Organizing Better Links to Labor

Foundations begin to see unions as allies on social-policy fronts

After eight years as executive director of the Arca Foundation, a small grant maker in the District of Columbia, Janet Shenk switched hats last summer and went to work for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. as its first-ever liaison to the foundation world.

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Her arrival there signals a sea change in the relationship between grant makers and organized labor.

Once deeply suspicious of each other’s motives and methods, foundations and unions are beginning to see themselves as allies on numerous social-policy fronts. The most notable arena of shared concern is the fight for better wages, benefits, and economic opportunities for low-wage service employees such as janitors and shop clerks.

So far, only a handful of foundations are involved in collaborative efforts with labor. Many foundation executives remain wary of the risks, including the possibility that unions may be more interested in rebuilding their decimated membership than fighting for social change and that grant money might be used for partisan political purposes. But advocates of collaboration say the potential benefits are significant for foundations interested in economic and social issues.

“Increasingly, the labor movement represents the very constituencies that foundations say they want to help, which include low-income people, minorities, and immigrants,” Ms. Shenk says. “That is increasingly who the labor movement is.”

Few if any ties between foundations and organized labor involve direct grants to unions. Instead, foundations are giving money to grassroots coalitions and other programs that include unions as members. Some examples:

* Grant makers such as the New World Foundation, in New York; the Discount Foundation, in Henderson, Nev.; and the French American Charitable Trust, in San Francisco, are giving a total of $500,000 this year to help the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy press for better wages, benefits, and job opportunities for low-paid employees, including people employed in city services such as trash hauling and street repair. The alliance also is using money from the Ford Foundation, in New York, and the Rosenberg Foundation, in San Francisco, to study whether economic-development subsidies that governments provide to companies help to create jobs.

* The Hyams Foundation, in Boston, and other grant makers last year gave a total of $97,500 to the Massachusetts chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a national advocacy group known as ACORN. The grant money has helped support various ACORN campaigns, including one in which the organization is trying to persuade the Massachusetts legislature to increase the minimum wage in the state. A similar campaign in Boston already has gained wage concessions for some employees of companies that do business with the city.

* The New York Community Trust has made $80,000 in grants to the New York Industrial Retention Network, a non-profit alliance of union officials, business executives, and community leaders that seeks to keep manufacturing jobs in the city.

* The Ford Foundation has spent more than $2-million in the past three years on programs and coalitions that include labor. In addition to helping the Los Angeles Alliance, for example, Ford has made grants to university programs that explore labor-market changes, economic globalization, the problems of employees who work without benefits or job security, and the potential role that unionized labor can play in economic development.

“It’s as important to connect with labor as it is to connect with other institutional interests,” says Lance Lindblom, a Ford program officer. “They are one of the parties directly affected by many of these social issues.”

Richard Magat, a retired foundation executive, writes in a new book titled Unlikely Partners: Philanthropic Foundations and the Labor Movement that foundations and unions have had “a panoply of connections” throughout the 20th century. But Mr. Magat added in an interview that “an element of mystery, if not unfamiliarity” still exists between many foundation trustees and union leaders.

That is changing, however, say Mr. Magat and many other observers.

Two years ago, the Neighborhood Funders Group, a McLean, Va., organization of grant makers interested in urban economic issues, formed a subsidiary group on “organized labor and community.” About 90 foundation executives have joined.

“I see a tremendous amount of interest on the part of grant makers in finding out more about what the labor movement is doing,” says Susan Chinn, executive director of the Discount Foundation, and the subsidiary group’s co-founder. Still, she says, foundations have been slow to recognize the potential benefits that can be gained from alliances that include labor.

“In my 11 years as a grant maker, I’ve heard very little about the labor movement” at foundation gatherings, says Ms. Chinn. “Philanthropy should have been more aware of what labor’s goals and priorities were.”

Many factors are sparking philanthropy’s burgeoning interest in the labor movement. They include economic globalization and welfare-law changes, which have put new pressure on the poor.

But the chief catalyst for the new interest in labor, many observers say, is a seismic change within the labor movement itself, personified by John Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

Mr. Sweeney, a former president of the Service Employees International Union, was elected in 1995 on a platform that promised to jettison the federation’s entrenched leadership and focus aggressively on new organizing efforts.

“When Sweeney was elected, he pledged to lead a reinvigorated labor movement, and he talked about a recommitment to poor people and working with community organizations,” Ms. Chinn says. “I became much more interested in what they were doing, and so did a lot of my colleagues.”

Mr. Sweeney says unions and foundations have a “mutual concern” about such issues as income inequality, job creation, and access to quality health care, education, and child care. Foundations can benefit from the research that labor has done on such issues, he says.

“Foundations play a strong role in defining problems and formulating the solutions,” he says. “We need to reinvigorate the relationship.”

Mr. Sweeney appointed Ms. Shenk as a foundation liaison because, he says, ”if we’re going to really reach out and make a strong effort to build a stronger relationship with foundations, we needed somebody who knew foundations and had the expertise.”

Many observers say that joining forces with philanthropy could open new organizing opportunities for the beleaguered union movement.

Mr. Sweeney denies that the A.F.L.-C.I.O.‘s agenda is simply to build membership. It is to help “working families as a whole,” he says.

But some critics are doubtful. “It seems that organized labor, particularly under Sweeney, has become more interested in using non-profits to help their agenda,” says Terrence Scanlon, president of Capital Research Center, a conservative Washington think tank that monitors non-profit groups. In January, the center began publishing a newsletter called “Labor Watch” that examines what Mr. Scanlon terms the “increasingly radical activities of labor unions.”

