Following a string of union victories at Amazon and Starbucks, a group of prominent progressive grant makers is seeking to put a total of $20 million into a coalition with organized labor that will steer funds to organizing and advocacy campaigns in the South.
A contentious battle to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., provided much of the impetus to create the new fund, says Jennifer Epps, executive director of the Labor Innovations for the 21st Century, or LIFT, Fund, a 10-year-old philanthropy-labor collaboration that will manage the effort. The fact that the Bessemer union drive wasn’t squashed outright gave foundation leaders hope that they can succeed in a region that has been difficult for unions to take hold.
“If folks in Alabama said that they were going to stand up and fight for the things that they believe and that they deserve, why wouldn’t philanthropy and other organizations working to help folks improve their lives be there with them?” she says. ‘This is an opportunity to put our resources where our mouth is.”
The fund, called the Southern Workers Opportunity Fund, has secured commitments totaling $14 million from foundations that have contributed to LIFT over the course of its 10-year history, including the Ford and Kellogg foundations. The fund also includes contributions from the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the Babcock, Surdna, and Tara Health foundations, as well as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which had not made grants to LIFT previously and is best known for its health-policy and research grant making. Decisions on which nonprofits will receive money will be made by a steering committee consisting of foundation and union leaders.
The support garnered by the Southern Workers Opportunity Fund reflects a growing interest among foundations in supporting workers’ rights more broadly. The fact that philanthropy and unions are working together on the fund and the targeting of the South, a region of the country long inhospitable to organizing, reflects a change of focus for foundations, which had largely written off working with organized labor and supporting southern workers as lost causes, Epps says.
The new interest in supporting workers’ campaigns has also drawn criticism from opponents of unionizing, who say that such efforts run afoul of the spirit of laws cordoning off charitable giving from politics.
If the fund raises as much as it contemplates, it will significantly increase LIFT’s grant-making budget, which is about $2 million a year. Grants will be awarded starting in the fall to workers’ groups emphasizing racial, gender, and economic justice.
The pandemic raised awareness of the difficulties faced by low-wage workers, Epps says, making it an ideal time for workers to parlay the increased attention into policy gains and organizing victories. As more manufacturers and warehouse companies have located in the south over the past decade, in large part because of “right-to-work laws,” which make it hard for workers to organize, activists like Epps, who came to the LIFT Fund last fall after a career as a union leader, say the need to bolster workers’ campaigns has become more crucial.
Epps and others involved in the fund are aware that union efforts face challenges in the South. One of their major short-term goals is to support small, successful projects that will attract more philanthropy, particularly regional donors, to the effort.
Grants from the Southern Workers Opportunity Fund will be made to nonprofit organizations that work to support worker centers, which are community organizations that support low-wage workers who are not represented by a union. Support will be given to groups pushing for community benefit agreements that hold companies accountable for creating a certain number of local jobs with certain wage levels and benefits when they open a facility in a town.
But ultimately, Epps says, successfully negotiating a contract with employers is the key to increasing worker power.
“Collective bargaining agreements are the gold standard,” she says
Political Taint
Anti-union critics see the combination of union and foundation dollars as something more nefarious: using philanthropic money earmarked for charity to tilt the political debate to suit progressive aims. The grants made by the fund will not go directly to unions organizing workplaces. But the fact that they are going to be made in consultation with unions gets into a legally gray, area says Richard Epstein, a law professor at New York University School of Law.
“This is not charitable work,” he says. “This is political advocacy.”
Epstein did not know the particulars of the LIFT Fund commitment. But he said foundations will “finesse” grants to support political work to be technically nonpolitical even though they are designed to achieve a political end.
The problem, critics say, is that the law governing political giving by foundations fails to account for efforts to sway political races and legislation that aren’t overtly political. Supporting unions, according to Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, falls into that category.
“National union leaders seem to increasingly prioritize their left-wing politics even though much of their political agenda doesn’t reflect the much more diverse political leanings of the rank-and-file workers they claim to represent,” Semmens wrote in an email.
That argument doesn’t persuade José Garcia, senior program officer at the Ford Foundation.
“We’re looking for the benefit of all workers,” he says. “This is not political. We see the poverty. We see people cannot put food on the table. This isn’t a political issue, it’s a human rights issue.”
More Dollars Flowing
Over the past two years, there have been some notable commitments by philanthropy to workers’ rights.
Bolstered by donations from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the Families and Workers Fund grew from about $10 million to $51 million over the past two years.
As part of is broader Reimagining Capitalism program, the Omidyar Network, created by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, has made a total of $8 million in grants over the past two years. In May, the philanthropy said would devote another $16 million to advancing workers’ rights over the next four years. The network will de-emphasize federal advocacy over that time period and work to organize workers, coordinate more with unions, and focus on state policy battles.
Coworker.org, a website that helps workers groups organize, has seen its budget grow from less than $2 million in 2019 to a projected $3.2 million this year, thanks in part to a tripling of grants from foundations, according to Michelle Miller, the site’s co-founder.
Organizing activity throughout the United States has resulted in a spike in demand that her current budget can’t accommodate, said Miller, who would like to increase Coworker.org’s support of workers by 50 percent this year. Last year she created the Solidarity Fund, where workers can contribute stipends directly to other workers engaged in organizing. The effort raised $200,000 for workers at technology companies.
“We’re in a moment where direct support to people who are actively engaged in frontline organizing can make or break a campaign, but that’s not necessarily where philanthropic dollars are structured to go.”
Big Shift in Attitudes Toward Labor
The attention foundations and donors have paid to workers’ rights, and union organizing in particular, is a lot different than what Amy Dean experienced as an AFL-CIO leader in Silicon Valley in the 1990s. The idea of even getting a meeting with Pierre Omidyar was laughable, she says. If foundations did make grants related to organized labor, she says, it was often directed at rooting out corruption in particular locales.
“I was told ‘forget about them. You’ll never raise money for the labor movement,’” recalls Dean, now a consultant. “Philanthropy’s relationship to labor was either hatred or ambivalence, at best. Philanthropy was always sort of skeptical — it felt that the labor movement was too big, powerful, and influential.”
Foundations are coming to believe that the change they want to see will only come if workers have more say in the workplace, says Dean.
It’s a lesson learned from the #MeToo movement, the wave of protests following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and the string of union victories at places like Amazon and Starbucks that previously seemed impervious to attempts to organize, says Christian Sweeney, deputy organizing director at the AFL-CIO.
“There’s a growing sense that the major problems in our country aren’t getting solved purely through policy interventions or charitable works,” Sweeney says. “What’s driving this from the foundation side is that people see the labor movement broadly as a place to change the balance of power.”
The tight labor market, a president who has courted union support, and the increased visibility of workers’ struggles during the pandemic have given organized labor its best shot in decades to make gains, says Pamela Shifman, president of the Democracy Alliance, a network of progressive donors.
She cited a Gallup poll conducted last summer that showed a 69 percent approval rate for unions — their highest level since 1965, and well higher than its nadir in 2009, when fewer than half of Americans said they approved of unions. To capitalize on that support in April, the leaders of four national unions, the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and the SEIU addressed her group’s annual meeting.
Says Shifman: “This moment is an unprecedented opportunity for building worker power and organized labor.”
