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A Dangerous Paradox in Human Service Systems

In January 2016, I was one month into being a new dad. I was also halfway through graduate school and working full-time at a nonprofit as a program director for a play-based early childhood initiative. Throughout the previous year, our program team navigated a series of challenges in our work: we adopted a more asset-based partnership model despite pressure to frame our work as “fixing” what was wrong with our partner’s programs; we lost an incredible program mentor when she took a job offering her more autonomy at a different organization; and right before the holidays, my executive director shared that our program was on the chopping block after a fundraising shortfall.

Feeling exhausted and defeated, I found myself in the office of my mentor, Dr. Linda Lausell Bryant. Linda’s past roles include Deputy Executive Director of the Partnership for Afterschool Education, Associate Commissioner at the NYC Administration for Children’s Services, Executive Director of Inwood House, and most recently Associate Dean at NYU and co-founder of the Adaptive Leadership in Human Services Institute. When I’m at a loss for what to do next, she’s always the first person I call. Linda recognized that my experiences—feeling stymied and demoralized—were all too common in the helping professions.

She described a “dangerous paradox in human services systems”: we speak about our noble values—recognizing people’s strengths, a commitment to social justice, pushing for greater access and equity in services—and yet struggle to match these values to our professional systems and work lives. While we find ways to honor these principles (particularly in direct practice with clients and community members), it is painfully challenging to live out these same values with one another as professionals given the systems that organize our work.

The most common example of this is the disconnect between the success we expect of the helping professions and the resources we provide practitioners. If excellent programming and services are the goal, how can we justify abysmal pay, inadequate materials, unsupportive leadership, and toxic cultures that mistreat the very professionals we need to perform at the highest level? Given the human-centered nature of our work, these conditions are simply inhumane. In our conversation, Linda stressed that she views the conflict between our values and behaviors as an existential threat that at best maintains the status quo, and at worst slowly undoes our efforts.

If this dangerous paradox posed a risk in 2016, then today we find ourselves in a break-glass crisis. With the confluence of the pandemic, a racial reckoning, political unrest, and the gruesome violence and death that accompanied them all, it’s no surprise that toxic stress and the need for mental health services continue to climb. Research conducted by the Citizens’ Committee for Children last year found that more than a third (35 percent) of New York City youth reported wanting or needing mental health services, and of those, less than half (42 percent) are actually receiving them. This circumstance is particularly worrisome as unbuffered exposure to toxic stress creates significant risk for lifelong health, wellness, and learning problems.¹

The adults who work with children are not immune to the traumas of the last two years, and without changes to better prioritize the mental health and wellness of both children and professionals, the education and human services sector runs the risk of grinding to a halt. The impacts of the Great Resignation in the helping professions have been devastating, as staffing shortages place a growing burden on the professionals who remain and compromise the quality of programming and services at a time of acute need.

According to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2021, job openings in the education and health services sectors were up 39 percent, and the rates of professionals leaving the field were more than 10 percent higher than in the three years before the pandemic.^[2] These trends show no signs of slowing; a recent national poll found that 33 percent of teachers are likely to leave the profession. With an additional 21 percent of teachers saying their resignation is somewhat likely, the potential exists to see over half of the teaching workforce turn over before the end of 2023.

Throughout the pandemic, those in the helping professions have demonstrated heroic levels of innovation, adaptability, and resilience in the face of once-in-a-lifetime challenges. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the systems and policies that manage their work. The organizational changes we have seen often level greater expectations with even less resources, creating misery for these heroes at a moment when their efforts should be lauded and reinforced. The pain and suffering this workforce has endured since March 2020 is reaching a crescendo—and people are headed for the door in droves. My hope is that we are at a tipping point and, before the wheels come off completely, we have an opportunity to reimagine how we support and empower education and human service professionals to more fully honor the values that guide our work.

What is Parallel Process?

Throughout 2016 and 2017, Linda and I met weekly to explore the attributes of great programming in the helping professions, and most importantly, what it might look like to turn that work inward. We used our own painful experiences with dissonance in these systems, as well as the answers we found in our work, to begin to make sense of the dangerous paradox with which we worked and to chart a path forward. To give a name to what we were articulating together, we upcycled a term from psychotherapy, “Parallel Process,” which traditionally has a negative connotation and describes the reenactment of client-therapist dynamics in the therapist-supervisor relationship. We used a more asset-based lens to repurpose Parallel Process, redefining it as our consistent striving to practice our values at all levels of our work—with clients, colleagues, and leaders and across work teams. In this new definition, Parallel Process is the work of “walking the talk.”

After yet another fundraising deficit in 2017, my work with Linda inspired the creation of a spin-off of our nonprofit program, Play At The Core. I traded the role of program director for CEO and established a new mission for the organization: to inspire healing and change through play, which enabled collaborations with organizations serving youth across the helping professions. To this day, the most precious legacy of this time with Linda was the creation of Play At The Core’s pillars: Relationships First, Lifelong Learning, Play as Change, Shift Power, and consequentially, Parallel Process.

Linda and I hoped that our collaboration could help us envision more healing-centered systems to buffer the toxic stress experienced by the helping professions workforce. For guidance, we turned to the research of psychiatrist Sandra Bloom, whose work in developing trauma-informed systems draws direct connections between the impacts of trauma on individuals and organizational systems. In fact, Bloom and her colleagues advocate for Parallel Process as a central component of their “Sanctuary Model” for creating or changing organizational culture.³

The body of trauma-informed systems work that already exists helped me and Linda begin to understand the potential of Parallel Process. However, given the depth of the crisis we currently face, the need to examine the ways in which past efforts have fallen short is absolutely vital as we imagine a new path forward. In his research, Shawn Ginwright is critical of the trauma-informed care paradigm’s focus on acute personal trauma rather than collective or shared trauma, its tendency to prioritize individual treatment interventions rather than engage root causes, and its inclination to prioritize “pathology (trauma) rather than foster possibility (well-being).”⁴ The shared challenges of the last two years, in particular, implore us to go beyond current systems and approaches, to consider how we can collectively heal and make meaningful change.

In late 2019, research published by scientists from Johns Hopkins University, The Alliance for Strong Families and Communities, The Montana Institute, and Tufts Medical Center proposed a conceptual model that can help to ameliorate aspects of this tension. The study identifies an association between positive childhood experiences (PCEs) and improved adult mental and relational health.⁵ The PCEs studied include: (1) talking to family members about feelings; (2) feeling their family stood by them during difficult times; (3) enjoyable participation in community traditions; (4) feeling a sense of belonging in school; (5) feeling supported by friends; (6) having at least two non-parent adults who took genuine interest in them; and (7) feeling safe and protected by an adult in their home.⁶

These findings have powerful implications for the helping professions as they illuminate the important role the workforce plays in promoting improved health and wellbeing for children and families.

This notion is a challenge to the legacy of white saviorism and the ethos of martyrdom in the human services, which frame white human services professionals in particular as the protagonists of change for the people we work with and which hold that our efforts are worthy of self-sacrifice.⁸ These myths have been passed down to our workforce through the generations and sustain a status quo of exploitation and suffering.

To illustrate what Parallel Process can look like in practice, let’s take the example of a recent Play At The Core partnership with a child life services department in a large pediatric hospital. Throughout the last two years, the department’s team went above and beyond to support young patients and their families as they navigated the uncertainty of their medical conditions during a time of heightened fear and anxiety due to COVID-19. Like so many others in the helping professions, however, the pandemic put significant strain on their department by limiting opportunities for supportive connections, communication, and collaboration with one another. Over the past year in particular, the severity of both medical and mental health needs among patients have paired with growing concerns about the department’s organizational culture, leading to increased workforce turnover that threatens to compromise patient care.

The ultimate goal of our work together is to strengthen community across the department’s team and the team’s internal capacity to engage with future challenges. Our partnership strives to honor the asset-based “what’s right with you” paradigm and is founded in the belief that the child life team already possesses the skills and strategies needed to overcome their challenges. Parallel Process is leveraged to draw this wisdom out of the department staff and help them make meaning of its applications in their work with one another. Play At The Core operationalizes this work through experiential learning workshops, coaching, and program resource generation that is organized in three phases through what we call the CORE (Collective Organizational Resilience through Empathy) model:

1. “Know Your Power” by identifying and celebrating the existing strengths within the program model. For the child life team, this work is centered on the ways that specialists build connections and a sense of community with patients and families during their hospital stay, by asking:
   • What are the beliefs, behaviors, and systems that help you to form a strong sense of community with patients?
   • What is the impact of these efforts on the care you provide?
2. “Target Your Pain” by articulating and exploring the challenges in the professional context. This work requires the child life staff to hold a brave space for one another to examine the dynamics of their professional community. We ask:
   • How would you describe the professional community within the department?
   • In what ways has this professional community supported you as you confronted challenges over the last two years?
   • In what ways has this professional community made your engagement with challenges more difficult?
3. “Live Your Purpose” by imagining and operationalizing ways to bring the program strengths in phase 1 to bear against the professional challenges in phase 2. This work invites the child life team to envision the changes that they seek within their professional experiences, and the ways that their powerful patient-centered work might be applied to this end. The team’s responses to these questions help them begin to envision new ways of working and thriving together:
   • How would you like to see this professional community be stronger?
   • How might you begin to apply some of the same beliefs, behaviors, and systems that help to build community with your patients with one another?
   • What might be the impact of these changes on both your professional and patient experiences?

