Until Justice Is Real…In Our Workplace

TL;DR

• COC has a long history of harm against Black women which continues today because leadership refuses to take accountability for failed policies.
• Color Of Change (COC) has been destabilized in the absence of a union contract because of inconsistent policies. They have actively fostered an unsafe work environment and continue perpetuating harm by refusing to take accountability for the organization’s instability.
• After negotiating for over a year, COC leadership continues to make decisions that impact union members outside of the bargaining table. For example, making unilateral decisions on the future of remote work, switching 401k advisory firms, reducing the listed salary in a job posting by 5.5% for the same role that they hired last year.
• Our demand is that management comes to the negotiation table in good faith, ready to reach tentative agreements on all articles by November 16, 2022.

THE COLOR OF CHANGE UNION NEEDS A CONTRACT NOW!

For over a year, the Color Of Change Union has been in negotiations with management to agree on a union contract that would ensure a safe work environment. The bargaining unit had hoped management would move with urgency towards a union contract.

The installation of protections and processes we propose would ensure sustainability at COC and prevent situations that would destabilize the organization, such as what happened earlier this year where multiple members of senior leadership were either let go or suddenly left without explanation. This caused a vacuum of leadership at the organization for many months and exposed that the organization has a long history of harming Black women employees.

Our union members have been subjected to toxic working conditions — from cover ups involving sexual harassment and retaliation to the abrupt termination of several members of the leadership team. The reactionary decisions of management continue to expose that Black women are routinely dehumanized within the organization.

Now, the situation has only gotten worse as management has continuously circumvented the bargaining unit on matters we have been negotiating on for a year.

COC has prided itself as being the nation’s largest online racial justice organization. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, bargaining unit members have secured a record number of campaign wins for the organization in a largely virtual environment. However, bargaining unit members are concerned about our health and safety. As we continue to be in at least one pandemic, we proposed that bargaining unit members be allowed to work fully remotely and be given the option to work in an office if they choose to.

Here’s what’s happened since we started negotiations:

• To date, we’ve presented 24 articles and we’ve only reached tentative agreements on 4.
• In February, we sent management a proposal about remote work for bargaining unit members. Management has yet to respond to our proposal, but in April, they created an employer-dominated work group to determine our plans to return to office, titled “Future of Work” — the outcome is that managers will have the final say if a bargaining unit member has to return to the office or not.
• COC management made multiple organization-wide changes about bargaining-eligible topics outside of the bargaining process, not respecting the contract negotiation process or the union that they voluntarily recognized.

Color Of Change management is making changes on eligible bargaining topics without the input of the bargaining unit and without notifying them ahead of time. This is not a good-faith negotiation process.

The same was the case with what happened with our 401k:

• After submitting an economic article in late July that focused specifically on the retirement plans of bargaining unit members, HR announced out of nowhere that we were going to be switching financial advisors and financial firms.
• We were then told that we were not switching firms, just switching advisors. We were then told that we were, in fact, changing firms.
• Management tells us that this was a process that was months in the making, but at no point did they decide to alert the bargaining unit of this potential change. These are massive decisions that affect the livelihoods and retirements of the bargaining unit and every employee at Color Of Change.

Even as recently as this month, HR put up a job posting for a union-eligible position at a 5.5% cut from what the salary was as of last year. They did this while hiring management positions with six figure salaries. Management is making unilateral decisions on bargaining unit salaries for potential new hires during negotiations. It is our concern as a union that management is devaluing the work of unit members, both present and future.

It has been a year since union negotiations started and we are so far away from anything resembling a contract. We have presented management with 24 articles and have only reached tentative agreements on four of them since September 2021. There are articles in which we have been waiting for counter-proposals from Color Of Change’s management for months.

COC management wants to push forward with a facade that Color Of Change is a “progressive” organization, fighting against corrupt corporations, politicians, and policies, but management has perpetuated harms that result in a toxic workplace environment with an alarming staff turnover rate. COC leadership — including our board members — masquerade as pro-worker and pro-union by speaking on panels on the role of unions and centering workers for racial justice. But the reality is that their circumventing of a good-faith negotiation process has been demeaning and downright disrespectful as we spend countless hours working on a contract that is for our bargaining members–the people who do the core work of the organization. Management has run out the clock for way too long. We need a #CONTRACTNOW.