Planned strike at transgender advocacy group called off after last-minute tentative deal

Transgender-led legal nonprofit Advocates for Trans Equality reached a tentative collective bargaining agreement with Union For Trans Liberation, the organization’s employee union, on Sunday, narrowly avoiding a planned workers’ strike.

The deal follows more than a year of negotiations spanning more than 40 bargaining sessions and now heads to a ratification vote by union members.

“The contract still needs to be ratified by our membership, but we have successfully avoided a strike at this time,” U4TL said in a statement to The Advocate. “We are grateful to our members who kept the pressure on management and remained strike ready to achieve our top priorities, which were stronger job security and layoff protections, and cost of living adjustments.”

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Collective bargaining agreements, or CBAs, generally lay out protections for union-eligible employees. Before CBAs expire, unions and management negotiate a new contract through a process called bargaining.

The tentative deal marks the first full CBA bargained under the new combined union, U4TL, following the 2024 merger between Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund and the trans-led nonprofit National Center for Trans Equality. The Union of Legal Workers for Trans Liberation was established by TLDEF workers in 2021 and negotiated its first collective bargaining agreement with the legal nonprofit in March 2023, which included guidelines on the organization’s remote work policy, structured processes for disciplinary action, and expanded coverage for gender-affirming care. In 2024, after TLDEF and NCTE merged into a new organization, Advocates for Trans Equality, the two organizations’ unions also merged, creating U4TL.

Tensions had escalated in recent months. In December, after months of bargaining, the union publicly criticized management over what it described as insufficient movement on wage increases.

“A4TE has cited budgetary concerns, and while we sympathize with these difficulties, we find them to be self-inflicted,” a caption posted to the union’s Instagram read. “A4TE chose to hire a plethora of C-Suite staff with high salaries and chose to increase its CEO’s salary by nearly 100k from 2023-2024 according to its latest IRS filings. Poor budgetary planning, especially when management knows contract negotiations were around the corner, is not the Unit’s fault.”

After the previous contract expired in January, the union said employees were working without key protections as negotiations continued.

“We’re working without a contract — and it’s showing,” the union wrote in a later post. “Departments are seeing drastic changes to their workload, roles, and expectations — without safeguards in place. That is why we are escalating.”

On March 11, the union announced that 96 percent of its membership voted to authorize a strike, citing unresolved disputes over job security, pay equity, and transparency about the organization’s future. A strike was scheduled for Monday but was called off after the tentative agreement was reached.