Parallel Process work must be deeply anchored in the context and experiences of the professionals engaging it. The inputs of the individual team members involved in this work are critical to the meaning-making and iterative strategizing that results as teams begin to consider how their work together should evolve. Our experiences have shown that with each change that teams put into practice, a growing sense of wellbeing and agency at the organizational level begins to fuel a virtuous cycle with abundant potential for healing, learning, and thriving. Nearly 100 years of research has borne this out, linking the strengthened  organizational culture that is possible through Parallel Process to increased professional motivation, job satisfaction, effective service delivery, client satisfaction, service quality, and overall organizational performance.⁹

Not only can Parallel Process be a potential antidote for the despair and exploitation all too familiar in our profession, it can strengthen our ability to achieve our mission. This moment begs us to use Parallel Process to co-create a new paradigm of healing, to leave the dangerous paradox behind us, and to more fully realize the promise of the helping professions.

Envisioning Parallel Process in Practice

Notes

1. Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss, M. P., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.
2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (n.d.). Jolts news releases. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved March 9, 2022, from https://www.bls.gov/jlt/#
3. Esaki, N., Benamati, J., Yanosy, S., Middleton, J. S., Hopson, L. M., Hummer, V. L., & Bloom, S. L. (2013). The sanctuary model: Theoretical framework. Families in society, 94(2), 87-95.
4. Ginwright, S. (2018). The future of healing: Shifting from trauma informed care to healing centered engagement. Occasional Paper, 25, 25-32..
5. Bethell, C., Jones, J., Gombojav, N., Linkenbach, J., & Sege, R. (2019). Positive childhood experiences and adult mental and relational health in a statewide sample: Associations across adverse childhood experiences levels. JAMA pediatrics, 173(11), e193007-e193007.
6. Bethell,  et al (2019).
7. Ginwright, S. (2018).
8. Sherman, W. R., & Wenocur, S. (1983). Empowering public welfare workers through mutual support. Social Work, 28(5), 375-379.
9. Agbényiga, D. (2011). Organizational Culture-Performance Link in the Human Services Setting. Administration in Social Work, 35(5), 532–547.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.

Editors’ note: This article is from the Summer 2022 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Owning Our Economy, Owning Our Future.”

This article was excerpted from The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century by Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs With Justice, and Sarita Gupta, in her personal capacity as a longtime labor rights organizer and advocate. Copyright (c) 2022 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

For the past few years we have been inundated with rosy books and articles about the gig economy.¹ They feature vignettes of people working flexible hours to pick up extra cash: the graduate student who drives for Uber in her spare time, the stay-at-home parent who brings in extra spending money with EasyShift, the high school student picking up odd jobs on TaskRabbit. Whether it is being praised as the newest innovation in work-life management or as a massive new industry that will displace traditional work relationships, the gig economy is widely touted as the latest great phase of modern work.

If this were actually true, we would praise the dawn of a new era—especially one where, for once, more people could have access to equal parts work, rest, and recreation. But this trend is actually just a collection of familiar exploitative business practices repackaged as a positive twenty-first-century development.

Companies lure workers by projecting their apps as the new fast way to achieve the American Dream of being your own boss. The problem is that these so-called self-employed entrepreneurs have very little autonomy.

Technology is brilliant and enables scale, but too often new technologies have just scaled or amplified long-standing problems rather than disrupting them, shifting inequities entrenched offline to the new online platforms. So far, it has been optimized for efficiency and convenience for the employer, but we believe that it can be optimized for equity for everyone.

Gig-economy business models serve the interests of their investors and shareholders at the expense of their workers. What we have learned from workers who work on gig-economy platforms is that this notion defines everything: the work conditions, structures, policies, and compensation. What this means for platform workers is the following:

• They are managed by an algorithm and rarely able to talk to a live
• Customer ratings can determine their
• They are penalized for canceling a job even if they felt
• There is little transparency regarding the policies, protocols, data collection, and
• They have no access to their own data, which means they cannot take their experience or reviews from one gig-economy platform elsewhere.

Under the guise of innovation, the gig companies are reinforcing the same pernicious dynamics that working people have faced for generations—twenty-first-century Taylorism.² Companies lure workers by projecting their apps as the new fast way to achieve the American Dream of being your own boss. The problem is that these so-called self-employed entrepreneurs have very little autonomy. They are not setting their prices or their schedules; sometimes they cannot even choose what car they drive. The company maintains control over those decisions.

A 2020 study of gig workers commissioned by the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission and conducted by the Institute for Social Transformation at the University of California–Santa Cruz bears this out. For example, the study found that platform companies providing services like rideshare and food delivery frequently withdraw work offers, threaten workers with deactivation, and reduce their bonuses when they decline specific job offers—something workers are supposed to have the freedom to do under California law.³ In September 2019, the California State Legislature passed Assembly Bill 5, which was aimed at including gig workers in protections designated for employees.

There is only one situation in which gig companies are willing to cede control to individual workers: when something goes wrong and someone needs to be held accountable. In those cases gig companies try to minimize their relationship with their workers. This is particularly clear in two recent lawsuits against Uber. In the first case, two women attempted to hold Uber accountable for the sexual harassment they experienced from a driver.⁴ The company claimed the driver was an independent contractor—not an employee—and thus Uber was not liable. In the second case, workers sued the company for mileage and tip reimbursements that they currently have to cover themselves.⁵ Again, the company argued that the workers are not employees— and that making them employees would undermine their business model by damaging driver flexibility and adding too many costs.

Classifying workers as independent contractors is key to many gig companies’ strategies, because gig workers are paid the same as or less than formal employees and receive significantly fewer benefits such as healthcare, paid sick leave, or workers’ compensation for injuries.6 And at the end of the day, gig companies’ goals are the same as always: to keep their costs low while maximizing profits.

In 2018, the California Supreme Court took an important step toward limiting corporate executives’ ability to misclassify individuals who are actually employees. In the Dynamex decision, the court implemented a basic A, B, C smell test, noting that a person is an independent contractor only if they (A) are free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of work, (B) regularly perform work outside of the hiring entity’s business, and (C) are engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed.⁷

Again, legislators took this even further with the passage of California Assembly Bill 5, which limited the use of classifying workers as independent contractors rather than employees by companies in the state.

Employees were entitled to greater labor protections such as minimum wage laws, sick leave, and unemployment and workers’ compensation benefits that do not apply to independent contractors. The law codified a stricter set of requirements than laid out in the Dynamex decision. This bill was overturned in November 2020 by Proposition 22, a ballot initiative heavily funded by gig companies.

Rideshare drivers also made gains during the COVID-19 pandemic given their status as “essential workers,” ultimately winning the right to claim unemployment benefits when laid off. This victory took them one step closer in their fight against misclassification as independent contractors, thus expanding their protections under labor laws. Again, it was quickly subdued by the passage of California’s Proposition 22 ballot initiative, which excluded many app-based workers from foundational labor laws.

The gig economy is sold to workers as a type of empowerment, but the actual jobs are designed to hold them back.

In August 2021, the Alameda Superior Court of California ruled that Proposition 22 violated the California constitution and must be struck down in its entirety. While the decision will likely be appealed by the app- based companies, the decision represents a huge setback for companies who have been trying to rewrite

U.S. labor laws and exempt themselves from labor standards that apply to all other employers. The decision also represents an important advancement in the gig-worker-led movement for employment benefits, fair wages, worker protections, and the right to exercise collective democratic power.

The gig economy is sold to workers as a type of empowerment, but the actual jobs are designed to hold them back. Flexibility for workers does not automatically gel with the on-demand needs of company executives. In fact, what working people want—and what the gig economy rarely provides—is more control of their time on the job. They want to shape decisions and redesign their jobs to meet the company and their personal needs. Both parties need room to negotiate conditions.

Unsurprisingly, gig executives militantly combat workers who attempt to form unions. Again, Uber is an illustrative example. When Seattle granted its drivers the right to unionize, the company instructed its customer service reps to call through a list of drivers to explain why unionizing was a bad idea (a spokesperson defended the practice in a statement, saying “it’s not clear a traditional union can serve such a large and varied group of people.”)⁸ The company also has a history of deactivating—gig-speak for firing— drivers who lead unionizing efforts.⁹ Uber’s major competitor, Lyft, has been accused of similar tactics. (Spokespeople for both companies have denied the allegations.)¹⁰ New York University (NYU) professor Aswath Damodaran explained that unions will ultimately hurt these companies’ bottom lines, saying “they are likely to shake up the current revenue-sharing balance.”¹¹ In other words, union workers get more of the total share, and that makes executives nervous. For them, it pays to keep gig workers from organizing.

So, while the gig economy is upon us, it is far from the worker-empowering revolution that companies are marketing and far less sizable.

However, workers at many gig companies are experimenting with different ways to negotiate over their conditions, from Seattle to New York to overseas.¹² They are proving that the only thing inevitable about the gig economy is that, as with business innovations of the past, working people will eventually figure out how to organize app-based and gig companies. These workers are designing a new generation of labor protections that will not only benefit workers at gig companies but also help to protect the interests of all part-time, temporary, or subcontracted employees.

Notes

1. This section is adapted from an original article by Erica Smiley, “The Gig Economy Is Screwing Over Workers—And It Needs to Stop,” Talk Poverty, October 13, 2016, org/2016/10/13/gig-economy-screwing-workers-needs-stop/, which was itself based on a presentation Smiley gave to the American Sociology Association convention in Seattle in 2016.

