The American Civil Liberties Union has been accused of firing an employee in order to discourage other staff from speaking up about working conditions—an embarrassing incident for the nation’s foremost nonprofit freedom advocacy group.
The National Labor Relations Board accused the ACLU of firing a staff member for engaging in collective action about working conditions in an effort to hinder other employees from doing so, in the complaint to an NLRB judge first obtained by Bloomberg.
Specifically, the fired employee had allegedly been “concertedly complaining” about wages, hours and working conditions from 2020 through May 2022, according to the filing.
The ACLU responded in a separate filing, arguing the worker “was terminated for just cause,” and said it believes the situation should be handled internally through its own arbitration process.
It has also claimed the NLRB’s attorney, Jennifer Abruzzo, doesn’t have the authority to issue complaints against it in the first place, arguing that President Joe Biden fired her predecessor who’d been appointed by former President Donald Trump, according to Bloomberg.
Although, it has since walked back that argument, telling Forbes the organization has withdrawn the argument after determining the matter involving Abruzzo is a “technical, procedural issue.”
The ACLU told Forbes it “flatly disputes these allegations and remains confident on the merits of its case,” adding the organization “respects and supports its employees’ right to free speech.”
News of the filing comes as unionization and collective action at nonprofits is on the rise. Since 2018, the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union has seen its ranks grow fivefold from 300 workers across 12 organizations in 2018 to 1,500 workers at nearly 50 organizations, according to the Associated Press. Those organizations include a number of local chapters of the ACLU as well as the National Immigration Law Center, the Economic Policy Institute, the Worker Rights Consortium, Jobs With Justice and the Animal Legal Defense Fund. In fact, the fired employee was represented by the union ACLU Staff United, a branch of the NPEU.
The ACLU, founded in 1920, has long fought for individual freedom and the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, the LGBTQ community and women in the U.S. Today, much of its advocacy centers around the right to an abortion, attempts to establish new privacy protections online against government surveillance and voting rights. Throughout the past century the ACLU has been involved in desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, advocacy for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Supreme Court Decision Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage.
ACLU Fired Staffer for Speaking Up About Working Conditions, Labor Board Claims (Bloomberg)
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