A union resurgence in the not-for-profit arena?

This semester I'm teaching an honors course called "Law and the Arts."  During yesterday's class, my co-instructor and I diverted from our syllabus to spend an hour on unions in the non-profit world.  The impetus was the brief strike by the Philadelphia Orchestra last weekend, which resulted in the canceling of two or three scheduled performances of Mozart's Mass.

Our students were surprised to learn that the contract minimum salary for Philly Orchestra musicians is $128K and change.  That might sound like a lot until you know that the Boston Symphony minimum tops $150K, as is the case out in Los Angeles as well.  Since the Philly band is among the five best in the nation, I assume any member is at the top of her/his game.  So getting paid about what a full professor makes at a typical private university hardly seems extravagant.

The really interesting part of the story is not the player's salaries but the fact that they were willing to walk in the middle of such an important engagement.  We have seen professional athletes go on strike.  And also Broadway musicians and Hollywood writers.  But all these folks play for profit seeking employers.  Typically employees in the non-profit world are expected to suck it up.  But, of course, this is Philadelphia.

Some might wonder why employees of non-profits would even think they need a union.  Here's the answer of the Service Employees International Union:

"You can like your boss and still have a union. You can believe in your organization and still have a union. Forming a union is not a statement about who runs your organization and how they do it. When unions and management negotiate a union contract, the process allows both the staff and the management to collectively come up with the rules for the workplace. It allows there to be clear agreement on workplace topics.  We often use an interest-based bargaining process, otherwise known as win-win bargaining, to come up with our agreements. The bottom line is employees need protection, not just from the boss you have today but from the person who may be hired tomorrow."

From the other side of the table, here are some thoughts published a few years ago in the Nonprofit Quarterly:

"Is there going to be more attention directed toward unionizing nonprofit shops? Hill suggests that the declining union membership in the private sector and the privatization of unionized government functions to non-union vendors and service providers will draw attention to the roles of nonprofits. If government functions, delivered by a typically highly unionized workforce, are outsourced to a much less unionized sector—Hill says only six percent of nonprofit employees are unionized—that will show up in declining public sector union membership and increased attention from organized labor. The author suggests that because of the mission-driven nature of much of the nonprofit sector, 'nonprofit management sometimes takes advantage of employees’ desire to do good, and guilt-trips them into working long hours for low pay.'”