2. Taylorism refers to the late nineteenth-century “scientific management” practices developed by Frederick Taylor. These practices sought increased efficiency by methodically tracking the daily habits/actions of workers and attempting to streamline At best, workers were a part of and even in charge of tracking these adjustments. At worst, the system allowed managers to track workers as coldly as they might tweak a machine, leading to many union struggles over Taylorism. For a strong description of Taylorism, see Clayton Sinyai, Schools of Democracy: A Political History of the American Labor Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 55–71.
3. Chris Benner et , On-Demand and on-the-Edge: Ride hailing and Delivery workers in San Francisco (Santa Cruz, CA: University of California–Santa Cruz, May 5, 2020).

4. Thomas Ahearn, “Judge Rules Women Can Sue Uber Over Alleged Sexual Assaults,” ESR News Blog, May 10, 2016, esrcheck.com/wordpress/2016/05/10/judge-rules-women-can-sue-uber-over-alleged-sexual-assaults/.

5. Davey Alba, “Judge Rejects Uber’s $100 million Settlement with Drivers,” Wired, August 18, 2016, www.wired.com/2016/08/uber-settlement-rejected/.

6. Steven Hill, “Can Workers Get a Fair Deal in the Gig Economy?” Common Dreams, August 24, 2016, www.commondreams.org/views/2016/08/24/can-workers-get-fair-deal-gig-economy.

7. Timothy Kim, “The Dynamex Decision: The California Supreme Court Restricts Use of Independent Contractors,” Labor & Employment Law Blog, May 1, 2018, laboremploymentlawblog.com/2018/05/articles/class-actions/dynamex-decision-independent-contractors/.

8. Alison Griswold, “Uber is using its US customer service reps to deliver its anti-union message,” Quartz, February 20, 2016, com/619601/uber-is-using-its-us-customer-service-reps-to-deliver-its-anti-union-message/.

9. Rebecca Smith, “Union-Busting. Now There’s an App for That,” National Employment Law Project, March 7, 2016, nelp.org/commentary/union-busting-now-theres-an-app-for-that/.
10. Sydney Brownstone, “Seattle Lyft Driver Wants to Know Why She Was Deactivated After Attending a Teamsters Organizing Meeting,” The Stranger, November 19, 2015, thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/11/19/23163805/seattle-lyft-driver-wants-to-know-why-she-was-deactivated-after-attending-a-teamsters-organizing-meeting.

11. Cole Stangler, “Why The Uber, Lyft Driver Union Push Could Disrupt The Gig Economy,” International Business Times, December 18, 2015, ibtimes.com/why-uber-lyft-driver-union-push-could-disrupt-gig-economy-2232778.

12. Daniel Wiessner and Dan Levine, “Uber deal shows divide in labor’s drive for role in ‘gig economy,’” Reuters, May 23, 2016, reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-drivers-labor/uber-deal-shows-divide-in-labors-drive-for-role-in-gig-economy-idUSKCN0YE0DF.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.

Editors’ note: This article is from the Summer 2022 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Owning Our Economy, Owning Our Future.”

This conversation with Sarita Gupta, vice president of U.S. programs at the Ford Foundation—who until recently directed the Ford Foundation’s Future of Work(ers) program—and NPQ’s Steve Dubb and Rithika Ramamurthy, focuses on the struggle for workplace justice, and discusses where the points of leverage are for building worker power and ownership.

Steve Dubb: We would love to hear a bit about the background of your work. How did you come to the field of worker justice? And what led you to move to Ford, recently, after a decade at the helm of Jobs With Justice?

Sarita Gupta: I like to think that I came to worker justice by a few pathways. A key one was that my family immigrated to Rochester, New York—“Kodak City”—when I was a child. Seeds were planted very early in my childhood, growing up in a city where, at the time, Kodak was downsizing and I saw the devastating impacts of unemployment on families and communities. At such a young age, I couldn’t really make meaning of it—but it always seemed strange to me that there could be generations of families who were part of building a major company like Kodak and who could suddenly lose their livelihoods and not have a voice in that process.

As I moved on in life, I went to college—and in college I saw workers organizing on campuses, and grad students organizing, and I started to recognize how important worker voice is. So, it was from the student movement, and going into the labor movement—and, specifically, Jobs With Justice—that I began to make links between the attacks on student voice and democracy on campus with attacks on collective bargaining. And that’s what brought me into the worker movement—where I spent the next twenty years.

I was a local organizer in Chicago—a strong union town—but I was there at a time when there was a rise of immigrant workers organizing in the city: janitors, hotel workers, industrial, laundry, and food service workers. I helped found the first worker center in the city. And that led me down this path of what it means to work with traditional unions, as well as worker organizing happening outside of a union context. That helped me to have

an imagination around working—or being able to work—at the edges of the labor movement, if you will, and to really understand the importance of seeding new approaches to how workers are organizing.

“Automation and the impact of new technologies is a relevant topic to discuss, but all too often the people who are impacted by current problems of wages, benefits, and the lack of influence over working conditions get left out of the debate.”

My transition to Ford after Jobs With Justice was based on two things. One, wanting a different perch from which to look at the field of worker justice. For years, I had been an organizer and an advocate, and I was hungry to widen my aperture, to better understand the interests of a variety of stakeholders. And two, the biggest driving force for me was my horror that, as this conversation about the future of work was taking root, it became focused on machines and automation, not centering workers and the realities of workers.¹ I was given an incredible invitation to come to Ford to help recenter that debate. It has been so inspiring for me over the last couple of years to be at the foundation and be able to do just that.

Rithika Ramamurthy: Can you elaborate on what that conversation about the future of work gets wrong?

SG: Automation and the impact of new technologies is a relevant topic to discuss, but all too often the people who are impacted by current problems of wages, benefits, and the lack of influence over working conditions get left out of the debate. Even before the pandemic, the average worker had experienced forty years of stagnant or declining pay, shrinking benefits, and reduced voice in the workplace. At the Ford Foundation, we focus on the future of workers—and named our program as such—because we’re focused on ensuring that all workers, regardless of their classification, have equal rights in terms of labor protections and social protections, and that workers shape the policies and the economic systems that affect their lives. We work to build public will and reimagine labor and social policies, to make sure all work and workers are valued and protected. I think that is what is critical right now, and I think the pandemic has created an opening for the kinds of discussions that we needed prepandemic and that thankfully are now beginning to take root.

RR: This is so important right now, as gig work starts to encroach on professions that you might never have imagined would be gutted by this. I was just reading about a bill in California that’s about to pass, “Uber for nurses.”² I think your instinct is right that with employment shifting and becoming flexible and restructured, new approaches and creativity vis-à-vis the working class are needed.

SG: Absolutely. If we aren’t careful, the policies that get created around so-called gig work could be the next chapter of policies that exclude large swaths of working people from the kinds of labor and social protections that are needed. It’s another vehicle that can promote the kinds of historical exclusions that our program has been trying to address. Domestic workers should have labor and social protections; day laborers should have labor and social protections. It’s important, through that lens, to recognize how critical this debate is right now, and how important it is for us to recognize—as a nation, as people, as policy-makers, as employers, as workers—that we can’t allow another vehicle by which those kinds of exclusions get created.

SD: You noted once that “the arc of the economic universe has bent badly toward injustice.”³ Why is this so, and what can be done about it?

SG: Why? Neoliberal policies of free trade, structural adjustment,⁴ increased outsourcing, and the fissuring of work. The growing concentration of power in the hands of multinational corporations and financial actors that occurred over the last forty years enabled them to rewrite the rules of the economy and claim the lion’s share of its benefits for themselves—and, as a consequence, working communities across the country are experiencing increasing economic insecurity. So, it’s critical—when we think about an inclusive and equitable economic recovery from the pandemic—to take a moment and pause, and acknowledge that the prepandemic economy was incredibly unequal, and that this pandemic has simply laid bare the results of decades of growing inequality and compounded it.

There are lots of statistics: you can look at the wealth gap, you can look at where jobs have grown or not grown in the last few years—and all point to the importance of looking at our economic recovery. It shouldn’t mean that we’re returning to “normal” or to recovery from just the pandemic. We’re in a moment that’s transformative; it’s an invitation (and responsibility) to build an economy that centers those who’ve historically been pushed to the margins. The magnitude of this crisis is an opportunity to have a magnitude of vision, and to reconstruct our economic and labor systems from the ground up. And that has to start with workers. We’re seeing that now, as we see workers expressing with their feet their discontent with the types of jobs they have access to, and what they believe they deserve.

SD: Why did those neoliberal policies pass into law and become effective? What can we learn from the experiences of labor defeat?

SG: Neoliberal policies include free trade, low taxes, deregulation, privatization, and balanced budgets. Every aspect of society is seen through the market economy. Neoliberal policies took hold because of a combination of trends: new economic thinking in reaction to the Keynesian economic model; businesses aggressively asserting their interests in politics; the public becoming more skeptical of government; and the aggressive attacks on unions as entities that represent the interests of working people. Many of these policies created a “race to the bottom,” in which many sectors of work were displaced and lost due to companies seeking cheaper labor in different parts of the world. Since the ’80s, a well-financed and organized anti-union industry has taken hold, making it more difficult for workers to form unions. As a result, we have witnessed the decline of unions that have been opposed to these types of policies that do not benefit workers and working-class communities. At the same time, we have seen the concentration of political and economic power and influence of the wealthy and corporations that are interested in making greater profits.

