Oh you're right on the money with that presumption. The white saviourism runs deep in the non profit industrial complex. People think that we should sacrifice livable wages in order to serve the underserved, that we dont need to better pur wprking/living conditions because we do this put of the love and passion for the work. Which yeah, we do but god damn we deserve to pay rent comfortably for taking care of the highest risk populations when no one else wants to. Our particular situation was a lil complicated though. If you wanna read my novel here goes:

We have many different depts at our agency, and before us there were 2 depts that unionized together as one bargaining unit. Then came one other dept, and then mine and our sister department that unionized together. So in all we have 3 separate bargaining units which is silly but that's how it panned out. FYI if you're not familiar a bargaining unit is the employees that will be represented under one contract.

In my case, organizing between the two departments was challenging to me, but seemed comparatively easy to the fights that other organizers have had to deal with. We are kind of the least appreciated depts in the agency even though we handle the toughest work. We also qualify for some of the programs that our clients do, we make such little money. A couple people in my unit have second jobs. Our agency has also undergone extremely traumatic change; it used to be based upon consensus, worker autonomy, and have a lot of radical ethics. Of course, that's all crumbling and being "restructured" with more of a top down business model. That was a huge impetus to unionize, so it only took a couple of months to get people on board. My agency didn't recognize our union cards, so we went to an election and won 98 percent of the vote.

Now, we didn't try to unionize the entire rest of the agency because we knew it would be impossible to do. There are a lot of old guard who cling on to the white saviourism so hard. Along with refusing to recognize that there are many new bad actors making horrible, fucked up decisions, and refusing to believe that consensus is done for. Also there are folks benefitting from the restructure, and those, mostly Gen Xers, who are extremely antiunion and refuse to engage even though myself and others have spent months of researching tirelessly. In my union we still have 2 employees who refuse to talk about it and continue to spread misinformation across the agency like how we will have to pay $200 a month in union dues which is ridiculous.

So yeah overall I think unionizing is pretty taboo in.the non profit world. There are very few who do direct service with marginalized communities, there are more that are climate oriented and law non profits, so the idea is growing but its still got a long way to go.

If you're more interested in the origins of non profits, unions, and the break down of social safety nets in the US I found this paper to be super fascinating.