Why nonprofit workers are organizing unions, even during the pandemic
And does the EITC deliver?
Hi!
So a bit of news: a little over a month ago I shared an Intercept story here I wrote about a newly-elected Milwaukee city councilmember whose first order of business was to draft legislation to ensure no Milwaukean would have to vote in-person in November if they didn’t want to. While Milwaukee doesn’t have the legal authority to mail everyone ballots (that’s up to the GOP-controlled state legislature), they can mail all registered voters absentee ballot applications along with prepaid postage to send the applications back in. The bill passed, and it was reported yesterday that now statewide officials in Wisconsin are looking to do the same thing.
That’s definitely encouraging for people who want to ensure they can cast their votes safely during the pandemic, and as I’ve written about before, perhaps no state is more critical to winning the White House in 2020 than Wisconsin. That said, our president has been saying extremely dangerous things recently to denigrate vote-by-mail (even though he and his press secretary Kayleigh McEnany regularly vote absentee) so that’s a real threat everyone should be preparing for.
I have two new stories to share this week!
The first is a reported piece for The American Prospect looking at new scholarship and debates around the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, which is the largest federal subsidy for low-income workers. About 22 million workers received EITC benefits in 2018, and it’s credited with lifting 5.6 million Americans out of poverty. This is a policy-oriented story, and I’ll say it matters now because a) it’s about welfare tied to work, and a lot of people losing their jobs these days. And b) expanding the EITC is a stated priority of Democrats in Congress and was of nearly all the Democratic presidential candidates including Joe Biden. So getting a clearer handle on how this works and doesn’t matters. You can read that here.
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I also had a story today in Strikewave, a great labor-focused publication that’s about 1.5 years old. They’re really worth checking out, and I was happy to be commissioned to write this piece on non-profit unions. Like other industries with a lot of millennials and college-educated workers, nonprofits have seen a wave of recent union organizing. (Nonprofits include museums, charter schools, hospitals, think tanks, political campaigns, social service providers and more.) The tactics for organizing nonprofits differ from those at big companies like Amazon or Boeing… as do the tactics nonprofit employers use to dissuade their workers from joining unions.
I talked with longtime organizers for both for-profits and non-profits to learn how their efforts are tailored to these mission-driven groups that often have very difficult funding constraints, as well as workers with very different attitudes towards their jobs.
The piece also looks at why we’re seeing nonprofits announce union drives now even amidst the coronavirus. I think you’ll find this one interesting, and you can read it here.
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And thanks as always to everyone for reading! Stay safe and keep wearing those masks.