Listen: A Coversation about Breach’s Progressive Union Contract

Breach Collective staff ratified their two-year Collective Bargaining Agreement on January 30 (read the press release). Below, Breach Co-Founder and Content Strategist Caitlin Howard chats with Breach Co-Founder and Director of Communications Meg Ward and Communications Workers of America Staff Representative Jeanne Stewart about the contract and the bargaining process. 

If you are interested in or are in the midst of trying to unionize your workplace, please feel free to get in touch for help and guidance: organizing@breachcollective.org. We’d love to chat!

Caitlin Howard: Hey everyone, welcome. Thanks for listening. My name is Caitlin Howard and I am the content strategist for Breach Collective. We have dabbled some with audio storytelling in the past – we shared an audio newsletter several months ago and over the summer we had an amazing communications intern Anya Moore who produced a podcast episode for us. And in general, those of us on staff at Breach really enjoy audio stories and listening to and sharing stories out loud. So we're planning to grow our capacity to do more audio storytelling and to share more of our stories and the stories of our partners via this medium, and we're going to start today with a little conversation about the contract that Breach United – Breach’s staff union, officially ratified last month. As a Breach staff person and member of the union, I'm really excited to dig into this and to share it with you all. To do that I'm going to be talking with Meg Ward, who is my friend and director of communications at Breach, and she was on the Bargaining Committee for the union, which I'll have her explain what that means in a second. And also with us is Jeanne Stewart from Communications Workers of America, Breach’s union, and she is a staff representative of District 7. So thanks to both of you for being here today. Meg, I was going to start with you and have you explain your role on the Bargaining Committee and maybe include in your answer what a Collective Bargaining Agreement is, what a Bargaining Committee is, particularly in this context.

Meg Ward: Definitely. And I think it might be helpful to first give a little bit of a backstory and more context to how we even got to the collective bargaining process. So we'll start from the beginning, if that's okay. Breach was born in 2020. And it was born in the midst of a successful unionizing campaign at another nonprofit. So we came into this work intentionally creating an organization that would be unionized and worker-led right from the beginning. We have created a progressive workplace model that works to push back on harmful employment practices that are so common in the nonprofit sector. A really beautiful thing about all of this is that our Board of Directors is 100% supportive of the union and the workplace model. And this has been the case from day one. So because we don't have typical hierarchies found in nonprofits, our unionizing campaign looked really different from what most people are used to. Typically when starting unionizing campaigns, staff have to seek recognition from management or have a National Labor Relations Board election, and these things can take years, in some cases. So it's a long process. Because Breach United was immediately recognized, we were able to bypass all of that and focus our time on creating a progressive Collective Bargaining Agreement, also known as a CBA. A CBA is a written legal contract between an employer and the union representing employees. So in our case, it's a contract between our Board of Directors and CWA – the union representing Breach – and the CBA is a result of an extensive negotiation process between parties regarding things like wages and benefits and employment terms. As for my role, I was one of three Breach employees on the Bargaining Committee, and we would meet with the three Board members on the Bargaining Committee, and with Jeanne, to go over proposed articles in the CBA.

Caitlin Howard: That background is really important, so I appreciate you sharing that. Jeanne, can you talk a little bit about your position at CWA more generally, and then also what your role was in these negotiations between Breach’s union and Breach’s Board?

Jeanne Stewart: My main job is I do bargaining, contracts, grievances, and arbitration for locals, and stewards and officer training. Basically, just all around whatever questions locals have, they call me. I’m their next person in line to deal with all the issues that the locals have, and I kind of guide them through stuff. And if I don’t know the answers, then I talk to my superiors and they help me as well. I have locals that are assigned to me in a 15 state region. My job basically is to assist them in whatever they need. In Breach's negotiations, I was more like an advisor. I didn't really need to do a lot in that negotiation because I think employees and the Board both worked very well together. There was a lot of trust, no back and forth like normal negotiations, where you bargain with a big company and they are always like, “No, we're not doing that,” or “No, this must have.” It's a lot more adversarial than this bargaining was. This bargaining was probably the only bargaining I've ever been in like this. It was nice. I think there's a lot of trust between everybody and it was really nice to see.

