You Don’t Have to Be Unionized to Be United

My journey into organizing began with a long sigh in the breakroom. I was working at a small, grant-funded nonprofit in New Jersey. I sat with my colleague, “Sarah,” and stared at a newly shifted deadline that meant another weekend lost to the glow of a laptop screen. But instead of accepting defeat, I asked Sarah a simple question: “Does it have to be?”

The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting.

That was the crack in the dam.

We started small, in the margins of the workday. Quiet lunches in the park turned into encrypted group chats. We didn’t talk about overthrowing the board or staging a walkout on day one. Rather, we talked about the basic dignity of knowing our schedules more than 48 hours in advance. We talked about why the “open door policy” always seemed to slam shut the moment a concern was raised, and why “flexibility” only ever seemed to go in one direction—ours.

The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called “performance review” could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it. Every time we met, there was lingering fear of retaliation. As a nonunionized workplace, we didn’t have formal protections to fall back on.

What we did have instead was a growing understanding that our frustrations were shared. If one person raised a concern alone, it could be dismissed or punished. But if several of us spoke together, the conversation had to change.

We documented everything, turning our shared frustration into a record of how the workplace actually functioned. One coworker created a spreadsheet comparing our scheduled hours with the hours we were actually working on program deliverables and grant reports. Others saved screenshots of shifting deadlines and conflicting instructions from management. We started forwarding important emails to one another and keeping notes after meetings so nothing could disappear.

The most important work was the emotional scaffolding we built. When a manager cornered a junior staffer, one of us would “just happen” to linger nearby. We checked in after difficult conversations and reminded each other that none of us were imagining what was happening. In small, careful ways, we were creating a kind of workplace dignity that the employee handbook never mentioned.

Solidarity isn’t a destination you reach; it’s a muscle you build through small conversations, shared risks, and the simple, radical act of looking a coworker in the eye and saying, “I see you.”

After weeks of quiet conversations and documentation, some of us requested a meeting with our department manager. When we walked into the conference room together, we brought a short list of concerns we had documented: unpredictable scheduling, unacknowledged weekend work, and constant, unannounced deadline shifts. Instead of individual complaints, we presented the patterns we had tracked and asked for clearer guidelines around overtime and communication. Though the room was tense, we spoke as coworkers standing together rather than isolated employees.

The outcome wasn’t sweeping, but it was real: Management agreed to a two-week minimum notice for major deadlines and introduced a policy requiring advance approval and time-off compensation for weekend work. This was a small shift, but one that made the boundaries of our labor more visible and, for the first time, negotiable. In turn, we built solidarity—the understanding that we didn’t have to carry these pressures alone.

We weren’t just “units of labor” anymore. We were a community within this nonprofit system that often runs on urgency, underfunding, and unspoken expectations of sacrifice.

I remember catching Sarah’s eye after that meeting. A kind of recognition passed between us. Solidarity isn’t a destination you reach; it’s a muscle you build through small conversations, shared risks, and the simple, radical act of looking a coworker in the eye and saying, “I see you.”