OSF union says Alex Soros, board won't meet to discuss reorganization

A union representing U.S.-based employees at Open Society Foundations wants to meet with board chair Alexander Soros and the rest of OSF’s board to discuss the organization’s proposal to outsource some staff roles, but said its requests have been denied. Communications Workers of America, a union representing OSF staff in New York and Washington, D.C., published an open letter raising concerns about a plan to turn some staff roles into fixed-term contract positions, saying it could potentially undermine workers’ ability to collectively organize and advocate for labor protections. It also has “the effect of union busting.” The union also pushed for severance pay for full-time and contract staff likely to be forced out as part of the reorganization process and for OSF leaders to provide grantees with a timeline of when the foundation plans to dissolve offices and programs worldwide. The $25 billion, New York-based foundation has said it will lay off at least 40% of roughly 800 employees worldwide and recently announced the closure of six African offices, in addition to others in Europe and the United States. The aim is to make its operations more efficient and better positioned to distribute more narrowly focused, larger, and multiyear grants, OSF has said. So far, OSF leaders have not provided “any true response” to CWA’s letter other than to deny the union busting allegations, said Lauren Ammons, a CWA member and operations officer overseeing grantmaking operations at OSF based in New York. CWA represents 145 employees in non-supervisory roles at OSF. The union has asked to speak directly to Alexander Soros, OSF President Mark Malloch-Brown, and the rest of the board, but was denied, she said. OSF declined to comment for this story but previously told Devex that its leadership had received CWA’s letter and was “committed to engaging with them in a fair bargaining process.” In an email to union representatives and shared with Devex, Malloch-Brown confirmed receipt of the letter on Sept. 28 and directed workers to voice their concerns “through the appropriate channels,” either in bi-weekly union meetings or during the bargaining process. “We understand the changes underway mean uncertainty for staff and are committed to expediting resolutions and providing as much information as we can in a timely manner,” he wrote in the message. Malloch-Brown has been overseeing the reorganization alongside Alex Soros, who replaced his father, OSF founder George Soros, as board chair late last year. Under a revamped operating model that OSF expects to adopt, there will be different employment contract types for different durations, according to an internal email from OSF management seen by Devex. Programmatic roles will have a “specific timeline/duration and will require staff with different skill sets for discrete timebound pieces of work,” according to the message sent to employees on Oct. 11. Staff have been told that “timebound” means that most everyone will be fixed-term under the new model, an OSF staffer said. The general sense is that full-time staff roles will be primarily at the management level while many roles currently held by union members will become fixed-term, Ammons added. Already, OSF has significantly downsized its headcount since 2021 from more than 1,600 to around 800 worldwide. In July, the organization announced that it expects to lay off at least 40% of the remaining workforce. Some have defended OSF’s decision. Aryeh Neier, OSF’s first president, said a staff reduction as the organization shifts from an “operating foundation” that needed staff to operate programs globally to a primarily grantmaking entity that distributes funding to others makes sense. “It takes far fewer people to give grants to others than for an organization to operate programs itself,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy in July. However, the full reasoning behind this shift to fixed-term contracts has not been well explained to employees, Ammons said. Many staff members are worried that instead of making OSF more nimble — a primary aim of the restructure — bringing on contractors that lack institutional knowledge will make it harder for the organization to give out grants quickly, she said. There has been a noticeable slowdown in work in departments that were already converted to fixed-term workforces, according to Ammons. “We’ve seen that with our [human resources]. We’ve seen that with our legal and contracting and grantmaking work, where it takes so much longer to get things done, to get our grants out to get questions answered, to respond to our grantees and get the contracts, the grant that they need because we’re working a situation where a lot of people doing this work are contractors and don’t know our system,” she said. This focus on protecting OSF’s grantmaking mission and encouraging the organization to manage itself differently is uncommon among labor efforts, said Janice Fine, associate professor at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations. Fine is a former OSF fellow who received funding from the organization in the late 1990s for her research on nonprofit centers that support low-wage workers. Pushing back against layoffs and turning labor into contingent labor are “bread and butter labor issues,” but OSF staff is using the union more as a vehicle to speak out about “what they see as the ways in which the direction and the deep work of the foundation, over many years, is being dismantled,” she said. “It’s really unusual,” Fine added. “I think it’s a bit of a reflection of the kind of shifting priorities that have gone on at OSF for the last several years that have had ripple effects throughout the sector in terms of the people who rely on OSF funding,” she said. That OSF has a union at all is also notable considering that no other foundation of its size does, she said. U.S.-based OSF staffers first voted to join CWA in 2016 in response to early restructuring efforts and also because of “a renewed sense of the importance of unions and the rights of working people in areas where labor has not traditionally been organized,” former OSF President Chris Stone told Inside Philanthropy in 2016. Historically, OSF has stood for open markets, democracies and societies, and support of worker power — and its proposal for a massive layoff and shift toward contract positions would seem to contradict that, Fine said. Both staff and grantees have been asking for more clarity on the ultimate goals of the reorganization. However, it's the staff who are put in the situation of “not being able to give clear information to their grantees or having to take steps with the grantees that they don’t agree with,” Fine said. That the union is pushing for more transparency and input both for themselves and their grantee partners is “fascinating and really compelling,” she said.