Caitlin Howard: That makes me really happy to hear. I agree that a lot of trust-building had already been established before we started this process. Meg, I'm wondering if you can walk us through in a bit more detail what the bargaining process was like for you and the Bargaining Committee, and that back and forth with the Board. Maybe there are a couple of examples of aspects of the agreement that took a little more refining and a little more dialogue between the staff and the Board.

Meg Ward: Before we even began the bargaining process, our staff had several meetings with CWA to talk about what we would like to see in the contract. We reviewed other contracts that CWA had helped staff secure. We also, and I think this was really vital, we filled out a survey so that we could get a really good sense of what the staff’s priorities and values were in terms of the contract. And this was super helpful in creating an outline for a contract and the types of articles we wanted to include. Like Jeanne said, there's a lot of trust between the staff and the Board and there was a high degree of transparency between the staff and the Board as staff worked to draft articles for the CBA. We provided the Board with an outline of all of the articles we were planning to draft. As we would complete the drafts, we would share those with the Board and have them review and provide feedback. Then we would all meet to discuss the feedback and fine tune the articles and get them tentatively approved. Jeanne was there every step of the way, and was an awesome advisor to all of us. One example of an article that went through a couple of iterations before agreement was reached was vacation leave. I think we had started out proposing that staff have unlimited vacation time, as that's become a more popular policy in many workplaces. And it sounds really great, but through negotiations with the Board, we realized that for a number of factors, it likely wasn't the best policy for Breach. One reason being that we are a really small team, and if there aren't parameters around staff leave, the team as a whole could be burdened by an increased and unsustainable workload if staff were taking extensive vacation at any given time. So in the end, our vacation leave is still highly progressive and we have 50 vacation days per year, but there are some parameters around how many days we can take in a six month period, just to ensure that the staff are working an equitable amount, taking vacation that works well for the whole team. In the end, we're really pleased with the final article. The entire process was incredibly collaborative. I have a lot of gratitude and respect for our Board and they made this whole collective bargaining process really generative. I think the biggest obstacle for us was probably just finding meeting times that aligned with everyone's schedules.

Caitlin Howard: I think that the contract we ended up with is really impressive, and I'm definitely excited about it. I want to highlight a couple other components of it: we have a 32 hour full time work week; we have unlimited sick days; we have six months paid time off within a 12 month period for family leave – and I have a two-year-old so that family leave portion of our contract makes me happy just because it's very difficult having a newborn and not getting adequate time off from work especially for both parents! We have a wage parity article that dictates that the lowest paid employee must make at least 70% of the highest paid employee, and as Meg mentioned, we have 50 vacation days per year. Do either of you want to call out any other elements that you think are worth mentioning here?

Meg Ward: Gosh, there are so many great articles in this contract. We are planning to put the contract on our website later today, so this will be accessible to anyone who'd like to see the whole thing, there’s some really great stuff in there.

Caitlin Howard: I will make sure to have that posted out on our social media channels as soon as it's live. This will probably get shared later, but we'll have the links easy for folks who are listening to find. Jeanne, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the negotiation process from your perspective and then also maybe compare it to other negotiation processes you've been involved in. I want to normalize for people who don't have this sort of trust foundation or this sort of dynamic with their Board, that it's not impossible to get powerful contracts, even under different circumstances. So maybe speak a little bit to what it's been like in this case, but also what it's been like in other experiences you've had.

