‘Staff started breaking down’: top US care non-profit accused of reducing workers to tears

Ai-jen Poo, the executive director of Caring Across Generations, in Los Angeles in November. Photograph: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Caring Across Generations

Former employees of Caring Across Generations, a high-profile caregivers association run by one of the US’s leading labor activists, and backed by celebrities including Megan Thee Stallion and Bradley Cooper, have accused the non-profit of reducing staff to tears due to poor management, and of retaliation against union organizers.

CGA, an offshoot of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, is focused on a national campaign to create better care systems for domestic caregivers and recipients, rallying around the tagline “Care can’t wait” – but some workers say that emphasis is not reflected internally at the organization.

The group is run by Ai-jen Poo, who serves as its executive director. A high-profile labor activist, Poo was a 2014 MacArthur Genius Award recipient, attended the Golden Globes in 2018 as a guest of Meryl Streep, and was listed on Time’s 100 influential people list in 2012. The non-profit includes a Creative Care Council with celebrity council members including Seth Rogen and Yvette Nicole Brown as well as Megan Thee Stallion and Cooper.

Workers involved in a union drive at CAG claimed to the Guardian they were targeted and pushed out as part of a restructuring at the end of 2023.

The workers requested anonymity claiming they feared retaliation, and were forced to sign non-disparagement agreements to receive any severance pay. The National Labor Relations Board has recently been pushing to outlaw overly broad non-disparagement clauses.

One worker who was a leader of the organizing drive at CAG claimed they were pushed out in retaliation despite the organization voluntarily recognizing the union in June last year.

“I tried to fight the restructure, but they said they were going in a different direction,” said the worker. “I think folks probably felt that I was too vocal in advocating for better working conditions or better treatment.”

A union contract has not been agreed and the union did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

A spokesperson for Caring Across Generations said the non-profit “welcomed the team’s decision to form a union because we see it as part of that investment in our staff” and is committed to negotiating a fair contract.

The worker also added they faced pushback and delays for reimbursements and for disability accommodations that they viewed as retaliatory.

“I think it’s ironic that there’s so many issues with accommodations there,” they added. “I think it’s ironic, too, that there are so many anti-labor issues. The workload is so huge. And they don’t hire enough folks or because there’s so much turnover too.”

According to another worker, the union organizing drive began after staffers started disappearing without notice or explanation, leaving projects they were working on with other staffers that were never completed.

“That was bizarre,” they said. “There were people I was working on stuff with and one day they disappeared, and no one knew why.”

The worker explained that chief managers ran the organization under Ai-jen Poo, who workers emphasized was rarely present and never involved in the day-to-day operations, and that those managers deflected blame for a lack of strategy and organization on to other workers.

“This is a very badly managed organization in every sense. People are not managed well, the budget is not managed well, and the strategy is not managed well,” the worker added.

“She [Poo] wasn’t on a single all-staff call. Not a single one. I never had a single meeting with her. There was an all-staff retreat and she came for a day. She was a fully absent leader and the organization did not seem like a priority to her at all. My sense was that she would come to leadership with a bunch of ideas and say: ‘Figure out how to make it happen.’ When they can’t make it happen, management looks for scapegoats to blame rather than looking for real strategies to move organizational priorities forward.”

They continued: “To be clear, I think Ai-jen has a great vision for where the care movement and domestic worker movement should go, but she doesn’t know how to run an organization and she puts her trust in people who don’t know how to run an organization, who have no desire to learn from their mistakes, and so they repeat their mistakes over and over and over again.”

Another worker who resigned from the organization said after the restructuring layoffs opposed by the union, their job titles, duties, and direction kept changing, and that they felt targeted after speaking up in protest against the layoffs.

“I have experience in bargaining and unionizing, and I had never seen anything like this,” they said. “Anyone that has complained or anyone that has said anything negative either gets pushed out like myself, or just gets fired. And we have a union. These people were fired, even though we had a union and there were conversations in Slack where people were saying, ‘You can’t fire us, we have a union, you can’t just fire us’, and that’s really troubling.”

A fourth worker at Caring Across Generations echoed similar sentiments about the organization’s management.

“Management worked diligently to make the hard aspects of people management just go away by consistently firing staff, instead of leaning into the actual mandate of the organization and caring enough about their employees to set up professional development, training, and project management that would allow us to succeed and not just struggle every day until an inevitable breaking point,” said one worker.

A spokesperson said the turnover rate at the organization was around the non-profit industry average of 19% and cited performance issues and restructuring for firings at the organization.

The worker also said that they consistently worked 50 to 60 hours a week, and requests to ease workloads were dismissed or deprioritized by management, who handled issues by firing staff rather than creating strategies and structures to help them.

“For a prominent leader who shouts about the importance of creating a more caring world from the rooftops, I saw Ai-jen Poo’s backyard be quite the volatile disaster,” they added. “If you spoke up about the workload, the management would judge you for it. You could feel it. I saw people crash and burn, and the management took no responsibility for it.”

They claimed that a high-profile event the organization ran in November called CareFest was so understaffed that it reduced staff to tears, and that money that could have been spent on hiring people to run the event was spent on holding it in Los Angeles and paying travel and accommodation for celebrities and influencers. Acting US labor secretary Julie Su delivered the keynote address at the event.

“We were so severely understaffed and under so much pressure that multiple staff started breaking down in tears and panic in the hallways. It took Ai-jen two weeks to send the staff a thank you email after all our work. But that wasn’t much of a surprise because she was a completely absent executive director,” they said.

Multiple staff started breaking down in tears and panic in the hallways

Anonymous worker

“In the non-profit world, you are sometimes expected to lean in more than you should. Most of us are used to that, even though it’s not right But, Ai-jen and her team pushed us day in and day out without any downtime, real support, steady HR infrastructure, or a staff retention policy.”

Another former worker said they were terminated despite dealing with long-term health problems, and they first noticed issues at the organization when their direct supervisor was suddenly terminated without any notice.

“The organization wants to avoid conflict and not just deal with issues straight on that they are walking into conflict and creating by trying to avoid,” the worker said. “I think that Caring Across Generations can do much better than what they’ve been doing.”

A spokesperson for Caring Across Generations denied retaliation or opposition to the union, and claimed turnover is around the industry average while the organization’s staff has grown significantly in the past two years. They did not comment on complaints about CareFest.

“Caring Across Generations is steadfast in its mission to transform the way we support and value care in our country, so that we can all live and age with dignity. Like many other non-profit organizations in the last two years, Caring Across Generations has been navigating uncertain, difficult economic conditions that have impacted funding and reinforced the need to strategically align resources, particularly given the urgency of our work with growing pressures on families and individuals in need of care,” they said.

“Caring Across Generations has undertaken thoughtful and strategic restructuring to ensure the long-term health and sustainability of the organization, and to have a larger impact, so we can continue to carry out our critical mission of ensuring that families, caregivers, disabled people, and aging adults can live well and age with dignity. These strategic changes included a significant investment in our staff, increasing the team by more than 50% from 2022 to 2023.”