Audubon employees unionize
Workers at environmental organizations are joining alliances to protect rights
In a trend that activists call the Green Labor movement, members of the New York Audubon Society earlier this month voted to join a union. With that vote, Audubon joins environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and others, that over the past few years have opted to unionize.
The push at Audubon, like other groups, was started in part by what workers said were pay discrepancies between male and female employees as well as between white workers and people of color.
“I’m still riding high off of last week,” said Zack Boerman, a forest program associate in the group’s Albany office who helped organize the union vote.
Employees in Audubon’s combined New York and Connecticut operations voted to be represented by the Communications Workers of America union. Some 27 of Audubon’s 55 people in the two states will now be unionized. Nationally, more than 120 employees in 11 regions joined the CWA. (The CWA also represents nonmanagement employees of the Times Union).
Boerman said a furlough and loss of some health coverage choices during the height of the pandemic last year, along with a study that pointed out pay discrepancies, was behind the push to unionize.
“That spurred the meeting between the organizing committees,” Boerman said. “We realized how vulnerable we were.”
One of the staff cuts, he added, came on Earth Day last year. People were furloughed but later came back on the payroll.
Additionally, a survey from the Morgan Lewis law firm, commissioned by Audubon’s board, turned up unequal pay. The survey was done earlier this year, following a 2020 article in the Politico news site suggesting a toxic work culture existed for women and people of color.
That led to the resignation of the national group’s CEO David Yarnold who had been there for more than a decade.
Audubon’s current CEO, Elizabeth Gray, who took over last month, said she would work cooperatively with the union.
“We respect the decision by our colleagues to form a union and we are devoted to ensuring our workplace is one where all employees are respected, val
ued, and empowered. We will always strive to be an ‘Audubon for All,’” she said in a prepared statement.
While involving a small number of people, the Audubon vote comes amid a flurry of highprofile unionization efforts.
Employees at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama earlier this year defeated an effort to unionize there. And earlier this month, workers at a Starbucks coffee shop in Buffalo voted to unionized.
The giant coffee retailer on Monday said it would bargain in good faith with the employees. Workers at another Buffalo Starbucks voted against joining a union and the results of a third vote there are still being tallied.
The Buffalo store is the only one of 9,000 such outlets that has unionized.
Both the Amazon and Starbucks votes were contentious, with efforts by the corporations to convince employees to vote no.
Boerman said there was some push back by management on the Audubon vote but not to a great extent. “We had to face some anti-union campaigning but not to the level that Amazon or Starbucks had to,” he said.
Employees at conservation groups such as Audubon are generally highly educated whitecollar professionals who may be motivated as much by their group’s mission as money.
Employees of environmental groups, though, are steeped in organizing techniques, so putting a together a successful unionization campaign would likely be second-nature to them.
The push to organize environmental groups actually dates to the early 1990s when the John Muir Local of the Sierra Club’s San Francisco-area office unionized. By 2017, that had evolved into the Progressive Workers Union and the Sierra Club’s nationwide chapters had joined.
The PWU also represents employees at Greenpeace USA.
The CWA represents workers at Sunrise Movement and Center for Biological Diversity.