The New York staff for the Open Society Foundations, the network of George Soros-founded think tanks, nonprofits, and NGOs, have ratified a collective bargaining contract with their management, making it the latest in a string of liberal and left-leaning activist organizations to unionize in recent years.
Management reportedly did not oppose the effort, a rarity among such organizing drives.
“It was kind of intuitive to form a union, since we support unions. There was a huge desire to have some sort of commitment to internal equity,” Chris Thomas, a legal assistant active in the union drive, told the Huffington Post. The staff voted to join the Communication Workers of America in 2016, but reaching a contract with management took a year and half. Workers ratified the contract last week.
Union organizers in recent years have found receptive audiences with workers at liberal organizations that rhetorically support unions, though management has often been less enthusiastic. Staffers at the liberal news site Vox joined the Writers Guild of America East this year after charging that Vox Media, the website’s parent corporation, was involved in “unionbusting” to undermine their efforts. The Writers Guild also unionized the staffers of ThinkProgress, the liberal blog of the nonprofit Center for American Progress Action Fund, in 2015.
Staffers at the liberal website Media Matters for America voted to unionize as part of the Service Employees International Union in 2014, after facing initial resistance from their management. The same SEIU local that represents those workers has been involved in an effort to organize the activist group Council on American Islamic Relations and has filed an unfair practices complaint against CAIR’s leadership.
