Planned Parenthood North Central States (PPNCS) workers, consisting of more than 400 employees in five states, filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board on May 26. By joining SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, PPNCS workers are joining a growing national movement to improve working conditions and combat threats against reproductive rights.
“We are unionizing out of a collective love and commitment for our work, to make our labor more dignified and sustainable, and to align our organization more closely with its mission,” Ashley Schmidt, training and development specialist serving Nebraska and western Iowa Planned Parenthood clinics, said during a virtual press conference hosted on the day of the election filing.
“Unionization is about giving our patients the best care possible. We need to have staff who are engaged, who are happy in their positions, who have a work-life balance, and who feel like they’re appreciated by their employer.”
PPNCS, formerly Planned Parenthood Heartland, is one of the larger affiliates of the national nonprofit Planned Parenthood, with twenty-eight clinics in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. More than 60 percent of workers in the affiliate have signed union cards with the SEIU chapter, organizing under the name “PPNCS United.”
Twenty-three-year-old Laurel Neufeld grew up in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. She studied at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where she majored in honors microbiology and immunology.
“I really liked science classes. A lot of my extracurricular involvement was more people-oriented, so I thought working in health care would be an excellent way to combine those interests,” Neufeld tells The Progressive. “Throughout my life, I’ve been really passionate about reproductive health, so I figured that working at Planned Parenthood would be a great way to work in health care and advance the values that I care so much about.”
For the past two years, Neufeld has worked at the Uptown Minneapolis Planned Parenthood clinic as a medical assistant. She says staffing is often stretched so thin that patients have to reschedule their appointments up to three times, or have to wait up to two hours before they are tended to by staff. Clinical staff members are not equipped with enough computer stations and frequently must forgo their lunch breaks.
PPNCS workers face chronic understaffing, a lack of equipment, pay inequities for the same positions, and lower pay compared to other health care providers. Many also feel ignored by management. The high levels of turnover place a heavy burden on the shoulders of remaining staff members, increasing the chances of their resignation down the road.
According to the PPNCS workers interviewed by The Progressive, it is a frequent occurrence for someone to join Planned Parenthood with high idealism only to feel worn down and burned out in a relatively short time. No matter how dedicated a person might be to the organization’s mission, it doesn’t take long for many employees to reach the limit of what they can endure physically and mentally on the job before seeking employment elsewhere.
“Most of us stay for a year or two, because despite lack of staffing and breaks we care so much about our patients’ autonomy and dignity, but it gets harder to justify that, harder to feel like we’re providing the care that we want to,” Neufeld says. “I heard my coworkers talking about unionization, and I was very excited about getting involved. It would be a great way for workers to have a seat at the table when all of these important decisions are being made.”
The PPNCS United campaign began in the summer of 2021, but it had been building for a few months prior to that. SEIU was approached separately by a partial committee of non-clinical workers who had already been exploring unionization.
In March, the union contacted PPNCS workers. To union organizers, it was apparent that their reasons for forming a union were the same as those in Minnesota, prompting the effort to unite for a “wall-to-wall campaign.”
Forty-three-year-old April Clark of Grinnell, Iowa, is a senior training and development specialist registered nurse serving clinics in central and eastern Iowa.
“If you think about a political campaign, how it’s word of mouth and going door to door talking to a lot of people about a candidate, it was that kind of thing,” Clark tells The Progressive. “It took a while to reach more people because you have to have some sort of outside contact, like a phone number or social media account. It grew exponentially.”
PPNCS workers are joining the growing wave of Planned Parenthood clinics, reproductive rights organizations, and nonprofit groups across the country fighting for their seat at the bargaining table. SEIU locals represent Planned Parenthood workers, who have successfully won union representation or are fighting to join a union in Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Washington D.C., and other locations.
“Once workers at Planned Parenthood wanted to organize, other reproductive rights organizations wanted to do the same,” Grace Reckers, an organizer with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) for almost four years, tells The Progressive.
PPNCS will not voluntarily recognize the union, forcing a union election by mail ballot on a date to be announced in the near future.
“Choice and autonomy are core to the Planned Parenthood mission,” says Molly Gage, PPNCS vice president of human resources, in an email to The Progressive. “Just as all people must be able to make their own decisions regarding their health care, employees must have the opportunity to be heard on the issue of union representation. We support employees’ decisions about whether to be represented by a union and want every union-eligible employee’s voice to be heard.”
To some, the lack of voluntary recognition despite mass support highlights the glaring contradiction of many nonprofits with liberal and progressive values espousing support for workers’ rights until their own employees seek to exercise these rights.
“We’re in this during the pandemic, during this moment of late-stage capitalism, where people are fed up with being exploited, fed up with the contradictions with the work they’re putting in and with what they’re being compensated for, and how they’re treated in their workplace,” Reckers says. “There’s a reckoning with that now.”
According to Reckers, employers at nonprofit agencies often repeat anti-union talking points usually attributed to for-profit businesses, pushing claims about not having the resources to fund a union and trying to convince their employees that they do not need the “outside third party” to address internal problems. Some even claim that a union “would offend donors,” risking the loss of donations and grants, which are vital to sustaining any nonprofit organization.
“Once you form a union, all that happens is you start negotiating a union contract that’s going to determine employees’ wages, working conditions, and compensation,” Reckers says. “During negotiations, we’re not going to demand anything that’s going to put the company at risk.”
The leaked draft of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito poses dangerous challenges ahead for Planned Parenthood providers and patients.
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, eight states have statutes protecting abortion and have expanded access, fourteen states and the District of Columbia protect abortion but limit access to care, three states and two territories have abortion access but are not protected by state or district law, and twenty-five states are at risk of prohibiting abortion entirely.
If SCOTUS strikes down Roe v. Wade, it will be the largest blow to reproductive justice seen in several generations. As the upcoming decision looms over the country, some are questioning if this is the right time for Planned Parenthood to unionize.
“Conversations about unionizing have been happening before the draft was leaked,” Neufeld says. “In general, there have been so many slow rollbacks of reproductive rights for years. This only contributes to the need for the union because of how much we care for our patients and the access they deserve. The leaked draft makes all of this feel more urgent.”
The campaign being waged by PPNCS workers represents a growing consensus by those who refuse to go backward, choosing instead to build collective strength in pursuit of a better future for all.
“Unionization is about giving our patients the best care possible,” Clark says. “To do that, we need to have staff who are engaged, who are happy in their positions, who have a work-life balance, and who feel like they’re appreciated by their employer.”
Clark adds, “We need to be taken care of as people with the same amount of care and respect we give to our patients.”