“These attacks on our democracy—whether it be voting rights or any other of the many different ways that such attacks are showing up—are another form of silencing the voices of working people, not only in the context of work but in the context of society as a whole.”

We should be really clear on why this came about. I noted the fissuring and neoliberal economic policies that substantively shifted the arrangements in workplaces. In the United States, we have antiquated labor laws and policies that were based on very traditional employment models, yet so many workers in our country today are not in those traditional employment arrangements. So, that’s one element. The other is the growth of an anti- union/union-busting industry that has perpetrated massive attacks on collective bargaining rights—which has been going on for over four decades now. What that means is it’s been made much harder for workers to come together collectively in their workplaces and form unions. It means we’ve seen increasing attacks in retaliation against workers who speak up in their workplaces around issues. We saw this with the pandemic—for instance, the Amazon worker in New York who spoke about health and safety issues and was immediately fired. Workers and whistleblowers across U.S. industries have alleged that they experienced retaliation for raising concerns about their health and safety.5 The increased attacks on collective bargaining and the increased retaliation that we see when workers speak up in their workplaces have made it very difficult for workers to find their voice in workplaces and to help to shape workplace policies.

I also want to connect this to what’s happening in our democracy as a whole right now, because it’s important for us to understand that these attacks on our democracy—whether it be voting rights or any other of the many different ways that such attacks are showing up—are another form of silencing the voices of working people, not only in the context of work but in the context of society as a whole. I think that the attacks on collective bargaining have had a huge impact on the health of our democracy generally. That’s the why: the policies that were passed, coupled with a real push to squash unions, if you will, or the idea of collective bargaining rights.

What we can learn from this defeat for working people and their communities is: the importance of unions and worker organizations to counterbalance the growing concentration of power of corporate interests; the critical need for unions as an organized voice to represent the interests of workers; and the need to create the collective economic and political power necessary to build an equitable economy and politics. We need to promote a vision of our economy that is based on the values of respect, agency, and everyone’s ability to sustain themselves and their families.

RR: Given this anti-union atmosphere, what do you see as the future of collective action? What role might traditional unions play? What role might alternative institutions, such as worker centers and worker cooperatives, play?

SG: Ultimately, all of us want to live in a healthy democracy in which our opinions and contributions matter— and collective bargaining is fundamental to building a healthy democracy, by creating pathways to elevate the decisions of workers alongside those of employers and others. This is particularly important in an era of global capitalism, where financialization (whereby the financial sector—banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, stocks and derivatives exchanges, and other conduits—takes up a larger share of the U.S. economy, and increases its influence over economic policy and economic outcomes),⁶ fissured employment, and entrenched practices of patriarchy and white supremacy exist. It means that we have to rethink collective bargaining and collective action, and reimagine what they look like in order to meet the needs of modern workers. So, in my mind, collective bargaining rights and collective action are critical pathways to democracy. We have to expand how we think about democracy: it’s not just a system of political practices but also principles that have to be applied to participation and decision-making in all aspects of people’s economic lives. That means that collective bargaining and collective action should be seen not only as important in the workplace but also in terms of the other economic relationships that workers hold: as tenants, as students who have debt, as the many different ways workers interact with the economy. Within that context, collective action becomes critical: it is the ability for people to come together and negotiate with whatever entity has decision-making power over their lives—negotiate agreements that give them a voice in the process and a way to hold firms, banks, and landlords, for example, accountable.

That’s what we’re starting to see happen. We know that labor unions—historically and still today—are an important pathway to the creation of good jobs and access to benefits. And for so many people—especially so many Black and Brown workers—unions were a huge pathway to the middle class, and that continues to be true and important. But we’ve also seen the growth of worker centers,⁷ and the impacts facing those historically excluded from labor laws and policies, as we’ve talked about. In this moment, especially with the pandemic, these impacts on people who have been historically excluded have become that much more apparent. We saw many Black and Brown workers, immigrant workers, and other low-wage workers excluded from fundamental rights and safeguards. Some of the early pandemic recovery policies, for example, and this anti-union offensive over the last two decades, have undermined worker protections in so many sectors of the economy—especially in lower-wage sectors of the economy, where so many Black and Brown and immigrant workers exist.

“We’re seeing collective action around us today in the increasing pressure for unionization. . . . We’re seeing the power of collectivization in the demands for better wages and benefits in an economy that centers workers.”

So, the growth of the worker-centered movement has been powerful in helping to right those exclusions, to find new approaches to collectively bring workers together and enable them to negotiate and to change policies. And this is fueled by an incredible renewal of energy in the labor movement. I see worker centers as playing a critical role in winning rights and raising standards in low-wage industries: they’ve been instrumental in raising the minimum wage and forcing wage theft ordinances, in winning a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and paid leave policies, and much more. I think they’ve played a big role on all those fronts in a way that gives us a window into what the future holds—one in which worker centers and labor unions can come together in a more powerful way. I think we are seeing new pathways to collective bargaining rights emerging here.

We’re seeing collective action around us today in the increasing pressure for unionization—from Starbucks workers, to Amazon, to journalism outlets, to tech companies. We’re seeing the power of collectivization in the demands for better wages and benefits in an economy that centers workers.

RR: What you’re describing is the ideal strategy of bargaining for the common good, or thinking as a “labor community,” as Naomi Williams might put it.⁸ The idea that, politically, the divorce of economic and racial justice is a major failure—not letting workers think about how their lives are integrated with work, and vice versa, and how people and institutions who hold power over them are affecting them, too.

SG: Bargaining for the common good is in fact one of the most promising models right now. I would also lift up what we’re seeing with the “Always Essential” campaign—another compelling example of essential workers coming together and declaring that “essential” doesn’t mean disposable, and that they need protections. And there have been great victories, from New York to Harris County, Texas, in terms of essential workers creating a Health and Safety Standards Board.⁹

SD: I would like to talk a bit about worker cooperatives—something we cover quite a lot at NPQ. The field is still fairly small, but the strategy is gaining prominence—it has certainly become a popular strategy among Latinx workers and workers of color generally. What can you say about the role of worker cooperatives?

SG: There’s growing momentum around worker cooperatives, which is really promising to see—and I think it’s a great example of economic democracy in its truest form. A lot of what we’re talking about here is economic democracy, and I think worker co-ops are a critical model of this. In some industries and places, it makes really good sense—it’s not applicable across the economy, per se, but where it does make sense, we’ve seen the power of what’s possible. I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Mondragón, Spain—the birthplace of the largest ever worker cooperative—and to see the model up close and what the impacts of such a model can be in terms of addressing the inequalities and disparities that we know exist, and what it means when workers really do have that much control over an industry (including the services that are created in that context).¹⁰ I think there is immense power in this, and I think time will tell, as this movement continues to grow in the United States, as to where and how the model takes root.

I do know that many of our grantee partners at Ford are in relationship with some of the worker cooperative movements, and that’s also what’s really exciting about this moment—the ways in which those in the worker justice movement are collaborating and learning from each other’s strategies to help inform new breakthroughs.

SD: I often refer to the 1936–37 Flint sit-down strike, and the fact that the workers were able to control the tool die that was used for shaping the body of about half the vehicles on the GM product line—which made their victory inevitable, once Governor [Frank] Murphy refused to bring in troops to break the strike. So, that was a point of leverage, and these days it seems harder to find those points of leverage. Where do you see points of leverage to shift the arc back in the direction of justice?

“We’re seeing an historic act of refusal by workers right now, who will no longer accept the below-standard wages and protections they’ve been forced to accept for decades.”

SG: Your question brings to mind another major worker struggle nearly a century ago, connected to a deadly pandemic, which was the ten thousand coal workers in West Virginia who banded together to march in protest against the cruelty and injustice they experienced working in the mines. It was one of America’s largest labor uprisings, and really unusual at that time because of the segregation of workers. But it did lead to incredible sets of protections that we take for granted today, like the forty-hour week and minimum wage.

In the same vein, we’re seeing an historic act of refusal by workers right now, who will no longer accept the below-standard wages and protections they’ve been forced to accept for decades. A lot of reporters and the media are calling this moment “The Great Resignation”; but in reality, millions of workers feel that America quit on them a long time ago, and I prefer to talk about it as “The Great Stagnation” for America’s workers— because it’s the stagnation of employers, policy-makers, and others who are just not changing the conditions for workers in this moment.¹¹ What’s exciting is that, in fact, there is this leverage right now, happening before our eyes—and workers are demanding that businesses compete with each other for their services, and are refusing to accept anything less than living wages, solid benefits, better working conditions, and flexibility.

And we’re seeing sectors in which wages and benefits have swung up.¹² There is much work still to be done, for sure—but this is a clear example of the power of collective action. And it’s one example of where I see leverage right now.

In the past, you thought about leverage in terms of employer and employees, and what a company can do and can’t do. But today, with the financialization of the economy, we have to ask ourselves what should and can a union contract cover? This gets back to the point about bargaining for the common good, which poses that question—as in, How do you leverage union contracts in smart ways to actually address a broader range of issues that fall outside of the contract but impact workers? Who are we negotiating with? Often, workers are not actually negotiating with the decision makers, and they’re caught in a shell game. It’s what we saw with McDonald’s workers: they think they’re negotiating with franchise owners, who say, “We don’t make those policies, it’s headquarters”; and headquarters says, “It’s not us, it’s the franchise.” Then there’s the role of private equity and hedge funds that own many of these companies and have a big say in decision-making, as we saw with Toys “R” Us workers not long ago, and with United for Respect, which did that really immense campaign.¹³ The question of who we are negotiating with and how that informs leverage is another really important element to be thinking about in this moment.

