SPLC and Its Union Get Ready to Rumble

Nonprofit organizations are generally not parliamentary democracies governed by their staffs. That did not stop the Southern Poverty Law Center’s unionized workers from holding a “no-confidence vote” in SPLC president Margaret Huang, in which over 90 percent of union members voted against the organization’s leader.

In unrelated news, your humble correspondent needs more popcorn.

They Deserve Each Other

Regular readers of the Capital Research magazine will not need the sins of the SPLC rehashed, but I will do so as briefly as I can. The SPLC holds itself out as a scrappy moral conscience and the nation’s arbiter of organized “hate.”

It is in fact a multi-million-dollar factory fundraising operation. It had to oust its previous leadership after widespread allegations of mistreatment of female and ethnic-minority employees by its longtime chief trial counsel Morris Dees. Its arbitration of supposed “hate” betrays little more than an uncompromising commitment to Everything Leftism and a desire to command the Left’s Eye of Sauron, adjudging numerous mainstream conservative groups to be in the league of the KKK because those groups oppose vanguardist social liberalism, especially on LGBT issues and de facto open borders immigration policy.

But in 2019, Dees was ousted and then-SPLC president Richard Cohen resigned. Surely a regime change would fix the SPLC’s sins and make the group the true arbiter the metropolitan-liberal corporate media claims that it is?

Of course it didn’t. SPLC commissioned Democratic operative Tina Tchen to write a report on how SPLC could fix its procedures to prevent misconduct like that alleged against Dees. Tchen would later become notable for resigning from anti-sexual-harassment group Time’s Up after it became public that she had provided public relations advice to then-New York governor and alleged sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo (D).

Yet in 2021, a former SPLC employee wrote an op-ed in liberal online news magazine the Daily Beast alleging that the process was a whitewash and that employees had not seen any written recommendations Tchen devised. After a brief interregnum, Margaret Huang, a career left-wing nonprofit-advocacy operative who had been working for controversial human rights watchdog group Amnesty International USA, was appointed to continue SPLC’s Everything Leftist mission.

So that leaves the staff union as the good guys, right? No, not really. Unsurprisingly for a literal union of professional left-wing activists, the SPLC union—a constituent of the Everything Leftist Washington-Baltimore News Guild journalists’ union and the very-left-wing Communications Workers of America—is fully committed to Everything Leftism. Its own mission statement is clear about that: “The SPLC Union is disrupting white supremacy, pursuing equity, building solidarity, and uniting workers at the Southern Poverty Law Center and across the Deep South.” When the SPLC announced a round of layoffs in June, the probable proximate cause of the ongoing infighting, the union’s statements focused on how the proposed layoffs would harm the SPLC’s mission and union authority as much as they would harm the workers themselves.

Let Them Fight

The SPLC board, which governs SPLC operations, rejected the SPLC Union’s “vote of no confidence” in Huang. The union responded by issuing a statement to the States Newsroom-funded news outlet Alabama Reflector in which the union’s recording secretary wrote, “It’s clear that internal dialogue won’t suffice and that we’ll need to step up the pressure in advance of contract negotiations next year.”

In another complicating factor, the Daily Signal (a conservative news outlet formerly part of the Heritage Foundation) speculated that Everything Leftism might be a contributor to the infighting. The SPLC has, unusually, not followed the Everything Leftist Eye of Sauron in support of maximalist Palestinian nationalism in the post–October 7, 2023 era, instead choosing to criticize both Hamas and Israel for killing civilians. The Daily Signal proposed that this might be a point of conflict with the SPLC Union, whose parent (the Washington-Baltimore News Guild) also represents the staff of radical anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace.

Reporting has not indicated an imminent strike, and labor unions are known for demonstratively ratcheting up strike threats before backing down for token concessions in final labor agreements. But conservatives (and popcorn farmers) can only hope that the internal tribulations of the SPLC will continue.