Pros
Amazing staff union. Some of the most passionate activists in non-management positions and middle management.
Cons
This is really sad for me to write. I loved working at CC when I first started. We certainly weren't perfect, but at least our efforts to make the organization more inclusive and equity-driven felt genuine. By the time I left, it all felt like a performance to get as much funding as possible. Throughout COVID, we were continually told by leadership to reprioritize our work to make time for "self-care" and elevate our COVID work to the forefront, but we were ultimately assigned more work and told to expect to work more than 40 hours each week. Then, despite receiving MORE foundation funding to do our work during the pandemic AND receiving a federal PPP loan, CC discontinued staff professional development money and cut our cost-of-living raises. CC leadership also decided to change our health insurance provider with less than two weeks before the end of the year to enroll. The turnaround was so fast that colleagues (NOT their managers) were calling and texting co-workers who were already on vacation or on leave to tell them to log in to work to enroll. Plus, health insurance costs went up after CC had already cut our COLA. CC claims it's on a "journey" to become an anti-racist organization, but leaders' approach is sorely lacking an intersectional lens. Leadership consistently tells trans staff, LGB+ staff, immigrant staff, and disabled staff that addressing the needs of these communities perpetuates anti-Blackness. Looking to Black social justice leaders, we can see that's plainly untrue, and erases the existence of Black trans, queer, disabled, and/or immigrant people all over the country. It's a clear case of leadership co-opting social justice language to pit marginalized groups against each other, and it is frankly antithetical to CC's stated mission. Multiple DEI facilitators have identified lack of intersectionality and defensiveness from senior management as recurring issues regarding the psychological safety of staff and CC's ability to "walk the walk" of equity and racial justice, but after YEARS of the same conversations over and over again, the organization won't even adopt a gender-inclusive language policy, or adopt a formal policy that would enact consequences for misgendering a colleague. When queer staff raise this issue, the staff union is used as a scapegoat, with a popular management talking point being that the union will sort gender-inclusive language out at the bargaining table. But at the same time, management flatly refused to consider including gender-inclusive language at the bargaining table. I also want to note that CC has a history of inviting facilitators, therapists, trainers, etc. to the organization and claiming they are creating "safe spaces" for marginalized staff to share experiences at the organization with the goal of making our workplace more inclusive. But let me make this clear: CC wants you to think it's a safe space for you to share your whole self. It is not. Your vulnerabilities and identities will be weaponized against you. I experienced multiple years of negative marks on my performance evaluation after I reported witnessing discrimination or sharing my own experiences in these supposed "safe spaces." There is also an overall severe lack of transparency at this organization with regards to its finances and decision-making. There are constantly rumors flying around the organization about being in a financial deficit, and about more general operating funds being available than senior management will admit, and more. Staff are even told the salary information on project budgets isn't accurate. Meanwhile, one of the "core values" they are selling to foundations RIGHT NOW is transparency. For the first two years of the pandemic, the organization lost roughly a dozen people per year. In the first half of 2022, that number has nearly doubled already. For an organization of less than 100, these numbers are abysmal. I want to be clear that pre-COVID things were far from perfect. There were capacity and transparency and equity issues all along. But the pandemic, and the collective grief from the passing of our founding executive director Rob Restuccia, have been used as an excuse to de-prioritize addressing the very pressing issues within the organization, and the ones paying the price are the lowest paid staff and the staff with the most marginalized identities. By the time I left, the pandemic was no longer a viable excuse, so the staff union became the new "fall guy." I witnessed a horrible display of anti-worker values from a supposedly progressive organization that regularly partners with labor organizations. CC needs to decide: they're either fighting for justice or they're not. The workers are not exempt from that fight.
