Happy Earth Day, friends! Today, inboxes all around the U.S. are filling up with urgent messages from Defenders of Wildlife, urging supporters to put themselves in the place of our imperiled polar bears, orcas, and other precious species in need of protection. We know, because we wrote them! But we wish we could have sent one more, to tell you about another endangered species – environmental workers. Since January 2019, well over 100 employees have left or been terminated from Defenders – approximately 70% of our organization. Twenty people have departed since January of this year. You need only check out GlassDoor to find out why. While you won’t read about it in the annual report, that kind of turnover incurs costs: institutional knowledge and memory, networking connections, and time sunk into onboarding and training new employees, among others. The greatest cost by far, however, is the energy and morale of people who live to fight for wildlife. Given the magnitude of environmental challenges facing our planet today, that is a resource we cannot afford to lose.
Defenders’ executives and Board of Directors appear to believe that these costs are acceptable. After refusing to voluntarily recognize our union last year, our President and CEO Jamie Rappaport Clark and her Senior Leadership Team have continually blocked and undercut Defenders United’s Bargaining Committee (BC) in negotiations on health and safety issues. Among other tactics, they have withheld legally-mandated information from the BC, contradicted verbal agreements in subsequent written proposals, and repeatedly bypassed the union to enact workplace changes. Consequently, Defenders United filed three Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Leadership didn’t stop there, however. In February, our colleague Erica Prather was suspended without pay within 24 hours of a Defenders Board member receiving a complaint from an external volunteer about their interactions with Erica during a virtual event. In violation of labor law, neither Erica nor Defenders United was informed of disciplinary action against her before she received news of her suspension, and no union representative was present at the time. Three days later, she was terminated permanently. Erica worked at Defenders for almost three years and was a passionate and vocal supporter of our union. Management’s swift and disproportionate response, as well as its failure to do more than a biased and cursory investigation of the complaint, are clear indicators that her termination was in fact retaliation for her union activity. We have filed three more ULPs with the NLRB to seek justice for Erica and started a GoFundMe to help support her costs. Meanwhile, our BC and representatives at OPEIU have continued to grapple with Leadership over a return to office (RTO) date and policy. Since December, our CEO and the Senior Leadership team have insisted on a mandatory RTO policy that does not provide flexibility for the needs of immunocompromised staff and family members. They also objected to various COVID-19 office safety measures requested by the BC without any science-backed justification for doing so. More recently, they refused to allow any union member to engage in voluntary fieldwork until a mandatory RTO agreement is in place. This last point particularly disturbs us, because it demonstrates our leadership’s willingness to sacrifice Defenders’ mission, as well as the well-being of its staff, just to win a point. There is absolutely no reason why healthy and vaccinated staff members should not be allowed to do in-person work – just as our supervisors and other non-union staff currently may – while immunocompromised and at-risk staff continue to work from home. Yet this is the trade-off our leadership has enforced, arbitrarily holding fieldwork hostage to strong arm the union into accepting a mandatory RTO policy that puts some of our coworkers at risk. Ironically, this move impinges on the same productivity that our CEO claims (without evidence) was damaged by telework during the pandemic. We wish we could say that these were the only issues we have encountered. Unfortunately, they are simply the latest and most egregious in a series of antagonistic interactions in which Jamie Rappaport Clark and the Senior Leadership team have made it abundantly clear just how little they value the health and wellbeing of Defenders staff. The reasonable response to a workplace like this is to leave. The problem is, moving from Defenders to another environmental non-profit might not improve things for employees. Similar struggles are taking place across environmental non profits (“green groups”) nationwide. Just ask our friends at the National Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and numerous others. That is why Defenders is joining Earth Day to May Day, a series of events to build public support for meaningful workplace protections for environmental staff from April 22nd to May 1st, International Workers’ Day. We invite you to join us and support our union by doing the following: • Sign the Earth Day to May Day Petition. Demand better from green group leadership nationwide. • Donate to our Pack Fund for Erica • Follow Defenders United (@defenders_staff) on Twitter and Instagram and join us for virtual events all through Earth Day to May Day! As you celebrate Earth Day this year, please reflect: our polar bears, orcas, wolves, and thousands of other imperiled species need advocates who aren’t demoralized, overworked, and underpaid. Saving our planet also means ensuring that those working to secure its future are inspired and supported. We love Defenders. We ARE Defenders. We are passionate about our mission to protect and restore imperiled wildlife throughout North America, and we believe we can better serve this mission in a workplace that is inclusive, diverse, supportive of employee needs, and steered by leaders who embody the values they purport to uphold. Note: All information about Erica Prather and the circumstances of her termination are presented here with her full consent. Over the last two months, Defenders has been inundated with letters protesting Erica’s termination, including several testimonies from participants of the virtual event that Erica co-hosted.
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