LGBTQ+ advocacy group The Trevor Project has been the site of a noteworthy fight for a union in the past month, as its employees seek to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and receive voluntary recognition from the nonprofit.
After a period of silence, yesterday (April 7), Friends of Trevor United announced a card-counting agreement that would see the union, which claims supermajority support from employees, voluntarily recognized by the nonprofit if it can demonstrate majority support. Provided The Trevor Project sticks to its word–it has been otherwise almost silent on the unionization thus far–Friends of Trevor United should very shortly become the official union of its employees. The union, I should note, has pretty broad external support, including the backing of Congressman Ritchie Torres (Democrat, New York's 15th congressional district)–it would be pretty stupid of the nonprofit to pick a fight here.
In any case, this unionization effort has been a long time coming, according to current and former employees of the nonprofit. In the union's vision statement, they describe numerous internal problems which leadership has been slow to address:
Over the past months and years, our staff members have called into question the leadership and priorities of the organization. BIPOC, trans, and disabled staff spoke up against racism and discrimination; our Crisis Services staff spoke up against harassment and unsafe working conditions; staff spoke up in solidarity with their colleagues’ concerns.
These concerns are backed up and reiterated in several places. A Twitter thread by former employee Preston Mitchum, for example, includes claims of a high-level employee within The Trevor Project misgendering a non-binary employee and then downplaying it. Further, in a VICE article on the unionization effort, employees describe an organization slow to respond to right-wing mass-harassment efforts:
[Sarah] Hallock said that people who provide direct crisis care are now regularly forced to deal with prank callers and worse. Some of those bad faith actors are people who start a call off with slurs, but can include people threatening violence against the organization, or someone attempting to get screen grabs of a conversation to share with conservative media or social media accounts, 'to try to make it look like we’re doing something wrong in supporting trans youth that reach out to us.'
The nonprofit, unsurprisingly, has seen a great deal of employee burnout in light of these–and this has been particularly exacerbated due to an alleged lack of crisis support staff and employee support. The union is hoping to bargain for more support to this end.
Another major issue the union is seeking to change in the organization is its culture–minorities within The Trevor Project report a culture that favors white employees both implicitly and explicitly, and the union itself has a BIPOC Caucus with a second set of demands to address the organization's racial issues. The BIPOC Caucus is calling for an end to "culture fit" promotions and hires, a shift to inclusionary language, and zero tolerance policies for racism and discrimination to be implemented within the organization.
More general union issues such as better pay and better benefits (including more access to healthcare and especially gender-affirming care) are also on the table, but at least in broad strokes seem comparatively tertiary to the aforementioned two points.