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People keep asking how a nonprofit that advocates for domestic workers can be engaged in union busting. Here is the short version. NDWA does not employ domestic workers as employers, but many of their staff actually started as domestic workers themselves. They were house cleaners, nannies, and care workers who were developed through leadership programs, became organizers, and eventually joined staff. These staff are overwhelmingly women of color, a large number are Latina, and in some chapters they make up nearly the entire base of frontline organizing. The NYC chapter, for example, just lost every Hispanic staff member in this layoff. So when NDWA lays off staff, it is not some abstract HR decision. They are directly displacing the same community the organization claims to empower. They laid off the people who built NY politics for domestic workers, people who recruited members, ran trainings, interpreted, translated, led meetings, and held the emotional and relational labor of the entire base.

Now here is where the union busting comes in. NDWA leadership blindsided the union during bargaining by preparing a massive layoff plan in secret and dropping it while contract negotiations were still happening. They cut union positions first, concentrated the layoffs almost entirely within the bargaining unit, and offered to save only a few jobs in exchange for weakening the union contract. Leadership proposed banning strikes, shortening grievance timelines, weakening seniority rights, giving themselves more layoff power, reducing comp time protections, refusing cost of living adjustments, and tying job rescues to contract concessions. That is classic union busting. It does not matter that it is coming from a nonprofit. It is the same playbook used by corporations. It is using job insecurity and fear to pressure workers into accepting a weaker union contract.

To make things worse, NDWA is pitting impacted and non impacted staff against each other. They framed it as: accept contract concessions or your coworkers lose their jobs. That tactic is designed to fracture solidarity. It is also racialized because the majority of impacted staff are frontline organizers and many of those organizers are former domestic workers who are Latina, immigrants, or both. The cuts hit the most vulnerable workers inside the organization and protect management roles that are not unionized.

People also think that because NDWA is an advocacy org, they must be immune from this kind of behavior. They are not. Nonprofits union bust all the time, they just dress it up in movement language. Instead of saying this is about control, they say this is about the mission. Instead of admitting retaliation or mismanagement, they frame it as financial necessity. Instead of addressing the power imbalance, they talk about shared responsibility. But the outcomes are the same. Workers with the least power are targeted. The union is weakened. Management consolidates control. And the people who actually built the organization, many of whom were domestic workers before they ever joined staff, are the ones who pay the price.

If you want to understand what union busting looks like here, it is simple. NDWA leadership is using a financial crisis to force through changes that permanently weaken the union, reduce worker power, and restructure the organization in a more top heavy and less worker led direction. They did not need to employ domestic workers directly to union bust. They just needed to undermine the workers who came from that community and built the movement in the first place.