So, what does a union contract cover, who are we negotiating with, and then who actually gets to be included and seen as a worker? Who has the right to actually negotiate around these things? Depending on the sector, there are different ways we leverage. Again, bargaining for the common good is a great example of where all of these things are being tried in really smart, thoughtful ways, and bringing about real wins. Whether it’s the Florida public services union—SEIU Local 8—demanding that the city and state stop providing subsidies to companies that rely on fossil fuels as a core component of their business model, or Minnesota’s SEIU Local 26’s “ban-the-box” campaign, demanding that the company remove questions from employment applications pertaining to employees’ criminal record—these are things that, although not historically within a union contract, they were able to negotiate. There are many other examples, of course, but I think that’s how we begin to answer that question of what are the new leverage points in the economy as it is today. As our economy changes, it’s going to require the collective action and experimentation of workers and these kinds of campaigns to really sharpen those leverage points over time.

RR: Since you’ve already spoken about the creativity and ambition of the contemporary working class struggle, I wonder if you could talk a bit about how the composition of the working class has changed in the past few decades, and the implications of this change.

SG: The composition has shifted over the last few decades. Part of the worker center movement was a response to the growing numbers of Black, Brown, and immigrant workers who were in many sectors of the economy where work protections have not existed. Broadly speaking, if you look at the worker center movement and who they represent, that gives you a sense of the composition of the working class.

But what I would really like to focus on is Black workers, who are 12 percent of the overall workforce but represent over 17 percent of all frontline industry workers.¹⁴ Combined with the limited access to healthcare, Black workers and their families continue to be at higher risk of COVID, and of falling into poverty if they face disruptions at work. Within two decades, Black and Brown workers will become the majority of the working class, yet movements to transform labor policies do not have representative leadership from affected communities.

One exciting initiative that Ford is proud to be supporting is the Advancing Black Strategists Initiative. It’s a partnership among Jobs With Justice, the Institute for Policy Studies’ Black Worker Initiative, and Morehouse College’s International Comparative Labor Studies program.¹⁵ They’re looking to create the next generation of Black economic justice and labor strategists to lead campaigns and demand collective power building, particularly in the South. The goal of this initiative is to support the development of a new school of thought— one that’s anchored in the principle that working people’s ability to organize and collectively bargain, alongside voting and other forms of civic participation, is a prerequisite for a healthy society and economy. I feel like we want to support more initiatives like this that help us embrace the changing composition—not just to acknowledge but to actually support how the movement infrastructures get built to ensure that Black and Brown workers are shaping future economic and labor policies in this century.

RR: There’s a lot of talk about reimagining capitalism. But what if capitalism is the reason that the arc of the universe bends toward economic injustice?

SG: What we need is a new form of stakeholder capitalism that recognizes the importance of all stakeholders, including employees, the communities, and suppliers.16 It’s important to see workers as a core stakeholder among actors who are shaping the economy, shaping workplaces, shaping policies. We also need a form of capitalism in which boardrooms are changed. A year ago, a third of the Fortune 500 companies did not have a single African-American director, and I can assure you that if you don’t have representation at the board level, you’re not likely to see material or sustainable change in the C-suite and within the company more broadly.

We’ve also got to change the rules of the game so that people have the opportunity to compete on a level playing field. I think these are some of the fronts that we see as opportunities, as we talk about reimagining capitalism in this moment, to make sure that we’re really meeting the needs of workers and helping to support the environment that creates opportunities for workers to achieve dignity in their lives.

SD: But capital is in the name of capitalism—it really does privilege the owners of capital. Is there space for thinking beyond it?

SG: Let me be clear: We want to support workers within the logic of capitalism. I think that’s what worker justice groups are doing—taking the lead from unions and worker organizations. There is a lot of interesting discussion happening around post-neoliberal economic thinking, and there are actors within philanthropy who are beginning to understand and learn about some of those efforts that are taking root.

As philanthropy, we support the movement, and so we’re taking our lead from the movement as to where they see the openings and opportunities for them to shape economic models that they’re confronting on a daily basis. That’s really where we’re at in this moment, while paying attention to some of these conversations about new economic models that are taking root, and doing our part to position and ensure that worker groups are at the table in those conversations—alongside racial justice groups, feminist organizations, and many others—so that, as new economic models are being thought out, we don’t replicate the historic exclusions of the voices that we know are critical. If we want a better future, we need to make sure that those who have been most impacted and historically excluded are at the table shaping the models moving forward.

Notes

1. Sarita Gupta, Stephen Lerner, and Joseph McCartin, “It’s Not the ‘Future of Work,’ It’s the Future of Workers That’s In Doubt,” American Prospect, August 31, 2018, prospect.org/labor/future-work-future-workers-doubt/.

2. Akil Vicks, “Big Tech Is About to Make Our Terrible Health Care System Even Worse,” Jacobin, January 22, 2022, jacobinmag.com/2022/01/nurses-travel-apps-uber-flexibility-lean-production.
3. Stephen Lerner, Sarita Gupta, and Joseph McCartin, “Why the Labor Movement Has Failed—And How to Fix It,” Boston Review, May 1, 2019, bostonreview.net/articles/sarita-gupta-stephen-lerner-joseph-mccartin-why-labor-movement-has-failed/.

4. Structural adjustment allows firms to construct networks of subcontracting, outsourcing, and franchising that allow them to streamline operations and cut costs—specifically labor costs—by avoiding the responsibility once attached to the standard employment relationship of the See Jason Oringer and Carol Welch, “Structural Adjustment Programs,” Institute for Policy Studies, April 1, 1998, ips-dc.org/ structural_adjustment_programs/.
5. The National Employment Law Project has detailed retaliations faced by workers, including: employer hostility toward workers who speak up; terminations of workers who raised health concerns; threats of termination for taking time off; and spreading misinformation about federal worker According to the report: “A majority of workers surveyed (63 percent) indicated they have concerns about the [health and safety] risk that they, other workers, or the public may be exposed to coronavirus at their workplace. Just over a quarter of the workers surveyed (27 percent) were able to raise any concerns they had with their employer and received a satisfactory response. However, for every worker who raised concerns and had them addressed satisfactorily by their employer, another worker had unaddressed concerns, either because they raised concerns to their employer but were unsatisfied with their employer’s response or because they did not raise concerns for fear of retaliation. Black workers were both more likely to have concerns (80 percent) and were twice as likely as white workers to have unresolved concerns, with more than one in three Black workers (39 percent) reporting either that they had raised concerns to their employer about COVID-19 but were unsatisfied with their employer’s response, or that they did not raise concerns for fear of retaliation.” (Emphasis in the original.) See Irene Tung and Laura Padin, Silenced About COVID-19 in the Workplace (New York: National Employment Law Project, June 2020), 3.
6. Amanda Fischer, “The rising financialization of the S. economy harms workers and their families, threatening a strong recovery,” Washington Center for Equitable Growth, May, 11, 2021, equitablegrowth.org/the-rising-financialization-of-the-u-s-economy-harms-workers-and-their-families-threatening-a-strong-recovery/.

7. Laine Romero-Alston and Sarita Gupta, “Worker Centers: Past, Present, and Future,” American Prospect, August 30, 2021, prospect.org/labor/the-alt-labor-chronicles-america-s-worker-centers/worker-centers-past-present-and-future/.

8. See Naomi Williams, “Sustaining Labor Politics in Hard Times: Race, Labor, and Coalition Building in Racine, Wisconsin,” Labor 18, no. 2 (May 1, 2021): 41–63.
9. Lucio Vasquez, “Harris County leaders create a new government board for low-wage frontline workers,” Houston Public Media, November 30, 2021, houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/2021/11/30/414399/harris-county-leaders-create-a-new-government-board-for-low-wage-frontline-workers/; Edward Felsenthal, “Front Line Workers Tell Their Own Stories in the New Issue of TIME,” TIME, April 8, 2020, time.com/collection/coronavirus-heroes/5816805/coronavirus-front-line-workers-issue/; and New York State, Department of Labor, “Excluded Workers Fund,” dol.ny.gov/EWF.

10. Mondragon, “About Us,” accessed May 2, 2022, mondragon-corporation.com/en/about-us/.
11. Eli Rosenberg, “4.3 million Americans left their jobs in December as omicron variant disrupted everything,” Washington Post, February 1, 2022, washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/01/job-quits-resignations-december-2021/.

12. Laura Reiley, “Restaurant workers are quitting in This is how they are being lured back.,” Washington Post, January 28, 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/01/28/great-resignation-restaurant-perks/; and Megan Leonhardt, “Employers are upping pay and benefits to keep workers from resigning. Here are the perks workers want most,” Fortune, February 23, 2022, fortune.com/2022/02/23/ employers-increasing-pay-benefits-workers/.

13. United for Respect, “Toys ‘R’ Us Workers Changed History,” 2022, united4respect.org/campaigns/wall-street/toys-r-us/.

14. Hayley Brown, Shawn Fremstad, and Hye Jin Rho, “Racial Inequality Among Workers in Frontline Industries: Black Workers are Overrepresented and Undercompensated,” Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), June 4, 2020, sepr.net/racial-inequality-among-workers-in-frontline-industries-black-workers-are-overrepresented-and-undercompensated/.

