobs aren't political, but I think a lot of people are trained that way and buy into that. How many people who are therapists would say, “I’m a social worker”? A lot of them would say, “I’m a therapist, I’m a clinician, I’m a psychotherapist, I’m a counselor.” They would much rather say that than say, “I’m a social worker.”

Natasha: Social work is in a fight for its life—at least a fight for its soul. Obviously, there are problems with how social work came about, but there is an opportunity to more fully realize the promise that’s there. I think it’s foolish not to take that opportunity. In terms of the connection between this kind of work, between labor organizing and social work as a profession, I think it is important that we’re having these sorts of conversations, if we want to see social work continue.

In terms of unionizing nonprofit workers, I do think that's feminist work because unions still are mostly male and white, and in New York City they’re male and Black or Brown, but it’s still very male. Jobs that are traditionally staffed by men are unionized, and the jobs traditionally staffed by women aren’t. Getting an actual representation of the workforce into unions is incredibly important, and that's a feminist act because unions are a political mechanism, they have political power. The workforce is increasingly female, not just in social work, and it’s Black and it’s Brown and it’s low paid. Getting people into unions provides more leverage for us to do things like bargain for the common good, but also to make micro-level changes, like getting people raises. Getting a $10,000 raise is huge. Decent health benefits, parental leave, all of this is stuff that we're much more likely to get with a union, and it’s going to really benefit women, and it’s going to benefit everybody.

Lili: I 100% agree, leadership in our local includes a lot of women of color, so we’re very different, but our bargaining team was majority women and queer people, and the management team was nearly all White men. When we proposed parental leave, their lawyer said, “we're going to have to count how many fertile women work here.” It was parental leave! It wasn’t even gendered, it was for anybody. How could workers’ rights not be feminist?

Reflections

The intersection between the workplace rights of social service workers and the rights of people who use services differentiates health and human service organizing from other labor struggles. A traditional narrative of U.S. labor history pits business unionism (self-interested organizing that frames a shared interest between labor and industry) against social movement unionism (workplace organizing alongside other social movements), the role of the South African labor movement in the mass democratic movement to end apartheid is an example; Hirschsohn, 1998; Seidman, 1994. More recently, social movement unionism has again gained traction, given the intersectional identities of workers and the forms of power with which they contend. For example, organizing among low-wage service sector workers, such as home health aides, has included immigration issues and childcare (Mareschal, 2006). However, the position of social service workers challenges the binary of self-interested alignment with management versus social movement action for several reasons: (1) nonprofits are not businesses, they do not seek profit or produce a product that can be consumed (efforts towards adopting a “business model” in the sector notwithstanding); (2) the content of nonprofit work concerns people who are marginalized and oppressed by social and political structures, often including our system of social services itself; (3) social workers deliver services, and the quality of what they “produce” depends on their own well-being. These tensions are underscored by a mixed funding model that relies on governmental contracts that shift public commitments to the common good onto private entities, and charitable donations that reinforce class-based hierarchies.

Conventional wisdom around nonprofit union organizing in social services is that these “shops” are too small to be of interest to existing unions, and that the funding model (government contracts and charitable donations) limits the potential to win meaningful gains for workers. Then there is the question of “over-commitment”. Mission driven organizations where the workforce is committed to the mission and may have close relationships to their managers are often seen as unripe for organizing, since workers are vulnerable to an appeal for their self-sacrifice on behalf of clients.

However, Lili and Natasha describe a vision that takes on this received wisdom. Their vision is informed by training and experience in public sector and service sector unions and is realistic about barriers and issues faced in working within these structures. Progressive organizing through DSA and radical social work ideas also inform their orientations—including an analysis of how privatization creates poor working conditions and pits workers and even clients against one another. Most importantly, they have engaged with other social service workers in discussions about working conditions, with an openness to working outside of existing structures and critical engagement with the existing labor movement. The creation of grassroots organizations (SSWUN and SSWU) that support local organizing is informed both by practical firsthand experience, and percolation of conscientizing ideas steeped in the realities facing nonprofit social service work. Could a sector wide campaign, that also considers the people who use services, support the work of small shops of nonprofit social service workers?

What does it mean to organize in solidarity with people you serve, a common good campaign in social services? This model was recently tested in the successful 2019 Chicago Teachers Union strike, where the strike resulted in a contract that included 180 case-manager positions, 20 English language program teachers, full-time staff for homeless students, up to $35 million to lower excessive class size, and nap time, in addition to teachers’ own salary, benefit, and working condition demands (Potter, 2019). As Lili and Natasha point out, quality, sustainable services also depend on a workforce that gets good sleep, has their own families cared for, and, in short, is not burnt out. This means decent pay, benefits, and time off. This pushback by young social worker organizers against neoliberal, individualizing ideas of “self-care” is critical. Social service jobs predictably encounter crises—this is the content of the work; the ability to log crisis-initiated overtime against time off later in the week is a critical example of flexibility that could be protective against stress and burnout. The links between such benefits are underscored by the client question that Lili reports, “can you do more for your staff so they stay?” Staff turnover interrupts services and relationships and creates stress for service users. Unions also make it possible for workers to take on problems with security, as Natasha points out; speaking out about observations of the failures and contradictions of contracting and other issues with service delivery are unlikely to happen when people feel their jobs are at risk. Unlike many other types of jobs, social service managers and staff are often close and share a mission, but this does not mean they share a perspective or have the same power in the organization. Having a union can create a healthy environment where social workers—well trained in values and ethics—can take a stand for what is right for clients, the organizations in which they work, and the public good.

Both Lili and Natasha comment on the political nature of social work and our pivotal position in taking on structures in which we are complicit. As Natasha points out, it is an opportunity that we would be foolish to squander. There are many historical examples of how people have used union power to elevate social issues. The issues that social service workers take on, as Natasha notes, are not “natural”; rather, they are socially constructed, and unless we recognize that we are working to heal wounds that we continue to perpetuate, we will never progress on the road to social justice. This is an ambitious, feminist agenda that we encourage social workers to support.