Facing Funding Shortfalls, Worker Centers Keep Organizing

Just as worker centers are reporting an increase in calls and drop-ins, and ripe potential among members, some are facing funding shortfalls that jeopardize their work.

Some centers depend on foundation money for 80 percent or more of their operations. As the plunging stock market drains foundations’ reserves, the well could run dry.

With the need for their work growing in a cutthroat economy, worker centers are scrambling to make ends meet. They’ve gained momentum in recent years for workers who aren’t in unions, battling immigrant bashing, winning millions of dollars in stolen wages, and providing a political orientation to thousands of members. So how to keep the doors open?

CUTTING DEEP

Even before the current crisis, dependence on foundation money has long been a concern in the worker center movement. Some have worried that strings attached to grants could affect a center’s capacity for militant actions.

Now, some funders are planning across-the-board cuts, explained David Staples, development coordinator for both the Miami Worker Center and Virginia’s Tenants and Workers United. “They don’t want to cut the number of fundees,” he said, “so they’ll fund less.”

Some are spreading cuts over a period of years and turning away new projects, attempting to keep current grantees relatively stable.

Organizers at Minneapolis Interfaith Worker Justice sat down last fall to make tough decisions. They’d have to give up raises and lay off an organizer unless the economy leveled out. Elsewhere in the Midwest, the Chicago Interfaith Worker Rights Center, now called ARISE, has reduced office hours and space, while cutting salaries. Chicago’s San Lucas Worker Center is running with a skeleton staff.

Worker center organizers have been fine-tuning different approaches to help them carry on.

Brian Payne, an organizer at the Minneapolis center, said even with the cuts, their center remains viable thanks to unions and congregations, which supply 40 percent of their funding.

As the center and unions have supported each other on campaigns, Payne said, unions have attached fewer strings to financial support. “We have constant conversations to make sure people know we’re not stepping on toes and that we’re organizing workers that unions aren’t organizing,” he said.

These relationships have also paid off in Virginia, where Tenants and Workers United has become, according to Staples, the “center of labor and community alliances, and a vehicle for organized labor to build a base of low-wage community supporters and workers in the region.”

Long before the current crisis, dependence on foundation money has been a concern for worker centers.

Others debate how much workers who use worker centers should help fund the projects themselves.

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“You’ve got to move towards membership dues,” said Jose Oliva, policy coordinator of Restaurant Opportunities Center United. “It’s paternalistic to say low-wage workers can’t afford dues.”

The Madison, Wisconsin, worker center asks for workers to donate when they access a service, but donations are not compulsory. The Minneapolis center is testing a new membership structure, issuing membership IDs for $10 and signing workers up for $5 a month memberships.

It’s not going to fix all the problems.

“Members don’t have resources to leverage for us,” said Adam Kader, who works at ARISE in Chicago. His organization is training members to teach the center’s “know your rights” workshops so the center can do more with less staff.

Another strategy is to create side projects and worker cooperatives. The Madison center runs an interpreters’ co-op that employs more than a dozen interpreters and brings in a steady stream of revenue.

Some centers are pursuing new grants by adding to their work. The Miami Worker Center’s voter registration work and consideration of green jobs hiring halls could put it in line for government money. Other centers are concerned that government funding could limit tactics, like civil disobedience, they use during campaigns.

Strategies to deepen the center’s role in the lives of workers could turn out to be fiscally sound. “More foundations ‘get’ organizing than they used to,” explained Payne. “They’re willing to give to organizations that do deeper organizing and leadership development, over servicing.”

This could mean sticking with a core of workers rather than going broader. Patrick Hickey of the Madison center reported that they are triaging the best campaigns to follow through on.

Oliva says it’s about focus: “Centers that are doing well are those that organize within one industry, rather than those that are multi-industry.”

DRIVEN TO ORGANIZE

Worker centers report that the same economic crisis that’s robbing the coffers is driving workers into the centers.

“People used to call, we’d explain their options, but they’d say, ‘thanks, but the economy’s too bad, I can’t do anything,’” Kader said. “Now, we’re flooded with calls from workers saying, ‘because of the economy, we have to do something!’”

Even as ARISE scrimps to make ends meet, Kader said it’s “running full-steam,” with a batch of workers ready to fight. They simply can not close.

“As people are seeing the crisis deepen, they’re beginning to think in collective mode and realize they can’t fight for themselves,” Payne said. “If organizations like ourselves are smart enough to work for the community, people will not let them go under.”