15. See “Advancing Black Strategists Initiative,” Jobs With Justice, accessed May 5, 2022, jwj.org/our-work/absi.

16. For more on this, see Steve Dubb, “Disruption Is Hard: The Limits of Stakeholder Capitalism,” Nonprofit Quarterly, April 6, 2022, nonprofitquarterly.org/disruption-is-hard-the-limits-of-stakeholder-capitalism/.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Growing income and wealth inequality are disrupting every aspect of US society, including donations to nonprofits. Since 2016, with our biennial report, Gilded Giving, we’ve been tracking the risks that increasingly top-heavy philanthropy poses to independent nonprofits—and to our democratic institutions. This article highlights some of the latest research in our recently released 2022 edition.

The problem in a nutshell is that nonprofits are receiving less money from donors at lower- and middle-income levels, making them increasingly dependent on major gifts from far smaller numbers of wealthy donors. Splashy mega-gifts from the ultra-wealthy have masked the troubling declines in small donor giving, which we attribute to rising economic insecurity for most households.

As wealth has concentrated in fewer hands, so has philanthropic power—the power to define not only which problems need fixing but also the universe of acceptable remedies.

The Changing Picture of Who Gives

Again, the big-picture story of the last two decades is that giving by regular Americans has been relentlessly declining, even as giving by the wealthy has increased.

First, the decline in giving from middle-income households: from 2000 to 2018, the most recent data available, the proportion of households giving to nonprofits has dropped from 66 percent to just under 50 percent—meaning that fewer than half of all US households now donate to nonprofits each year. This decline correlates with measures of economic insecurity and is likely a product of less stable employment, coupled with stagnant wages and homeownership rates.

Writing three years ago for NPQ, Shena Ashley, then Vice President of Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, raised the alarm regarding the significance of this development. “What happens when the normative commitment to charity through charitable organizations is no longer universally held—when tens of millions of Americans choose to stop giving to charitable organizations?” Ashley asked. She concluded her analysis by noting that “foundations cannot remain comfortably unaware while everyday donors are walking away from charitable organizations.”

The other part of the big-picture story is that, at the same time, the share of charitable donations coming from the wealthy has increased significantly. In the early 1990s, households earning over $200,000 made up less than 25 percent of all charitable deductions. By 2019, they made up a whopping 67 percent. Some of this is due to an increase in the standard deduction in 2018, which limited how many people benefit from itemizing deductions. But even in 2017, before the tax law change, 55 percent of all charitable deductions were taken by families making $200,000 or more. For families making more than a million dollars a year, the percent of charitable deductions went from 10 percent in 1993 to 32 percent as of 2017—and even higher, 40 percent, with the new tax math in 2019.

And giving by megadonors—those at the very top of the income ladder—has grown astronomically fast. Giving USA‘s mega-gift threshold, which is the amount large enough to require a manual adjustment to their estimate models, has been increasing rapidly as ultra-wealthy donors dole out ever greater gifts. In 2011, the mega-gift threshold was just $30 million, and gifts over that size totaled $2.7 billion. By 2021, just 10 years later, the mega-gift threshold had jumped to $450 million, and gifts over that size added up to $14.9 billion.

Two Realities, Two Worlds of Giving

But why does this matter? A century ago, in a 1926 short story, author F. Scott Fitzgerald famously reminded readers that the very rich are “different than you and me.” One implication of Fitzgerald’s wisdom for the nonprofit sector is that they also give differently than you and me.

Above all else, the wealthy prefer to give not directly to nonprofits, but to intermediaries—particularly their own private foundations and donor-advised funds, or DAFs. Of the $25 billion that America’s top 50 philanthropists gave to charity in 2021, for example, a full 69 percent of it—more than $17 billion—went to private foundations. The second-largest slice, another $2.6 billion, went to DAFs.

You can see the effects of this shift over time. For example, according to the Federal Reserve, private foundations at the end of the first quarter of 2022 had $1.326 trillion in assets. When the Federal Reserve’s economic time series began in the fourth quarter of 1987, that number was $101.2 billion. In current dollars, that’s roughly $260.4 billion. In short, even adjusting for inflation, the asset value of private foundations has increased by a factor of five over the past 35 years.

Then there are DAFs. In 2009, according to the National Philanthropic Trust, total assets were $29.31 billion ($39.93 billion in 2020 dollars). By 2020, that figure was $159.83 billion. Effectively, the asset value of DAFs increased by a factor of four in just 11 years.

To illustrate this gap, in our latest edition of Gilded Giving, we compared the giving of the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s top 50 US donors to the giving of all Americans as reported in Giving USA. See the chart below to understand the vast difference in donor behavior:

As a society, we are coping with a myriad of crises of enormous scale: pandemic, climate change, crumbling infrastructure, gaping social and economic inequities.

What do the choices of the top 50 donors tell us? More than half of their giving went to intermediaries—DAFs and foundations—rather than direct beneficiaries. Nearly eight dollars in 10 went to foundations, DAFs, and education. Has philanthropy met the moment? The data suggest that most elite resources fail to meet society’s most pressing needs.

The Rise of Intermediaries

Private foundations and DAFs offer significant tax advantages to the wealthy donors who contribute to them. But foundations are only required to distribute five percent of their assets each year to charity, and DAFs have no payout requirement whatsoever. To compound the problem, foundations can count both grants to DAFs and administrative expenses toward their annual payout.

All of this means that of the millions in taxpayer-subsidized contributions pouring into foundations and DAFs, very little is guaranteed to make its way out in a timely fashion to nonprofits working directly for the public benefit.

Because of wealthy donors’ giving, donor-advised funds have been the fastest-growing recipients of charitable donations in the US for the past 20 years. The largest single recipient of charitable giving in the US for the past six years has been the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund—a commercial DAF sponsor. For the past three years, six of the top 10 charities have been DAF sponsors. And in 2020, for the first time ever, DAFs caught up with private foundations in terms of total contributions; both types of charitable intermediaries received roughly $48 billion from donors that year.

In fact, private foundations and donor-advised funds now siphon off nearly a third of US charitable giving. Giving to private foundations has increased from six to 15 percent of all charitable giving since 1992. And giving to DAFs has increased from four to 15 percent of all charitable giving since 2007. Together, these charitable intermediaries now soak up 30 percent of all US donations—more than quintupling their share of the charitable pie in less than 30 years.

Yes, a considerable part of this money does eventually make it to nonprofits, but not enough. In 2020, a record year for DAF contributions to nonprofits, DAF donations to nonprofits totaled $34.67 billion. Foundations contributed in 2020 a record $88.55 billion. Even so, in 2020, assets of both DAFs and foundations increased—in other words, even in a record giving year, they are not able to donate assets as fast as they accumulate them.

Fixing Philanthropy

As we have written previously in NPQ, we need to overhaul the rules governing philanthropy to discourage the warehousing of charitable wealth, to align tax deductions with the public interest, and to encourage broad-based giving across all segments of society. We outline our suggestions for this in detail in Gilded Giving 2022, but some of our key recommendations include:

• Require donor-advised funds to have a payout. DAFs should pay out the entirety of any donations within three years after donations have gone into the fund, including any income earned during that time. This type of reform is broadly supported by the American public.
• Increase DAF transparency and reporting. Donations to and from DAFs should be publicly disclosed and reported on an account-by-account basis. This could be done so as to protect anonymous givers.
• Increase the annual foundation payout requirement. We propose increasing the requirement to 10 percent of assets.
• Reform foundation payout exclusions. We should exclude both administrative overhead and grants to DAFs from counting toward the foundation’s payout requirement.
• Replace the itemized charitable deduction with a universal charitable tax deduction. We should implement a universal tax deduction for all households that give more than two percent of their adjusted gross income to nonprofits.

We estimate in Gilded Giving 2022 that if foundations had a 10 percent minimum payout and DAFs had a three-year mandated payout between 2018 and 2020, at least $193 billion in additional donations would have flowed to nonprofits.

Beyond Philanthropy 

Reforms to philanthropy are important, but even more important is to restore a modicum of fairness to taxation. A 2021 ProPublica exposé revealed that many of the wealthiest people in our country have been able to use various tax-avoidance strategies to bring their effective tax rates down to just a “tiny fraction” of the millions of dollars that their assets grow each year.

There are many ways to evade taxation, and undoubtedly, one of those ways is through philanthropy, including the use of private foundations and donor-advised funds. And when millionaires and billionaires donate unlimited amounts of money to charity, they opt out of paying their fair share of taxes to support the public infrastructure we all depend on.

It is important to remember that philanthropy is not a substitute for democratically governed public investments paid for by a fair and adequate tax system. If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us nothing else, it should have taught us this. The New York Times estimates that the US government spent $5 trillion on COVID relief. That’s a decade’s worth of philanthropic giving.

Philanthropy does many things well—notably, it can test new approaches to advance social justice that may eventually lead to better government policies. Yet that’s only likely to happen if the philanthropic edifice has at least some mooring in the desires of communities. As we have seen, everyday citizens over the past two decades have lost a good deal of the modest influence that they once had on the nation’s philanthropic system. In a polity that aspires to be a democracy, movement actors and policymakers must join to rein in abuses, restore fair taxation, and establish basic standards of public accountability.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

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Editors’ note: This article is from the Summer 2022 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Owning Our Economy, Owning Our Future.”

