When employees of Larkin Street Youth Services in San Francisco began talking about unionizing earlier this spring, their concerns centered on issues familiar to workers of all stripes: understaffed departments, increased workloads, benefit cuts, high turnover. Although an attempt to unionize in October 2010 was unsuccessful, most employees at the homeless services nonprofit believed that the effort would end differently this time around.
The workers engaged in a full-throated unionization drive, complete with outreach to supervisors in San Francisco City Hall and meetings with community-based organizations and political entities to garner widespread support. Nearly all the nonprofit's staff participated in the election, and when the vote was counted on June 6, the outcome was clear: By a margin of 67 to 17, Larkin Street workers voted to unionize with representation through SEIU 1021, a labor organization that represents employees of local governments, health care organizations, and school districts throughout Northern California. The Larkin Street workers joined the Lusty Lady, the Exploratorium, La Clinica de le Raza, and scores of others as rare beasts in the US economic order: unionized nonprofits.
Larkin Street's move to unionize has implications that reverberate beyond its home in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. The growth of nonprofits nationwide is coinciding with the decline of union membership, so nonprofits could become a new battleground in the labor movement, particularly since nonprofits are now filling gaps in the economy that were once occupied by government agencies that employed union workers. And the battle could start in the Bay Area, which has the third-highest number of nonprofit organizations of any metropolitan area in the country (behind only New York City and Washington, DC), and has a unionization rate that is 6 percent higher than the national average.
Nationwide, organized labor has been in a serious decline for decades. In 1983, the union membership rate across all industries was 20.1 percent, covering 17.7 million union workers. Today, that figure stands at 11.3 percent, covering 14.4 million workers.
The nonprofit sector, on the other hand, is large and expanding. In fact, it's the third-largest industry in the United States behind retail and manufacturing. There are more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations in the United States, holding more than a trillion dollars in assets, and providing services ranging from low-cost health care to river cleanup. According to a 2012 report by the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins University, nonprofit employment represented 10.1 percent of total employment in the United States in 2010, with total workforce numbering 10.7 million.
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