Nonprofit Workers Organize for Recognition and Workplace Dignity

For years, nonprofit organizations have asked Americans to believe in the power of collective action. They organize communities, advocate for workers, challenge discrimination, defend civil rights, and push institutions to become more democratic. Increasingly, though, some of the people doing that work are asking a question closer to home: What happens when the workplace itself falls short of the values an organization promotes publicly?

For nonprofit workers across the United States, unionization is often the answer. Nonprofit workers’ unionization efforts have grown beyond isolated disputes over wages, expanding into fight over transparency, job security, racial equity, workload and a greater voice in decisions that shape both their jobs and the missions they carry out. The result is an emerging test for the sector on whether organizations built to advocate for a more equitable society can build workplaces where employees hold meaningful power themselves.

A Test Case at the Southern Poverty Law Center

The Southern Poverty Law Center offers one of the clearest examples of this test. In December 2019, employees at the civil rights organization voted 145 to 42 to unionize with the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, amid broader turmoil over workplace culture, discrimination, compensation and management. After roughly 60 bargaining sessions, the union and management reached their first contract in 2022, including paid parental and sick leave, retirement contributions, remote work provisions, professional development funding and a Labor Management Committee focused on racial justice and equity. At the time, then-CEO Margaret Huang called it “a proud day for the SPLC,” and management noted that it was proud to be unionized.

But in the years that followed, SPLC announced a restructuring that led to dozens of layoffs. The union argued the cuts had disproportionately hit union members and key areas of the organization’s work. This dispute fed into a vote of no confidence in Huang by unionized staff. SPLC management responded by defending the restructuring as difficult but necessary “to strengthen our strategic framework and focus.” It was a reminder that even a unionized nonprofit can face fundamental disagreement over who decides what the mission requires.

Then, in March 2026, after nine months of negotiations, SPLC workers ratified a new agreement covering 220 unionized employees. This also included continued remote-work flexibility, four additional weeks of parental leave, wage increases weighted toward the lowest-paid staff, guaranteed union involvement in any future layoff planning, and new provisions on artificial intelligence in the workplace.

“We are living through a moment that demands leadership. This agreement is leadership in action,” said Lee Warnecke, a member of the union’s bargaining committee, adding that the deal reflected “the power of trust, solidarity, and shared purpose” at SPLC.

That trajectory matters. The union that emerged from an internal crisis didn’t dissolve when leadership changed or the organization restructured. Instead, workers used collective bargaining to build in more mechanisms for having a voice the next time a major decision threatens their jobs.

Mission Work and Its Costs

Nonprofit workers occupy an unusual position in the labor market. Many enter the field because they believe in the mission, and that commitment can be a source of real meaning. But it can also make it easier for organizations to take advantage of their efforts and passion.

The Associated Press reported in 2023 about how nonprofit employees confront low pay, burnout,  and management dysfunction. At SPLC specifically, the reporting captured just how adversarial that first contract fight had become: Lecia Brooks, the organization’s chief of staff and culture and management’s lead negotiator, recalled the union treating negotiators “like we were all the devil” at the table. At other organizations, staff described stagnant wages alongside rising workloads.

These are familiar tensions in the nonprofit sector. While employees may support the mission, the mission doesn’t pay rent. That contradiction becomes especially pointed when an organization’s public advocacy centers on economic justice or workplace rights. For some workers, unionization offers a way to turn those broad commitments into enforceable workplace standards.

The experience of SPLC is part of a broader wave of union organizing among nonprofit workers. While SPLC employees are represented by the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, other nonprofit workers have organized through the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (NPEU), which represents employees at dozens of nonprofits nationwide. NPEU members have used collective bargaining to negotiate standards for pay, benefits and working conditions while building a stronger voice inside their organizations.

Pew, Carnegie, and a Widening Pattern

Recent unionizing suggests this isn’t simply a post-pandemic reaction to burnout. In January 2026, employees at the Pew Research Center voted 74 to 45 in an NLRB election to unionize with NPEU, after management had declined an earlier request for voluntary recognition. NPEU President Amy Chin-Lai said the vote reflected workers’ desire for “clear desire for a constructive partnership at work.” That framing is notable given Pew’s own business: an institution devoted to producing research that informs public understanding was itself confronting the question of how much internal power its employees should have over the conditions of that work.

To date, Pew management has not publicly commented on the vote.

A similar dynamic played out at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where staff won their union election in October 2025 with 87 percent of the vote, forming the Carnegie Endowment Workers Alliance around what they described as a push for transparency, equity and accountability. “I’m hopeful about what we can accomplish,” said Haley Clasen, a senior editor at Carnegie and a member of the organizing committee, of the group’s move toward first-contract negotiations.

In both campaigns, workers didn’t frame unionization as a rejection of their organizations’ missions, but rather they presented it as a way to strengthen the institutions. That distinction is key, and runs through much of the nonprofit labor movement.

What Collaboration Can Look Like

Part of the problem is that unionization is often cast as an adversarial fight between workers and management that diminishes an organization’s value or harms the mission. Yet workers, particularly those at mission-driven organizations, tend to unionize in defense of the mission.