If you performed a task at four times the rate of productivity, shouldn’t you receive four times the pay?

In his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, mechanical engineer and management consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor tells the story of how he convinced a worker at the Bethlehem Steel company, whom he named “Schmidt,” to increase the amount of crude iron he was able to load onto a railroad car.¹ Taylor did this by promising him a raise, to be determined by management. Schmidt was eager to accept, as he had worked hard to own a small plot of land, and hoped to build a house on it. Taylor told Schmidt that he should walk, rest, and load when/as he was instructed by a manager, minimizing any inefficiencies or inconsistencies in the process of carrying the crude iron onto the train. Schmidt went from loading around 12 tons of iron to almost 48 tons per day—an increase of 400 percent. For this, his pay rose from $1.15 to $1.85—an increase of 60 percent.

Taylor’s method turned into an entire system of management focused on minimizing waste and maximizing profits, which became known as “Taylorism.”² By breaking down every task into its smallest components, Taylorism took control away from the worker executing the task and gave it to another person, a manager, who decided the “one best way” for it to be done. As workers lost more and more control over how their work was done, management was able to streamline the labor process, squeezing every last drop of efficiency out of it without paying in kind. From 1979 to 2020, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, net productivity rose 61.8 percent, while the hourly rate of pay for the average worker increased by only 17.5 percent.³ In other words, even though today’s worker is more productive than ever before, she has seen wages stagnate, prices increase, profits disappear into deep pockets, politics favor the wealthy, and working conditions worsen.

The political terrain on which the struggle for ownership over work is taking place does not exactly favor workers. Over the second half of the twentieth century, management responded to worker struggles for power with brutal techniques to inspire fear and tamp down resistance.

The Fruits of Our Labor

In Taylor’s story about Schmidt, everyone made more money than the steel loader himself, whose increased productivity was met with disproportionate compensation. A century later, this has stayed true: as workers struggle to make ends meet, pay for top-level executives and profit for the ownership class have grown exponentially. The Economic Policy Institute found last year that in 2020, CEOs made 351 times as much as the average worker.⁴ And even as those in the C-suite are being paid at such asymmetric rates, the owners of the companies they manage are making away with even more. Over the course of the last two years alone, wealth inequality has soared: American billionaires, many of whom are owners of the largest corporations in the world, have grown their assets by over $2 trillion since 2020—totaling over $5 trillion in October 2021, as one report shows.⁵ This kind of mind-boggling math is proof that the numbers don’t lie: the scales of the American economy are tipped in favor of those who already have the most. And that ownership relies on a system that funnels wealth away from workers and toward owners and the management class.

Giving workers back the fruits of their labor would completely alter the distribution of wealth in our economy and reverse economic inequality. At a very minimum, ownership over labor would be constituted by a fair wage. The federal minimum wage, which is at $7.25 per hour, has not been raised in over a decade, and fails to be sufficient pay as inflation steadily increases and prices soar. Lowering the value of the minimum wage hurts workers in the economy who often have the least bargaining power in the workplace—Black, Brown, immigrant, and women in low-wage jobs. Better wages are only one aspect of ownership in the workplace, but they are the main site of struggle for labor, because they are the most concrete illustration of one group’s efforts being controlled by another for profit. Tackling this disproportion in profit head on is the first step toward taking back control of how work is done.

Struggle For Power

The political terrain on which the struggle for ownership over work is taking place does not exactly favor workers. Over the second half of the twentieth century, management responded to worker struggles for power with brutal techniques to inspire fear and tamp down resistance, such as delaying negotiations, firing strikers, and even threatening or terminating union activists.⁶ While companies consolidated political power, federal labor law was not up to the task of defending workers and unions from political assault. As deindustrialization led to U.S. production being moved abroad, unions had less leverage to protect workers from closures and cuts. The American economy changed in its composition, turning to precarious work schedules and lean production to increase productivity, while giving U.S. workers less power and fewer protections than ever before.

Federal agencies and laws that support labor have been political targets since the middle of the twentieth century, when the labor movement was at its heyday. For example, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act amended the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act)—the nation’s fundamental law protecting workplace rights—by taking aim at some of labor’s most effective weapons: solidarity strikes (striking in support of other unions), secondary boycotts (calling for boycotts of companies that do business with a company engaged in a labor dispute), and closed shops (an agreement that employees will require membership as a condition of employment). The passage of Taft-Hartley led to the decline of union victories nationwide.⁷ If the legal apparatus of Taft-Hartley and other antilabor laws limited what unions could do, other political efforts attempted to limit what the nation knew about the labor movement altogether. For example, the Reagan administration cut funding for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1982, forcing it to limit documentation of work stoppages to those involving only one thousand or more workers who complete at least one entire shift.⁸ Because more than 80 percent of businesses have fewer than one thousand employees, the majority of work stoppage activity, from slowdowns to walkouts, goes undocumented.⁹ The consequences of this exclusion are vast, but the major loss is that workers all over the country have no way of knowing about workplace activity of various kinds—making it harder to inspire organizing efforts and learn from other fights.

Today, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is a federal agency that is in desperate need of support. Since last October, when the media buzz around labor activity was at an all-time high, union representation petitions—filed by employers or employees to hold an election to determine whether workers want a union— have increased by an impressive 57 percent at the NLRB, according to a report released in April 2022, with increased cases coinciding with critical shortages in both funding and staffing. Budgetary apportioning by the federal government, the report details, has not increased in nine years, and field staffing has decreased by half. “Right now, there is a surge in labor activity nationwide, with workers organizing and filing petitions for more union elections than they have in the last ten years,” NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said. “This has caused a significant increase in the NLRB’s caseload, and the Agency urgently needs more staff and resources to effectively comply with our Congressional mandate.”¹⁰ Without this funding, workers all over the country will be much less likely to succeed in their organizing efforts, especially when they are up against employers with resources dedicated to anti-union campaigns.¹¹

As of now, it seems that many workers are seizing the moment to insist that they deserve better. In what has come to be called “The Great Resignation,” almost 47 million American workers quit their jobs in 2021.

There have also been legislative efforts to give workers back control over their workplaces, beginning with the right to organize. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, also known as the PRO Act, is one proposed piece of legislation that would protect worker power.¹² The PRO Act proposes to end right-to-work laws (which financially undermine unions by preventing them from requiring membership as a condition of employment), protect workers from corporate exploitation, and put forward civil penalties for employers that violate labor law—including anti-union practices that undermine union elections and collective bargaining. This comprehensive reform aims to position unions as a powerful entity to stand up to corporate power, reversing close to a century of repression of the labor movement. With the PRO Act, the federal government has a chance to mitigate four decades of economic polarization and the brutalization of the working class. But achieving this kind of historic legislation to make labor law work for the people will require strong pushback from the working class and its allies.

Mobilization

As of now, it seems that many workers are seizing the moment to insist that they deserve better. In what has come to be called “The Great Resignation,” almost 47 million American workers quit their jobs in 2021, an overwhelming if unorganized response to the increased pressures of low-wage jobs.¹³ Workers— predominantly in the areas of retail, hospitality, and food services—quitting in the tens of millions is part of a larger trend of pushing back against the way we work now.¹⁴ This unprecedented wave of individual resistance—significant expression of a larger collective dissatisfaction—has sparked a national conversation about the nature of work. As Ophelia Akanjo wrote in a recent article for NPQ, employees are “treated as one- dimensional expendable beings with very little care for their three-dimensional complex lives outside of work.”¹⁵ Whether workers are fed up with low wages, despotic management, or limited flexibility, their mass quits suggest that work as we know it—wages, working conditions, and workplace power—is in desperate need of transformation.

As the widespread sentiment that “work sucks” became reflected in various spheres of media coverage, worker activity began to pick up steam. Last October, over 100,000 workers in the private sector were ready to walk off the job or were already walking picket lines—a phenomenon the media has called “Striketober.”¹⁶ But as Luis Feliz Leon and Maximillian Alvarez wrote in Labor Notes during this flurry of work stoppage activity, the labor movement—unions, worker centers, journalists, and other allies—has to both stoke the fires that fuel worker activity and clearly assess its obstacles: “We need to identify and cultivate the passions among America’s rank and file that have made this a special moment, but we also need to be clear-eyed about the deep challenges preventing this moment from becoming a movement.”¹⁷ Even though it has been widely repeated, for example, that more Americans are supportive of unions than ever before,¹⁸ that public opinion doesn’t translate directly to the incredible effort that workplace organizing requires: sitting through captive audience meetings (mandatory anti-union sessions run by management), running successful elections despite the arcane process, and growing membership to supermajorities in order to build power in local communities.

Paying attention to the stories of workers struggling for power in the workplace will allow us to better understand where revolutionary potential lies across various sectors of the economy, which are constantly being restructured by the pressures of capital.

