In a groundbreaking move, workers at the Pride Center of Western New York, a nonprofit promoting LGBTQIA+ health and HIV prevention in Buffalo, are ramping up their efforts to form a union. The organization is the first nonprofit operated by and for the LGBTQIA+ community to form a union in upstate New York. As bargaining with the center’s parent organization, Evergreen Health, ramps up, workers say they need their workplace to resemble the same inclusive, identity-affirming space they provide the local LGBTQIA+ community.

The center’s workers unanimously voted 5-0 to unionize back in March. Among the key issues raised were the pressing need to bolster support groups, enhance programs aimed at preventing sexually transmitted diseases, and secure better pay and a commitment to making the workplace more inclusive for employees. 

Their union is represented by Workers United, the affiliate regional board of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Two and a half years ago, it helped invigorate the labor movement by organizing Starbucks locations, first in Buffalo and later all around the country. 

For community health worker Delaney Sprecker, higher pay is an urgent priority. Sprecker has been working at the center for almost a year and currently earns $40,800 a year.

Living off that salary is “really difficult,” Sprecker said. She noted that some workers are members of the LGBTQIA+ community or people of color—communities typically underserved and excluded from government aid. 

“Something that feels very backhanded to us is assisting people with their housing needs and … then having to go home and stress over our own financial situation and worry about how we’re going to pay our rent and our bills,” Sprecker said. 

Tee Douglas, one of the center’s trans youth coordinators and its longest-tenured employee, said that level of precarity is a disservice to people who turn to the center for services, as well as its workers.

“How can you serve the community to the best of your abilities if you are still worried about how you’re gonna pay your bills?” said Douglas, who has worked at the Pride Center for five years.

Workers say a base salary of $50,000 would be a good start due to the strenuous nature of their job. Sprecker said she works on case management, facilitates support groups, and performs HIV testing. She also participates in and orchestrates community outreach events at staples of LGBTQIA+ life in the region.

Douglas works with gender-expansive people ages 5-17 years old who are undergoing gender-affirming health care. 

“For the amount of responsibilities and the amount of investment this job requires—physical investment, time investment, and mental investment—that is a fair ask,” Sprecker said. “We need to be compensated fairly for all the effort that we put in.”

Staffers said working at the center has been further complicated over the years due to a lack of resources and a shrinking and consistently rotating staff. When Sprecker was hired last year, she was part of a team of four community health workers.

“Now there’s only three of us,” she noted. “For a while, I was the only one doing the job of that many people because the other two had quit because they were fed up with the conditions.”

This is part of a pattern Sprecker said she has noticed in the last year. Most workers have been there fewer than eight months, she said, and only three people have worked there for longer than a year.

For Douglas, the issues with retention stem in part from poor training. In some instances, for example, Douglas said, there are no clear instructions for how to refer individuals to services like housing assistance.

“There’s no real formal training that is given to a lot of people,” Douglas said. “There is a handbook, but it does not cover the depth of services that you’re sometimes providing to the community.”

Bargaining response

Since March 5, when workers formed their union via an election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), workers say they have seen a mixed response from Evergreen Health.

Sprecker said the organization initially seemed supportive of the workers’ efforts to unionize. That would change in April, Sprecker said, when about 40 workers at Evergreen’s Center for Supportive Services (CSS) filed cards to form a union with Workers United. The CSS provides case management support and helps people secure and retain housing.

“That’s when they started stalling our bargaining and tried to dictate to us what workers can and cannot bargain over,” Sprecker said.

For instance, Sprecker said the company has submitted contract proposals during bargaining sessions that do not include existing benefits, such as a paid lunch break.

“Their first set of proposals was to take away a lot of the things that we currently have,” she added.

Sprecker also said that Executive Director Kelly Craig told workers they would not bargain over changes to their job descriptions. 

This prompted the union to file an unfair labor practice claim with the NLRB for “coercive statements (threats, promises of benefits, etc.)” on June 3, according to the federal regulator’s website.

In response to the alleged illegal bargaining tactics, workers walked off the job on June 1, the day before the Buffalo Pride, a huge staple of the LGBTQIA+ community’s celebration of Pride month in Buffalo that can trace its origins back to the 1970s. 

“It’s important that management and the community understand labor rights are queer rights. From Stonewall to the picket line, we’ll fight for justice every time,” Sincere Carter, a community health worker at the Pride Center, said in a press release.

Amy Usiak, a spokesperson for Evergreen Health, did not respond to questions regarding the unfair labor practice claim or Sprecker’s allegations.

Workers and union representatives have sat at the bargaining table with Evergreen representatives for eight sessions. Part of the focus for some workers has centered on affirming and inclusive language, a fight that national organized labor leaders are taking seriously in workplaces across the country. 

Elizabeth Rockett, the program and membership director at Pride At Work and a labor organizer, aids workers in seeking inclusive language in their first contracts during bargaining. Pride At Work is a constituency group of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and a nonprofit that vies for full equality for LGBTQIA+ workers.

“The first step on any good bargaining agreement is that it uses gender-neutral language,” Rockett said. “We have a lot of collective bargaining units out there that use gendered pronouns for everything.”

Another tangible gain Pride At Work seeks to help workers secure is gender-affirming health care and being able to use sick leave or paid time off for gender-affirming surgery.  

Rockett said Pride At Work helps to create gender-neutral bathroom access in union contracts in states with discriminatory bathroom laws.

At the Pride Center, workers like Douglas, a Black trans man, are fighting to feel that inclusion.

“There have been past instances of transphobia and racism while I’ve worked there,” Douglas said, “I’ve seen [Evergreen] hire a lot of people who don’t want to serve the full community or individuals who don’t look like them. Or they don’t want to serve specific marginalized communities. That makes our space very much not affirming.”

Douglas said workers need to demand more from the organization. 

“For the number of trans people that we serve, especially minorities, there should be more [trans people] who are working,” Douglas said. “If you consider yourself to be an LGBTQ organization that is for the community, then you should definitely be an example of how you should treat LGBTQ employees. You shouldn’t just be the standard; you should go above the standard to create a new standard.”