In my overview of labor policy in 2026, I asserted, “The biggest labor issue of all is the changed, and still changing, composition of Big Labor’s membership. And the people the metropolitan press live and work around—journalists, government workers, and liberal nonprofit staffs—are represented well in that changed composition.” At Capital Research Center, we have discussed the journalists’ unions some and the government worker unions quite a lot—as well we should, given that government-worker unions constitute roughly half of unions’ membership and that they are major players in liberal Democratic and democratic socialist politics.
But we have not discussed the nonprofit-staff unions all that much, except occasionally to point out that liberal nonprofits and even labor unions themselves can negotiate as aggressively as any right-wing industrialist. But as the recent vote by several hundred members of the staff of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) to join the United Auto Workers (a.k.a. the “united non-auto non-workers”) illustrates, unions in membership decline see nonprofits as a member-dues lifeline, and nonprofit workers are a class open to filling out Big Labor’s ranks. How did we get here and what does it mean?
How We Got Here: Unionizing the Nonprofits
Unionizing nonprofit staff is not particularly new. Unions themselves have practiced collective bargaining with staff unions for decades, and the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, Local 70 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees AFL-CIO (IFPTE), reports on its tax documents that it received its tax-exempt status in 2000.
NPEU began in 1998 at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), effectively Big Labor’s semi-in-house think tank. According to a 2020 article at the labor-focused socialist magazine In These Times, the NPEU’s efforts picked up in pace around 2018, with an organizing wave bringing its total nonprofit workforces represented to 27, with a focus on left-wing advocacy groups including what In These Times called “influential D.C. institutions like the Center for American Progress, Open Markets Institute and J Street.” According to the union’s website, as of early 2026 NPEU has added a further 22 staffs to its membership, with the workforces of liberal organizations such as the Brookings Institution, National Immigration Law Center, and Food and Water Watch signing on.
NPEU is not alone in organizing left-wing advocacy groups. Southern Poverty Law Center staff, along with staff from groups including Lambda Legal, the National Abortion Federation, and Jewish Voice for Peace, signed on with the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild, a division of the left-wing (even by labor unions’ leftist standards) Communications Workers of America. The Sierra Club’s workforce is the largest component of the Progressive Workers Union’s membership, which also includes staff of other environmentalist groups. Other unions have organized other advocacy groups; Community Solutions, a MacArthur Foundation-funded housing-advocacy group, saw its staff join the Office and Professional Employees International Union, which counts some San Francisco-area homelessness groups’ staffs among its membership.
The class analysis: “Everything Leftism” comes home
When Congress was considering allowing its staff to unionize back in 2022 (the House did, but the Senate still does not), I conducted a “class analysis” of why congressional staffers might consider labor organizing. I suggested:
Congressional staffers resemble journalists—whose unions are growing, militant, radical-Left-aligned, and dedicated to the suppression of all right-deviationist thought—in a key way: They have more status than money.
Congressional staffers tend to be college-educated, but their pay relative to other pixel-pushing occupations in Washington, DC, is notoriously low (at least for entry-level staff). But working for a member of Congress comes with prestige by association and the prospect of future payoffs as a lobbyist, policy advocate, or politician. So the posts are fairly high status as entries to the pixel-pushing world go.
And that “status-income disequilibrium” is a marker for aligning with the Left in present political and class divisions.
The same dynamics that drive Democratic Congressional staffers into the arms of their ideological comrades in Big Labor are also driving both openly activist left-of-center nonprofit staffers and the merely more-left-of-center-than-average broader nonprofit-world staffer class toward unionizing. Here is how the Associated Press characterized the “income” side of “status-income disequilibrium” at the SPLC:
Money was a key issue for staff at the nonprofit, which monitors hate groups and brings lawsuits over civil-rights, immigration, and criminal-justice issues. Jackie Hurst, who works as a bilingual administrative assistant, says that her department, part of the immigrant-justice project, had been chronically understaffed. After taxes and other deductions, Hurst took home just $1,100 for two weeks of work. She earned so little that she lives 54 miles away from the group’s Decatur, Georgia, office, where housing is cheaper. “Our pay was not sustainable,” she says.
But, as is so often the case in modern organized labor, the disputes go far beyond the economic and into the broader world of Everything Leftism, especially on racial, sexual, and other identity characteristics. Mother Jones, a left-wing magazine, reported on the organizing campaigns of the Progressive Workers Union and found the campaigns aimed directly at ethnic “representation”:
Now the organizations’ employees are turning to unions to change their workplaces from within, by fighting for higher wages and better benefits, and by forcing their organizations—whose leadership is predominantly white—to be more diverse and inclusive.
Green groups haven’t had the best track record in this respect. Earlier this year, a report produced by a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) consultancy firm hired by Defenders of Wildlife was leaked. Its contents, which detailed a “culture of fear,” were damning for the organization: The 144 employees surveyed described an unwelcoming environment for BIPOC employees, who experienced “tokenism, microaggressions, cooption of ideas” and bore the brunt of DEI work.
Lessons
There is clearly more to the nonprofit unionization spree than mere money, as is typical of 21st century social justice unionism. Perhaps this is why the staff of the Hewlett Foundation-funded pro-union nominally right-leaning American Compass do not appear to have unionized: they may be perceptive enough to know that Big Labor doesn’t have their interests at heart, because Big Labor is Everything Leftism.
There is a reason the nonprofit sector is ripe for Big Labor. First, it’s ideologically left-leaning to explicitly left-wing; or, as union-sympathetic journalists put it, they are “younger, highly educated and idealistic workers.” Second, nonprofit staffers have status-income disequilibrium, as I have explained. And finally, unions themselves are looking for members wherever they can find them because of the decline in traditional blue collar unions, with the consequence that today’s union members don’t work in the same trades as the union members of yesterday.