Without both strategies—telling positive stories about labor while also honestly recognizing its political challenges—movement building will be divorced from the material context that makes it real: the workers themselves. Because the labor movement is an uneven and complicated one, grasping its ebbs and flows and mapping its moments of defeat is the only path forward with the strength required to take on multibillion- dollar corporations. As labor scholar Naomi R. Williams has noted, paying attention to the stories of workers struggling for power in the workplace will allow us to better understand where revolutionary potential lies across various sectors of the economy, which are constantly being restructured by the pressures of capital.¹⁹

Amazon is the most prominent example of a company that has restructured the economy and, by extension, the labor process. Employing over one million people in the United States, the company has set unprecedented productivity standards and reshaped consumer expectations—all at the expense of worker health and safety.²⁰ Insider accounts of working at an Amazon fulfillment center, like the one by journalist Emily Guendelsberger, detail the brutal expectations of this low-wage work. “Working in an Amazon warehouse outside Louisville, Kentucky,” Guendelsberger recounts, “I walked up to 16 miles a day to keep up with the rate at which I was supposed to pick orders. A GPS-enabled scanner tracked my movements and constantly informed me how many seconds I had left to complete my task.”²¹ Amazon has consistently been in the press for ignoring health and safety protections and imposing efficiency requirements that force workers to relieve themselves in plastic water bottles, miscarry pregnancies due to overexertion, or even die on the shop floor of a heart attack.²² As workers at Amazon have pointed out, this production pace is set, as at other low-wage jobs, by technology: algorithms and trackers that count a bathroom break as a “TOT” (time off task).²³ Subverting the safety and dignity of workers to Amazon’s two-day delivery model via various modes of technological surveillance is not just a feature of the logistics sector. Technological surveillance for productivity purposes has become a near ubiquitous feature of the modern workplace,²⁴ ranging across sectors from food service to healthcare, and prioritizing output above all.

A company of this insidious influence and economic power is unlikely to take kindly to attempts to curb its insatiable pace. This is one reason why Amazon spent over $4 million on anti-union consultants when workers at JFK8, a Staten Island fulfillment center, began to organize an independent union.²⁵ Considering this well- resourced attack—alongside the conditions that make organizing at Amazon extremely hard (including high employee turnover and technological surveillance)—the Amazon Labor Union’s historic election in favor of union representation at JFK8 is no small feat.²⁶ There is no straightforward path to worker sovereignty, however: earlier this May, workers at the fulfillment center LDJ5 warehouse voted against the union.²⁷ But the uneven character of struggle within the corporation itself does not necessarily change the labor movement’s energy on a national scale; nor does it change the fact of the ALU’s first and essential win. Organizing efforts at Amazon fulfillment centers are important first steps toward taking back the reins of a global infrastructure that increasingly surveils and profits off us all. When workers see other workers winning power at their workplaces, especially at a giant like Amazon, it tends to spread like wildfire.²⁸

***

The famous slogan of the labor movement—“eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will”—articulates the spirit of many worker struggles we are seeing today. Workers, from manufacturing to higher education, understand that power in the workplace is the first step toward living whole and healthy lives. Without control over the eight hours of the workday, the remaining sixteen, for rest and what we will, are bound to suffer.

This control looks like many things. Beyond demanding good, high-paying jobs for all, the labor movement also struggles for other kinds of equality in the workplace: freedom from discrimination and harassment, transparency around working conditions and wages, and decision-making power—all aspirational features of a worker-owned economy. Ownership over work is the right to be safe, the right to have a say over our time, and the right to a life of dignity. To realize a world beyond our capitalist present, to leave behind staggering inequality and crushing productivity, we need workers to take the wheel and steer society into these fairer waters.

Notes

1. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911).
2. Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997).
3. Economic Policy Institute, “The Productivity–Pay Gap,” updated August 2021, epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/.

4. Economic Policy Institute, “CEO pay soared nearly 19% in 2020,” press release, August 10, 2021, epi.org/press/ceo-pay-soared-nearly-19-in-2020-ceos-made-351-times-as-much-as-the-typical-worker/.

5. Chuck Collins, “Updates: Billionaire Wealth, S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers,” Blogging Our Great Divide, Inequality.org, May 6, 2022, inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pandemic/.
6. Lawrence Mishel, Lynn Rhinehart, and Lane Windham, Explaining the erosion of private-sector unions: How corporate practices and legal changes have undercut the ability of workers to organize and bargain (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, November 18, 2020).
7. “1947 Taft-Hartley Substantive Provisions,” National Labor Relations Board, accessed May 20, 2022, www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/who-we-are/our-history/1947-taft-hartley-substantive-provisions. And see “1959 Landrum-Griffin Act,” National Labor Relations Board, accessed June 24, 2022, www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/who-we-are/our-history/1959-landrum-griffin-act.

8. Harry Bernstein, “Bureau of Labor Statistics Facing More Cuts,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1985, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-28-fi-25131-story.html; and Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work Stoppages: History,” last modified January 23, 2019, www.bls.gov/opub/hom/wsp/history.htm.

9. Andrew Hait, “The Majority of U.S. Businesses Have Fewer Than Five Employees,” United States Census Bureau, January 19, 2021, www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/01/what-is-a-small-business.html.
10. National Labor Relations Board, Office of Public Affairs, “Union Election Petitions Increase 57% In First Half of Fiscal Year 2022,” April 6, 2022, nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/union-election-petitions-increase-57-in-first-half-of-fiscal-year-2022.

11. M. Lewis, “Multimillion-Dollar ‘Union Avoidance’ Industry Faces New Scrutiny,” Progressive Magazine, February 20, 2021, progressive.org/latest/union-avoidance-industry-scrutiny-lewis-210220/.
12. Celine McNicholas, Margaret Poydock, and Lynn Rhinehart, “How the PRO Act restores workers’ right to unionize,” Economic Policy Institute, February 4, 2021, epi.org/publication/pro-act-problem-solution-chart/.

13. Joseph Fuller and William Kerr, “The Great Resignation Didn’t Start with the Pandemic,” Harvard Business Review, March 23, 2022.
14. Jennifer Liu, “Roughly 47 million people quit their jobs last year: ‘All of this is uncharted territory,’” CNBC Make It, February 1, 2022, cnbc.com/2022/02/01/roughly-47-million-people-quit-their-job-last-year.html.

15. Ophelia Akanjo, “The Great Resignation—A Call for Change in Organizational Culture,” Nonprofit Quarterly, February 16, 2022, org/the-great-resignation-a-call-for-change-in-organizational-culture/.

16. Daniel Thomas, “100,000 workers take action as ‘Striketober’ hits the US,” BBC News, October 14, 2021, bbc.com/news/business-58916266.
17. Luis Feliz Leon and Maximillian Alvarez, “Viewpoint: Beneath Striketober Fanfare, The Lower Frequencies of Class Struggle,” Labor Notes, October 29, 2021, org/2021/10/viewpoint-beneath-striketober-fanfare-lower-frequencies-class-struggle.

18. Megan Brenan, “Approval of Labor Unions at Highest Point Since 1965,” Gallup, September 2, 2021, news.gallup.com/poll/354455/approval-labor-unions-highest-point-1965.aspx.

19. Rithika Ramamurthy, “Bargaining for the Common Good: Race and Labor at the University,” Nonprofit Quarterly, March 23, 2022, org/bargaining-for-the-common-good-race-and-labor-at-university/.

20. Jason Del Rey, “The Amazonification of the American workforce,” Vox, April 21, 2022, vox.com/the-highlight/22977660/amazon-warehouses-work-injuries-retail-labor.

21. Emily Guendelsberger, “I’m a writer who went to work at an Amazon warehouse, a call center, and a McDonald’s. I saw firsthand how low-wage work is driving America over the edge,” Business Insider, November 26, 2019, businessinsider.com/i-worked-three-low-wage-jobs-prize-efficiency-over-humanity-2019-8.

22. Ken Klippenstein, “Documents show Amazon is aware drivers pee in bottles and even defecate en route, despite company denial,” The Intercept, March 25, 2021, com/2021/03/25/amazon-drivers-pee-bottles-union/; Lauren Kaori Gurley, “Amazon Denied a Worker Pregnancy Accommodations. Then She Miscarried,” Vice, July 20, 2021, www.vice.com/en/article/g5g8eq/amazon-denied-a-worker-pregnancy-accommodations-then-she-miscarried; Dana Schuster, “Amazon workers ‘forced to go back to work’ after fellow employee dies on shift,” New York Post, October 19, 2019, nypost.com/2019/10/19/ amazon-workers-forced-to-go-back-to-work-after-fellow-employee-dies-on-shift/.

23. Nathan Robinson, “How the Amazon Labor Union Defeated the Bezos Behemoth,” interview with Justine Medina, Current Affairs, April 22, 2022, www.currentaffairs.org/2022/04/how-the-amazon-labor-union-defeated-the-bezos-behemoth.

24. Joelle Gamble, “The Inequalities of Workplace Surveillance,” The Nation, June 3, 2019, thenation.com/article/archive/worker-surveillance-big-data/.

25. Dave Jamieson, “Amazon Spent $4.3 Million On Anti-Union Consultants Last Year,” HuffPost, March 31, 2022, huffpost.com/entry/amazon-anti-union-consultants_n_62449258e4b0742dfa5a74fb.
26. Alex Press, “A Stunning New Chapter Begins for Amazon Warehouse Workers,” Jacobin, April 1, 2022, jacobinmag.com/2022/04/amazon-labor-union-victory-jfk8-staten-island-bessemer.
27. Karen Weise, Noam Scheiber, and Coral Murphy Marcos, “Amazon Union Loses Vote at Second Staten Island Warehouse,” New York Times, May 2, 2022, nytimes.com/2022/05/02/technology/amazon-union-staten-island.html.

28. Alex Press, “The Starbucks Union Drive Is Spreading With Impressive Speed,” Jacobin, February 5, 2022, www.jacobinmag.com/2022/02/starbucks-union-drive-movement-workers-united-seiu.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.