by Sarah Jaffe
Yet it was the health-center workers who had to answer the questions from panicked patients wondering where they’d go for their care. Brink said, “I had patients crying in rooms because they were like, ‘I don’t know where I am going to go. I can’t afford insurance and you are the most affordable place for me to go.’” That experience led workers to get serious about their union drive; they’d been in contact with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 105 for a while, and the organizers helped them prepare for what they could expect once their union drive went public. Cecile Richards, then the long-serving president of national Planned Parenthood, had been an organizer for SEIU in her younger days, a fact that the health-center workers liked to cite when they were signing coworkers up to union cards. But it wasn’t Richards the burgeoning union had to negotiate with—it was the leadership at their regional affiliate. And that leadership hired a law firm, Fisher Phillips, that on its website trumpets its services in “union avoidance.”55
Brink was surprised at the intensity of the anti-union campaign from her bosses. They held captive audience meetings—a common anti-union tactic, where part of the workday is carved out for all staff to attend a lecture on the potential downsides of a union. At PPRM, Brink noted, that meant holding time where patients wouldn’t be scheduled in order to have the meetings. “They were claiming that there would be pay freezes because it takes so long to bargain to get pay changes, that it was going to negatively impact our relationships with our managers, that it was going to negatively affect patient care,” she said. But Brink felt the union would improve patient care, because the workers would no longer be burned out, exhausted, and worried about how to pay the bills. “For an organization that claims to be feminist and states that they take on reproductive justice values, to also have staff that can’t afford to pay their bills or take care of their families… that is very hypocritical and frustrating. Those are not my values. So it is hard to say, ‘Yes, I am proud of Planned Parenthood.’”
Brink and her coworkers weren’t the only ones having trouble at various Planned Parenthood affiliates at that time. Employees from around the country told the New York Times in 2018 that they’d been discriminated against when they got pregnant: they were denied leave or doctor-recommended breaks, or pushed out after they gave birth. Others said they had not been hired when they disclosed their pregnancies. The organization did not, as a rule, provide parental leave, though there were exceptions. (It told the Times it would conduct “a review to determine the cost of providing paid maternity leave to nearly 12,000 employees nationwide,” but in 2019, employees at state affiliates were still petitioning for family leave.) The same Times story noted that a dozen lawsuits had been filed against the organization since 2013. Employees in those suits, according to the Times, accused managers of “denying workers rest periods, lunch breaks or overtime pay, or retaliating against them for taking medical leave.” Planned Parenthood’s Seattle regional director told the paper that providing medical leave could require her to close clinics; meanwhile, a Colorado employee had turned to GoFundMe to raise money to cover her bills after having a baby because she was on unpaid leave. Out of fifty-six Planned Parenthood affiliates, only five were unionized when Brink and her colleagues began their union drive. A nurse practitioner told reporters of the struggles she faced when she was part of a union campaign at Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina: “There’s so much focus on the mission and the cause and people become, like at many nonprofits, very vulnerable to being manipulated into lower pay and less benefits for the cause.”56
The organization’s pleas of poverty frustrated employees and observers during the union drive because donations to Planned Parenthood had skyrocketed following the election of Donald Trump, as did donations to other liberal-identified nonprofits, such as the American Civil Liberties Union. One calculation said that Planned Parenthood’s donations had gone up 1,000 percent after the election; according to the Times, the organization brought in $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2016. Brink noted that after the 2015 shooting in Colorado Springs, donations had increased specifically to PPRM. And then there was the money spent on the anti-union campaign: the workers were getting anti-union mailers sent to them at home. Anti-union lawyers don’t come cheap.57
Brink was in a unique position during the union drive. As a traveling employee, she was able to talk to many more of her colleagues than the average health-center staffer. But that additional work made her life even more exhausting, she said: “I can honestly say that there was a solid six to eight months that I cried every day on my way home in my car. Trying to unionize is also a job in and of itself. It was all of the emotional pieces of my job, and then another job, plus travel time.” Because, of course, during the union drive, she was still doing the rest of her job, as were all her coworkers (aside from the time they spent in those anti-union meetings, which took away from their work time). It frustrated her that hourly staff, like her, were being “nickel and dimed”: they were sent home early if the clinic was slow; if budgeting was tight, their hours might be cut back. “That was always hurtful, this idea that we were disposable. Just like, ‘Oh, well, you all can just go home.’”
Like the North Carolina practitioner, Brink felt that the assumption was that the clinic workers were doing their work out of dedication to the cause, not because it was their job for which they were paid. “This comes up in every nonprofit,” she noted. “If your mission, your values are feminist-driven, then you cannot use not paying your staff as an excuse. That is how it often felt, that the respect and dignity and the reproductive justice framework was only afforded to patients and everyone else, but not to staff. We had to give that to them, so we had to take it from us.”