Such sentiments are not new, of course, including within the foundation world. Tensions between philanthropy and labor have existed throughout most of the century. One reason, experts say, is that foundations and unions have contrasting historical roots. Unions rose up as adversaries of corporate power and abuse. Foundations gained their wealth and stature from corporate expansion and are governed, by and large, by people who work as corporate managers.

Henry Allen, program director at the Hyams Foundation, says he has had to allay some trustees’ concerns about Hyams’s grant making to coalitions of community activists and unions working on issues that affect low-wage workers.

Some trustees harbor an image of unions as “exclusionary” institutions interested only in their own welfare, not in the plight of minorities or non-unionized poor people, says Mr. Allen. As a consequence, he says, Hyams has sought to insure “that what we’re funding is community-driven and that these alliances are really beneficial” to the foundation’s focus on low-income people and organizations that seek to help them.

Another reason that foundations and unions have not worked more closely together is that they often have disagreed over important policy issues. For example, many liberal grant makers backed the civil- rights and women’s movements, while many unions blocked minorities and women from leadership positions.

Blacks now hold key labor jobs, but the legacy of past union behavior dies hard. Elaine Bernard, executive director of the Harvard Trade Union Program, which trains labor leaders, recalls a symposium last year in which 40 top black labor leaders met with black scholars from the university. Many of the scholars were surprised to learn that blacks now serve as senior union officials, Ms. Bernard recalls. “When they think of labor,” she says of the scholars, “they think of P.M.S.: pale, male, and stale.”

The event was supported with money from the Ford Foundation, the first philanthropic grant in the Harvard program’s 57-year history.

Despite the obstacles and ingrained perceptions, a growing number of community organizations are using foundation money to advance causes shared by organized labor.

A prime example is the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a coalition of community and religious leaders, union members, and others that is pushing for better conditions for low-wage service employees, including thousands of newly arrived immigrants working at hotels, restaurants, and office buildings.

“Foundations are playing an essential role in our work,” says Madeline Janis-Aparicio, the alliance’s executive director. “It’s a good investment. Foundations are getting a bang for their buck.”

She points to a so-called living-wage campaign that the alliance led in 1997. The effort, which included the participation of two unions that represent hotel and other service employees, won legislation that raised the incomes of 10,000 employees of companies that do business with the City of Los Angeles.

“The living-wage law took $300,000 to achieve,” Ms. Janis-Aparicio says, “but it resulted in $30-million a year in increased wages and benefits going directly to poor people.”

Ms. Janis-Aparicio acknowledges that foundations sometimes face conflicts in making grants for such programs. Some conservative trustees resist unions’ focus on legislative solutions to social problems, preferring to rely on market forces instead, she says. Others simply mistrust unions.

But, Ms. Janis-Aparicio says, “if we’re going to have any success in making a dent in the daunting problem of low-wage poverty, unions have to have an integral part. If we don’t take any risk, we’ll never make changes.”

The alliance’s supporters agree.

Seth Borgos, of the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, in New York State, says labor’s voice is crucial in any debate over economic policy.

“In some ways labor is the largest institution in the country that brings ordinary people into public life, and it’s the most powerful institution articulating principles of economic justice,” he says. “I wouldn’t claim labor is doing the best job of articulating those principles, but it is the most powerful.”

In recent years the Veatch fund, a congregation-run giving program, has poured about $1-million into the Los Angeles Alliance and other local coalitions that seek to narrow the income gap between rich and poor, Mr. Borgos says.

While many foundation and labor officials see vast potential for collaboration between philanthropy and unions, observers point to potential pitfalls.

“Unions are not necessarily charitable in intent; they’re very membership-oriented,” says Angel Bermudez of the Boston Foundation, which has made grants to help unionized service employees with housing or educational needs.

“When you look at any collaboration, you have to look at how sincere it is. Is it a collaboration of equals? Are the resources being shared? What is the agenda of the unions? Is it partisan or is it charitable?”

Mr. Scanlon, of the Capital Research Center, warns that foundations and other non-profit groups “have to be careful on the issues they choose that labor is promulgating.” He points to unions’ successful opposition last fall to a California ballot measure that would have forced them to get members’ permission before undertaking certain political activities.

Many charities joined labor in opposing the measure, believing that it would curtail donations deducted directly from employee paychecks. United Way of America also sided with the unions, but it then recanted under pressure from corporate donors and others. As a result, United Ways came under fire for allegedly betraying unionized donors who contribute millions of dollars to United Ways nationwide. One national labor organization, the Plumbers, Pipefitters & Sprinklerfitters Union, went so far as to shift its giving to a different charitable organization.

Mr. Sweeney is unapologetic about labor’s position on the California measure, saying, “United Way should have stayed the hell out of that issue.”

He also suggests that union-foundation cooperation has its limits, depending on whether the interests of the two groups converge. “If taking a strong position on a worker-related issue is going to break a fragile relationship” with a grant maker, “then so be it,” he says. “We cannot compromise on our priorities.”

Spence Limbocker, executive director of the Neighborhood Funders Group, recognizes those limits, too. “That’s why foundations need to realize that their relationship is primarily with the community groups, and their money needs to go primarily to community groups,” not to unions, Mr. Limbocker says.

Still, Mr. Limbocker sees compelling benefits in forming alliances that include organized labor. “If we’re going to make significant change in this country,” he says, “we’re going to need lots of allies.”