Jeanne Stewart: I’m in a bargaining right now that's very adversarial. There's a sentence in the bargaining proposal regarding hours of work and the company wants this one line in there, and we don't want it in there. And so we pass it back and forth, crossing it out, uncrossing it out. And it goes back and forth and back and forth. And this bargaining started probably in May or June of last year, and we're still down to three articles. It's just a fight the whole way. We’re fighting over words, not really looking at what's best for the company and what's best for the employees. It's a power struggle every step of the way. It has been since the beginning. I think we're finally getting to the point where we finally trust each other a little bit. But neither one of us is willing to budge right now. So we have three articles, and the company rejected two of them on Tuesday. And we put them back in. Friday we meet again… I don't know. We just told them, “These are must haves,” and I guess we’ll fight. I don't know what else to do. With Breach, everybody was looking out for each other. It wasn't adversarial at all. If there was something that somebody questioned, they listened to what the other person had to say and took that into consideration. Talk about mutual respect. There was a lot of mutual respect. And we don’t get that a lot anymore.

Caitlin Howard: Even in those situations where it is more adversarial, do you find that it is feasible to get a really good contract in place? Or do you end up having to make a lot of concessions?

Jeanne Stewart: Sometimes you have to make a lot of concessions to get the stuff that's really important to the employees, like wages. It makes it a lot harder, because they do get concessions, but if they get a contract, then you get the grievance procedure where you can fight. Then the next contract, you'll get better and better and better. Where this contract with Breach was – I think it was the best that we can get at this time. I don't think there's anything that had been given concession to.

Caitlin Howard: I feel really fortunate for that. That's really awesome. Somewhat in the same vein, I'm wondering if you have words of advice or encouragement for people out there, not necessarily in the nonprofit sector but maybe they are, who are trying to unionize, or in the process of unionizing or bargaining, and they might be feeling like there's just no way they could have the process be like this or get a contract like this.

Jeanne Stewart: I think the biggest thing is upper management and CEOs have taken advantage of workers for so many years now. And we are the workers. We have all the power, but we never take it. We never try to better it. I think by unionizing, we all get together and we go against the company and say, “Hey, we want a little bit of a share in this company, and you're not giving us anything.” I think it's important to get some power back for the people. I think that's what unionism is all about.

Meg Ward: I remember when we were thinking about unionizing at our last workplace, Caitlin, there was this big feeling of like, “Oh, gosh, this won't work,” or, “This is too much of a lift and it won't be successful.” I remember it felt really scary at the time. What I found most helpful in moving forward with this whole process was just learning as much as we could about that process, talking to unions, talking to folks at CWA, talking to other staff who successfully unionized, and it made us all realize that this was absolutely something that we could achieve. And for those folks who are wondering if they can unionize their workplace, I would also say that we are here for you! Our team is always down to talk to folks who are curious about unionizing their workplace. Please don't hesitate to reach out if you want to chat about the process. You can email me at meg@breachcollective.org. I would be happy to set up a phone call. I'll also say that we're in the midst of creating some tools for other folks working at climate and environmental nonprofits, and these tools can act as a guide for creating a unionizing campaign from the ground up. We're working in collaboration with CWA on this project, and we're really stoked about it. So look for that in the coming months.

Caitlin Howard: I can add from my personal experience, dovetailing off of what you shared Meg, is that it definitely can feel very isolating to be in a toxic workplace. I think part of the unionizing effort and just this burgeoning conversation around labor, especially in the nonprofit space, is helping open people's eyes to the fact that this happens everywhere. There are workers at all kinds of organizations who are struggling. Like you were saying, Jeanne, there's so much power in the workforce, and it's often made to feel otherwise because of hierarchy, and because of toxic and harmful employment practices. But once you start to band together and see what is possible and what's happening elsewhere, it starts to be something that you realize – just like you said Meg, I think we all had that moment in our last workplace where we were like, “Oh, this is actually something we might be able to pull off.” And there are tons of resources, so many people out there to help and guide. Definitely reach out. That's all I have to chat with you both about. Do either of you want to add anything or have any final thoughts to share? 

Jeanne Stewart: I would just like to say thanks. This Breach bargaining was really nice. It was good. It was a nice change for me.

Meg Ward: Yeah, it felt great! We're really thankful for your support too, throughout it all. It was an awesome process. 

Jeanne Stewart: It was.