When Voice Is Conditional

Recognition, Exclusion, and the Politics of Care

A follow-up to “When Care Becomes Extraction”

In my previous essay, I examined how care work can become extractive; this piece turns to how institutions respond when that dynamic is named.

In the days following my recent statement on nonprofit labor and LGBTQ+ care work, management at The Diversity Center of Santa Cruz County leadership has declined voluntary recognition and filed for an election. At the same time, they have asserted that part-time staff should be excluded from the bargaining unit. These decisions are often framed as procedural. They are not. They are decisions about recognition, about structure, and about who is understood to count.

Who Counts as a Worker?

In many nonprofit and care-based organizations, the line between “core” and “peripheral” labor is rarely neutral. It is shaped by funding structures, institutional priorities, and longstanding assumptions about whose work is central to the mission and whose is supplemental. In practice, especially in LGBTQ+ community spaces, care work rarely fits neatly into these categories.

Part-time staff often carry direct community contact, program continuity, relational labor that sustains organizational trust, and flexible labor that fills ongoing institutional gaps. To exclude them from union recognition is a claim about whose labor is structurally significant enough to warrant voice.

And that claim matters.

Because in care-based institutions, where “community” and “collective responsibility” are central values, exclusion at the level of labor recognition produces a quiet contradiction: the work is collective, but the power to shape its conditions is not (Young, 2011).

This is not only a structural contradiction. It is also a narrative one.

When Voice Becomes Conditional

Unionization is often misunderstood as the introduction of conflict. In practice, it is the formalization of voice where informal systems of accountability are no longer sufficient.

This moment extends that logic.

The question is no longer only whether workers will have a voice. It is also which workers are permitted to have one. When participation in collective bargaining is narrowed through classification, hours, or employment status, voice becomes conditional—on role, on institutional recognition, and on administrative definitions that may not reflect the lived experience of labor.

From the perspective of Feminist Therapy, Liberation Psychology, and Relational Cultural Theory, this is not incidental; it reflects how power organizes legitimacy and determines who is inside the circle of recognition and who remains at its edges (Martín-Baró, 1994). When legitimacy is unevenly distributed, so too are the stories that shape how those conditions are understood.

Procedure Is Not Neutral

Filing for an election rather than voluntarily recognizing a union is often described as standard procedure. In many contexts, it is. But procedures do not exist outside of power. They shape the timeline of organizing, access to information, the conditions under which workers act collectively, and the degree of institutional resistance or support. Similarly, decisions about bargaining unit composition are frequently framed as administrative or legal. But they also carry moral and structural weight. They signal whose labor is legible, whose presence is considered essential, and whose voice is structurally necessary to decision-making.

In care-centered organizations, these distinctions matter not only for workplace conditions, but for the integrity of stated commitments to equity, dignity, and community (Young, 2011). Even federal guidance notes that voluntary recognition can streamline bargaining and establish a more collaborative foundation for labor relations from the outset (U.S. Department of Labor, n.d.). To understand how these tensions emerge, it helps to name the different stories that are present at once.

Between Stories

What is unfolding here can be understood as a conflict between stories.

Nonprofit organizations often tell a story about themselves as mission-driven, relational, and grounded in shared care. In that story, staff are collaborators in a collective project.

Workers organizing tell another story: that care is still labor, that commitment does not eliminate material conditions, and that voice requires structure rather than goodwill alone.

Leadership holds yet another story: that it is responsible for organizational stability, accountable to funders and boards, and tasked with maintaining continuity under constraint.

None of these stories are entirely false but they do not carry equal power.

To be between stories is to be in a space where institutional self-understanding, lived experience, and organizational responsibility come into tension without immediate resolution. Unionization does not create this tension. It makes it visible. And once visible, it must be negotiated rather than assumed.

What Leadership May Be Protecting

It is worth asking why an organization committed to inclusion and community care would not simply recognize a union and begin bargaining with employees it describes as valued. From the outside, that question can appear straightforward. Internally, it rarely is.