The union vote came at the end of 2017. “The day that the vote was counted, Planned Parenthood gave what they called a holiday bonus to everyone, which was interestingly timed,” Brink laughed. The staffers voted 72 to 57 in favor of the union, and Brink was excited. Heading into 2018, with the union battle, she thought, behind them, she was elected to the bargaining team and looked forward to negotiating the union’s first contract. And then they found out that PPRM had appealed their vote to the National Labor Relations Board. “Before we got the union, they were claiming, ‘We are a family. We don’t need a union. We have an open-door policy. We listen to each other. We don’t need some outside person to come represent us and help make decisions for us. We can just talk about it together,’” she said. Then, when the employees voted for the union, the organization argued that the election had been unfair to staffers in New Mexico and Nevada, because only fourteen of PPRM’s twenty-four clinics—the Colorado clinics—had been included in the bargaining unit. The appeal, Brink said, was the moment she realized how hard PPRM was willing to fight their union. “This is not family. You want to say that we are a family, this isn’t how family treats each other.”58
The appeal was a slap in the face, too, because by then the NLRB was dominated by Trump appointees, who were busily paring back union rights and also, presumably, opposed to the mission of Planned Parenthood. The dispute brought about more publicity, a national story. Thirty-seven Democratic members of the Colorado state legislature signed a pledge of support for the PPRM union and called on PPRM management “to recognize and respect the vote of their employees to form a union, and… immediately withdraw their appeal at the NLRB.” The lawmakers who delivered the pledge told reporters, “We find it surprising and troubling that when frontline employees have made the choice to sit at the table when pay, working conditions, safety and customer satisfaction are discussed Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains leadership would fail to respect that choice.”59
That April, the initial decision from the NLRB panel took PPRM management’s side. It was hard at times, Brink said, to keep staff interested in fighting for the union as the case dragged on. Many people just wanted it to be over—a feeling that anti-union consultants count on. But the union-busting just made Bri
nk more determined. “It often felt like we were having the finger pointed at us, that we were the reason why donations had been pulled, we were the reason why they were negatively impacted in the media about this union fight. ‘No. You did that to yourself.’” The attitude of “How dare you challenge us?” from leadership, she said, made her angry. “How dare we expect to have a decent workplace?” she asked. “Well, how dare they not pay us a living wage? How dare they not listen to us when we have concerns about our working conditions?”60
Finally, she said, Planned Parenthood and SEIU came to an agreement and the organization dropped its opposition to the union. The workers at the ten other health centers that made up PPRM would have the opportunity to vote to join the union, but either way, the fourteen centers that made up the original bargaining unit got their union. “I think the decision came in August,” Brink said. “I left in September. I was like, ‘Cool, we got our union! I cannot work here anymore.’” The comments that had been made to her—people who had told her they didn’t believe she deserved a living wage, or that she was “too progressive” for PPRM and needed to get “perspective”—left her uncomfortable at work. She believed that she’d never be promoted because she had been outspoken about the union. “My dedication to our patients and to reproductive health and rights work was questioned,” she said. “But I am doing this because I care about you. I am doing this because we can do better and we should do better.”61
The union got its contract in 2019. The ten Nevada and New Mexico clinics also voted to join the union. And Brink moved on to a management position at another reproductive health organization. At her new job, though, she found some of the same old problems. “This is happening in reproductive health and rights organizations all over the country,” she said. Part of the reason she felt it was coming to light now was a generational shift. Not only are younger people coming up with more student debt and economic instability, but they are also coming up with a different set of political values. “A lot of us get into this work because we have been impacted by some unjust issue or policy, and to get to these organizations and just feel like we’ve been duped, essentially,” Brink said. “Economic justice is not a separate issue from reproductive justice. Labor rights are just as much in line with reproductive justice values and feminist values.”62
Planned Parenthood workers at affiliates across the country continued to organize after Brink left—particularly, in 2020, against the backdrop of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. In Texas, around twenty staffers were laid off in April 2020, and they suspected it was retaliation for their union drive. The workers had raised issues around the lack of personal protective equipment and paid sick leave. “There’s this big disconnect between the people managing us and the work that is being done on the ground,” Ella Nonni, one of those workers, told reporters. In New York, meanwhile, as protests roiled the country, Planned Parenthood staff rose up and ousted the CEO of the affiliate, Laura McQuade, describing “issues of systemic racism, pay inequity, and lack of upward mobility for Black staff.” The employees noted that while clinic staff were furloughed, McQuade kept her six-figure salary, and they offered an alternative view for the organization that echoed Brink’s goals: “We… envision a Planned Parenthood where all our staff, in particular our Black and other staff of color, are honored for their expertise and included in the decision making process.”63
For now, Brink has left reproductive health work, though she’s heading to graduate school and hopes eventually to return to the field—it is still, after all this, where her heart lies. But she continued to wonder if she’d be able to do so. “They argue, ‘Well, you don’t do this work for the money. You do it because you care about it.’ It is like, ‘Well… Both? Why can’t I have both?’”