Consider the Healthcare Anchor Network, which offers a vision of what a more cooperative relationship can produce. Staff first unionized with NPEU in 2022 and negotiated a contract establishing wage standards, parental leave, and a Labor Management Committee. In May 2026, they ratified a four-year successor agreement expanding compensation, leave, and professional-development benefits, including targeted raises for employees earning $70,000 or less.

HAN president and founder David Zuckerman said that the deal “strikes the right balance, providing meaningful compensation and benefits improvements for staff now while building a foundation for their career growth and our shared organizational sustainability.”

On the union side, bargaining committee member Lauren Worth described the contract as reflecting “the power of collaboration and a shared dedication to strengthening” the organization. In a time when nonprofits face even greater  financial constraints, this kind of relationship matters. But financial limitations shouldn’t automatically translate into unilateral management decisions. Collective bargaining changes the terms of that conversation. Instead of employees individually requesting raises or flexibility, they negotiate as a group, and workplace policy shifts from management’s discretion to a binding contract.

Winning a Contract Versus Enforcing One

The Philadelphia Museum of Art shows both the promise and the difficulty of collective bargaining. Museum workers voted to unionize in 2020 and struck for 19 days in 2022 before ratifying a first contract with wage increases, health care provisions, paid parental leave and longevity raises. Workers later disputed whether management was properly implementing those longevity provisions, a public reminder that winning a contract and enforcing one are different stages of the same fight.

“I was happy to vote for our contract at the end of the strike,” said Sarah Roche, a label technician at the museum, of the longevity clause she’d fought for, only to watch management apply it more narrowly than the union believed the language allowed.

By July 2025, the museum’s workers had ratified a second three-year contract with a higher minimum wage, guaranteed annual raises, eight weeks of paid parental leave, and stronger protections against unjust discipline. Then-CEO Sasha Suda called the agreement “probably the thing I’m most proud of with the staff” in an interview shortly before it was finalized. Suda was fired that November amid allegations, which she is fighting in an ongoing lawsuit, that she misappropriated museum funds—a reminder that even a management voice praising a labor deal doesn’t settle the larger, separate questions an institution can face about its own leadership.

Workers aren’t arguing that they don’t care about the mission; they’re arguing that caring about it is exactly why they want more say in how the organization runs.

That progression is why workers often describe unions as more than a mechanism for higher pay. A contract can set rules for how decisions get made, how grievances are handled, and what protections exist when management changes direction—a form of workplace democracy, even if it’s not identical to democracy in government. Employees don’t elect their CEOs, and a union doesn’t turn a nonprofit into a cooperative. But collective bargaining can redistribute some decision-making power by requiring management to negotiate over certain conditions of employment, which matters most in organizations whose missions depend on public trust and democratic values.

Applying the Mission Inward

This raises a question about a tension within the nonprofit sector: Employees can be deeply committed to an organization’s mission while still needing adequate pay, manageable workloads and a meaningful voice in decisions that affect their work. As the Associated Press reported in 2023, nonprofit workers have faced low pay, high stress, understaffing and rising workloads. A person can believe deeply in a mission and still need a salary that covers rent, a manageable caseload and transparency from an employer that asks other institutions to uphold those same values.

A nonprofit can promise equity; a contract can require specific pay standards.

That may be the deeper significance of nonprofit unionization. Workers aren’t arguing that they don’t care about the mission; they’re arguing that caring about it is exactly why they want more say in how the organization runs. It also suggests that workplace dignity is becoming part of how nonprofit accountability gets defined. For decades, that accountability was measured mostly by how organizations spent donated money and whether their programs hit their goals. Workers are adding another measure: how the organization treats the people responsible for carrying out its mission.

Through 2025 and 2026, NPEU has continued announcing organizing wins and new contracts, including the Carnegie and Pew elections and the Healthcare Anchor Network’s successor agreement, and its membership now spans thousands of nonprofit workers. The question is no longer whether nonprofit employees can unionize. They can. The more consequential question is what happens after they do: Some organizations have responded with negotiated agreements that improve wages, leave, and workplace protections while others have faced contentious bargaining, strikes, or disputes over enforcement. Those differences show that unionization creates a structure through which workers can exercise power. However, the quality of that democracy still depends on whether management treats workers as legitimate participants in how the organization is run.

[I]t’s difficult to advocate for a more democratic society while running a workplace where employees have little real influence over their own conditions of work.

For workers, unionization offers something a mission statement can’t: enforceable rights. A nonprofit can promise equity; a contract can require specific pay standards. An organization can say it values transparency; workers can negotiate provisions governing how information and decisions get shared. A leadership team can call employees essential to the mission; a union gives those employees a collective way to hold the organization to that claim.

The nonprofit labor movement is, in effect, forcing organizations to confront a basic contradiction: It’s difficult to advocate for a more democratic society while running a workplace where employees have little real influence over their own conditions of work. The workers organizing inside these institutions aren’t asking them to abandon their missions. They’re asking them to apply those missions inward, and increasingly, they’re using collective power to make sure that happens.