Nonprofit leadership operates within layered constraints: boards of directors, funding and grant structures, legal and regulatory frameworks, organizational sustainability pressures, and expectations of operational flexibility. Within this context, unionization may be experienced by leadership not only as a request for voice, but as a shift in how authority and decision-making are structured within the organization.

From that perspective, filing for an election rather than voluntarily recognizing a union may be understood as attempts at ensuring procedural clarity, maintaining legal compliance, preserving time to assess implications, and managing institutional risk during transition. Similarly, defining bargaining unit boundaries may be framed as alignment with employment classifications, administrative feasibility, and operational continuity.

These explanations are common, but they are not neutral. Because each one also shapes who is recognized, who is included, and whose voice becomes formal within the organization.

Recent research on nonprofit unionization reflects this broader pattern. Workers often organize not only around wages or working conditions, but because those conditions shape their ability to provide meaningful, sustainable care. In social change organizations, unionization is frequently driven by a desire for greater voice, equity, and alignment between institutional values and workplace realities (Axt et al., 2023).

At the same time, research also suggests that unionization is often experienced by leadership as both generative and disruptive—surfacing long-standing tensions around power, structure, and accountability that may have previously remained diffuse or unaddressed (Sams, 2025). Across the sector, organizing is increasing, particularly in mission-driven organizations where a gap emerges between stated values and material practice.

In smaller nonprofits, union drives often follow unsuccessful attempts at informal feedback, while leadership hesitation is commonly shaped by concerns about resources, administrative burden, and organizational stability, as well as the complexities of navigating funding relationships and organizational accountability within constrained systems (Zhao et al., 2025).

These patterns suggest that what is unfolding here is structurally familiar. The question is not whether leadership intends harm, it is whether the structures being enacted align with the values being named by the organization. And whether “valued employees” are understood simply as individuals whose contributions are appreciated—or as workers with a collective right to shape the conditions of their labor.

That distinction matters because appreciation is not the same as power.

A Question for Leadership

Leadership in nonprofit and LGBTQ+ spaces often articulates commitments to inclusion, liberation, and shared care. This moment asks a more difficult question: Do those commitments extend to the structure of labor itself? Not only in mission statements, but in who is recognized, who is included, and who can participate in shaping the conditions of their work. This is not a question of intent. It is a question of alignment. When care is collective but voice is selective, the structure diverges from the values it claims to hold.

What Solidarity Requires

For those outside the organization, solidarity is not only about supporting unionization in principle. It requires attention to who is included, who is excluded, and how “worker” is defined in practice. Because those definitions shape the future of organizations as much as any union contract or agreement.

Care, Labor, and Recognition

If care work is collective, then recognition must be collective. If labor sustains an organization, then those who perform it must be included in the structures that govern it. Otherwise, “care” becomes selective—extended rhetorically, but constrained materially.

Care work is labor—and who counts as a worker is always a question of power.

Want to help and show your support?

If you’d like to urge The Diversity Center to voluntarily recognize the union and include part-time staff in the bargaining unit, you can email Director@diversitycenter.org.

References

Axt, D., Freeman Brown, K., Porter, A., & Smoucha, A. (2023). Beyond neutrality: Navigating challenges and leveraging opportunities of staff unionization in social change nonprofits. Ford Foundation. https://www.beyondneutrality.org/

Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology. Harvard University Press.

North, D. (2018). Unionizing a nonprofit human service organization: Lessons from a children’s residential and community service agency. Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance, 42(3), 345–351. https://doi.org/10.1080/23303131.2018.1471648

Sams, R. (2025). How unionization is impacting the nonprofit world. Nonprofit Risk Management Center.

U.S. Department of Labor. (n.d.). Neutrality and voluntary recognition: Employer guidance. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/general/workcenter/Neutrality-Guidance.pdf

Young, I. M. (2011). Justice and the politics of difference (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press.

Zhao, R., Welch, R., & Bies, A. (2025). Nonprofit management’s perceptions of unions in government-funded child welfare agencies: Can they help raise wages in this triangular relationship? Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership & Governance, 49(1), 61–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/23303131.2024.2377080