PART TWO
ENJOY WHAT YOU DO!
CHAPTER 6
MY STUDIO IS THE WORLD
Art
WITH LATE AFTERNOON SUN STREAMING IN THE WINDOWS OF THE print studio at Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork, Ireland, Kate O’Shea flooded a massive screen for printing with bright spring green paint. She was artist in residence at the college, which brought no paycheck but provided access to some nice facilities. She leaned into the printing press, laying down the eye-popping green on top of a dark purple print, the words on the screen cutting different directions across bold shapes, handwriting, and type. The colors blended like the faded rainbow that was her hair as she bent into the print and then lifted the screen to see how the colors looked side by side.
She was in fact layering new ink over old for this new project, as she does with many of her prints, playing with patterns and colors and words to make new works, new art. The older prints beneath the green were from an exhibition she staged, along with her collaborator Eve Olney, in an abandoned bank building in Cork. “All the work is about layering lots of ideas and practices and theories,” she explained. “How I make sense of all the other work is through the process of printing. Every exhibition builds on the last exhibition. So, I basically print over whatever is left. It is all the one work.”
O’Shea uses different printing processes to make her works, including monoprint, industrial laser-cut stencils, and the screen at the college. That day, she was printing over old work on heavy paper and on newsprint, on folded and jumbled pieces and on brand-new white sheets, testing ideas against one another. Another artist came into the studio while I was there, making his own prints, and then left again; a studio attendant helped O’Shea set up the press. “In terms of the fine arts—which are printmaking, sculpture, and painting—sculpture and painting can be very much the lone artist, but printmaking can never be,” O’Shea commented. When not at Crawford, she works at Cork Printmakers, a collective space where she keeps a cubby and a drawer of work that she’d picked through that day, deciding which pieces to layer new paint over. “There are printmakers in every city,” she said. “There is Limerick Printmakers, New York, Philadelphia, everywhere.” On a recent trip to the United States she wound up driving seven hours to use a print shop in Pittsburgh and back again to Hamilton, New York, where she was staying. “That is why I love printmaking, because there is such a community.”
O’Shea’s art has always been about connecting with people. Originally, she went to school to be an architect, since, she laughed, “I was like, ‘I can’t be an artist because that is not a real job and it is not socially acceptable.’” Architecture seemed like a creative field that could allow her to make a living, but, she said wryly, “Luckily I got a huge depression because of it and dropped out. If I didn’t get really sick, I wouldn’t have dropped out because I would have been too stubborn. I would have kept going.” The depression, she said, made her rethink everything in her life. She went home to Kerry, where she’d grown up, to heal. “Slowly, I got into cooking. The one thing I could do would be to cook a recipe a day.” That cooking practice led her to turn an old cottage on her father’s land into a little café, and having the ability to support herself, she said, helped her get better.
What that whole experience taught her, she said, was that she needed to find a way to make a living making art. And the tanking economy perversely helped: “I feel it is easier to choose to be an artist now because around me, most people are struggling to get to what they want to do and doing the in-between job to get there and it is all quite precarious.” Choosing to be an artist hasn’t made her much more precarious than any number of talented people she knows who are working shit jobs in order to get by.
Being an artist in Ireland has its advantages. Unlike in the United States, where an art degree can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, in Ireland O’Shea was able to study for free. “There is no way that I could have justified becoming an artist if it involved the kind of money it involves in America,” she said. Also, though arts funding per capita isn’t as high in Ireland as in some European countries, there are grants available for Irish artists, another way that she and other artists are able to at ti
mes pay the bills. And then, of course, there’s the welfare state; even in its pared-back current shape, it’s available as a last resort when she really can’t make ends meet.
O’Shea used her café as a way to make space available for her community, a practice that has become part of her art and organizing work. “I got into the idea of food as a community-based, social project,” she said. She returned to school for a one-year course, still not sure she could make it as an artist, but that year convinced her that she could and should do it. When she discovered printmaking in art school, it felt akin to her work in the café, a different way to control the means of production. She made art prints, printed little political ’zines, and then published a book, bringing her activist work to her art, and did a master’s degree researching printmaking as a space for solidarity. As part of that research she studied everything from the Paris Commune to the radical print shops of the movements of the 1960s to present-day movements. “When I started printmaking, I was just making really colorful architectural work about the inside of my head,” she laughed. “I didn’t discover political printmaking until my third year.”
Printmaking and the café experience, and, in a way, her architecture background, all came together in the bank exhibition in Cork, where her art hung on the walls and she curated not just visual exhibits but events and dinners. When we visited the bank, workmen were pulling down the remnants of the exhibit, and O’Shea was able to grab a few more pieces of her prints as well as a box of political pamphlets, which had been left in the library they’d built in the old bank vault.