107 - the days in quarantine have reached the triple digits! And...
The highlight of this past month would be finally getting our union at work recognized. It's been a lengthy, frustrating process, but through it all, the solidarity and empowerment I felt with my colleagues kept me hopeful and fired up enough to keep going.
While I won't go into full detail here about why we unionized, I will say that it was a long time coming and that we aren't alone in doing so. During the pandemic, many other legal aid nonprofits also decided to unionize. I admit that when I first started this work, I didn't think of nonprofits as unionized workplaces–mostly I thought of jobs such as factory workers and large government offices like my mom's as benefitting from and having unions. But after a year on the job, while living through the shit pay and other non-ideal working conditions, James sent me this article. I was already well aware of the wealth of problems inherent within the nonprofit industrial complex, but the article and my own experience opened my eyes to how the problems extend into nonprofit workplaces themselves. In the article's examples, I saw many parallels with my own workplace. At first I thought we were too small of an organization to unionize, but I was thankfully proven wrong. When my colleague Beth joined the team over the summer and started talking about unionizing a few months later, I knew I supported the initiative one hundred percent. Eventually, we got everyone on board and announced our decision to management. We were afraid they would not recognize us, but thankfully (not after a long time deliberating...) they did, living up to the organization's original founding premise of upholding workers' rights.
Since this is my first job out of college, I thought the difficult conditions in my workplace were just a part of working entry level at a small nonprofit and that I would have to learn to live with them. After all, I loved my day to day work and thought that was enough. However, the unionizing process has taught me that I should never settle, and that a better workplace is possible even for employees starting out at the bottom of the professional ladder. Although I am the only union member not based in New York City, I feel a strong sense of solidarity with my fellow union members after having gone through the process with them. Being open with each other about our experiences at the workplace has encouraged us all to improve our working conditions for ourselves and for each other, and it's a beautiful thing to be a part of. I'm incredibly happy and proud to have had this empowering experience in my first job, and I know that I will carry that sense of empowerment with me in all the jobs I have in the future.
Now that management has recognized us, it's up to the bargaining team–which Beth and I are on with our colleague Jeremy–to negotiate our first contract with management in order to guarantee better working conditions for everyone. It's not going to be easy, but it will be so worth it.
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