Sierra Club clashes with union over layoffs and restructuring plan
The Sierra Club, one of the US’s oldest and largest environmental advocacy groups, is going through a turbulent restructuring, which a union has issued two formal complaints about and warned could lead to more than 100 job losses.
Some staff also raised questions about how the changes might affect its recent efforts to improve workplace culture following allegations of misconduct, and boost inclusivity in the aftermath of scrutiny over the racial views of its founder, the conservationist John Muir.
Dozens of employees have been laid off since late April and even more have taken voluntary buy-outs, said the Progressive Workers Union, which represents about 400 of Sierra Club’s pre-layoff count of 800 employees.
The moves come under the leadership of Ben Jealous, a prominent civil rights leader who was named Sierra Club’s new executive director in November. In April, he said he inherited an annualized deficit of $40m, and that layoffs and cost-cutting would be needed. “Every department has been asked to make hard decisions,” he told E&E News. He said the organization was “retooling for this climate moment”.
When the process is complete, the Sierra Club, which was founded in 1892 in California and is now in states across the US, said it expects the overall size of its staff to be roughly the same. But more than 100 people – roughly oneeighth of the staff – are on the chopping block, while others have seen their job descriptions change, the union said.
“I am terrified for the future of the organization,” said one staffer who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “I do not see how we survive this.”
A Sierra Club spokesperson, who would not comment on the numbers of staff affected, insisted the restructuring is necessary to meet financial constraints and improve internal accountability and equity. A focus of the overhaul, he said, will be “enacting an aggressive 50-state strategy to help save the planet and making significant progress against long standing challenges like pay inequity between our national and chapter staff”, he said. He would not specify what led to the organization’s fiscal challenges.
Other green groups have recently faced similar hurdles. Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation organization, announced layoffs this month. Climate advocacy group 350.org has in recent years undergone layoffs and has faced budgetary shortcomings, Politico reported last year. And Greenpeace announced layoffs in 2020.
Climate-focused nonprofits are currently grappling with a changing landscape in the US. Over the past two years, Sierra Club and others have allocated substantial resources to pushing for the federal climate bill that eventually became the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included $400m in incentives for clean technology and constituted the largest down-payment on climate policy in US history. Now, many groups are shifting their focus to fighting to ensure the bill is implemented.
But some employees say the Sierra Club’s reorganization process has been opaque and exclusionary.
In a 27 April email to the organization’s board shared with the Guardian, one senior manager with years of experience in the climate justice movement said that restructuring plans were underway weeks before Jealous announced the current reorganization plan. She said she worked with other staff to complete a roadmap to avoid a deficit, prioritizing “transparency and accountability”. But weeks later, she said, she was shut out of the restructuring process as it became “secretive, confusing, and – quite honestly – dehumanizing”. She was laid off shortly after, staffers say.
Progressive Workers Union has filed two official unfair labor practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board over the restructuring. The first, filed on Tuesday, alleges that Sierra Club is bargaining in bad faith and violating the union’s collective bargaining agreement, including by telling staff that they were employed atwill and informing employees that if they refused to sign new job descriptions, they would be treated as having resigned. A letter sent to Jealous by nearly 70 staffers represented by Progressive Workers Union on Wednesday echoes the claims; they called for more say over the changes and more time to review them.
Last week, Progressive Workers Union filed a separate claim alleging that management failed to adequately share details about the restructuring plan. “We acknowledge the intensity of this situation and that changes must take place at the Sierra Club to reign in the budget,” said CJ Garcia-Linz, a current Sierra Club staff member and president of the Progressive Workers Union, “but leadership’s approach has left staff floundering and losing hope.”
Sierra Club spokesperson Jonathon Berman said the allegations in both filings are “baseless” and said management is adhering to the union’s collective bargaining agreement.
“We take the bargaining agreement seriously and are disappointed the union has chosen to act in a manner inconsistent with the Collective Bargaining Agreement,” he said. “Our desire is to work collaboratively with the unions to deliver on long outstanding promises to our staff and ensure the Sierra Club is positioned for growth.”
The restructuring comes shortly after an internal reckoning at Sierra Club. After a staffer alleged in 2020 that she was sexually abused by a volunteer leader at the organization, Sierra Club kicked off an internal investigation process and in 2021 commissioned a report documenting widespread “unprofessional and abusive behavior.” After the report’s release, the group hired an internal investigations team and conflict resolution team, which some employees found encouraging. But both have now been eliminated, according to staff.
“It makes me feel as if the organization is treating this work as disposable,” one laid-off worker said.
A Sierra Club spokesperson said the existing accountability process was “plagued with unreasonable delay and uncertainty of outcomes” and had “fallen short of its intended goals”.
“Reorganization will include this critical work moving forward,” the spokesperson said.
The changes come at a delicate time for Sierra Club, which in recent years has worked to center environmental justice and forge relationships with frontline community groups. Jealous will help further that goal, the Sierra Club spokesperson said. Among other resume lines, from 2008 to 2013 he led the NAACP, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, and during his tenure launched a Climate Justice Program.
But some workers fear the organizational overhaul could compromise Sierra Club’s progress on environmental justice. One staffer said community partners learned about the restructuring plan through an article in E&E News before they were officially informed.
She said she has worked for months to build trust with community groups in her city, but that the rapid changes are now sowing “chaos”.
“We worked really hard to establish this credibility,” she said. “Now it’s being taken from us.”