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Nation’s oldest environmental nonprofit plans third consecutive year of layoffs under Executive Director Ben Jealous
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Despite unprecedented threats to public lands, endangered species, clean energy advancement and other environmental priorities from a hostile administration, the Sierra Club announced on Tuesday (June 10) that it will move forward with significant cuts to its frontline staff for the third straight year, and the second time just this year.
In May, the Sierra Club announced plans to lay off 10 chapter staff, effective in early July, and placed them immediately on administrative leave, removing access to work computers and accounts in a move criticized by the union. The cuts announced Tuesday, like others over the past two and a half years, will affect people who work directly for the national organization.
“The Sierra Club must be a strong leader against the Trump administration’s attempts to eliminate bedrock environmental policies and protections. It’s incomprehensible that the Sierra Club Board and executive leadership would again discard the very people who stand on the front lines every single day to carry out this work,” said Dylan Plummer, Unit Representative for the Sierra Club Unit of the Progressive Workers Union (PWU). “By casting off experienced professional staff, the Club is undermining its own mission, breaking promises to its membership, and betraying the values and principles it publicly avows.”
On Tuesday, the organization announced that it will lay off about 30 – its second round of layoffs in 2025 alone.
This announcement comes just days after the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors voted 10-5 on Saturday (June 7) in a contentious decision to approve the proposed $144 million budget for fiscal 2025-2026, despite strong opposition from volunteer leaders and the Progressive Workers Union (PWU). Notably, the Club’s Executive Director, Ben Jealous, didn’t attend what was arguably one of the single most important Board meetings of the year.
Many Board members voiced concerns at the meeting ahead of the vote, including the Board’s own Treasurer, Cheyenne Skye-Branscum, who noted that she had been excluded from critical conversations and did not support passing the budget as it was written.
“I don’t feel like this budget process has lived up to our values as an [organization], and the values that we say that we are striving to have as a Board,” Skye-Branscum – the first Indigenous person to sit on the Club’s Board – said during deliberations before the vote. “I’m not going to attempt to understand why I’ve been sidelined and excluded, but it’s not lost on me that this has happened to the first and only Native to serve on this board in 133 years, the first Native treasurer in 133 years. So you know, choices were made about what voices mattered in this budget process. And I feel like the choice was ultimately that it was not voices like mine. And so I will be voting no today.”
PWU has filed an unfair labor practice charge to the National Labor Relations Board in response to Sierra Club’s bad faith bargaining over the effects of layoffs this spring, and is working around the clock to negotiate with the Club to mitigate the damage of these layoffs to affected staff. Further, the Union demands that the Sierra Club Board of Directors take action to protect jobs, respect union members’ contractual rights, and push executive leadership to stop undermining the Sierra Club’s mission by gutting its workforce.
Under Jealous’s leadership, the Club has laid off disproportionate numbers of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) staff, including the elimination of environmental justice campaigns and the Equity Team. In 2023, PWU reported to the Board of Directors that BIPOC members made up nearly 50% of the layoffs, despite only making up about 28% of the staff at the time. Layoffs in 2024 included 66.67% BIPOC staff.
In addition to the layoffs, management has targeted union leaders and engaged in repeated bad faith bargaining in recent years, which led PWU members to overwhelmingly pass a no confidence vote in Jealous last spring, and vote to authorize a strike, which was narrowly averted.
“Ben Jealous’s tenure at the Sierra Club has been defined by unprecedented union busting, never-ending layoffs, and the demoralization of staff at the organization,” said CJ Garcia-Linz, Sierra Club employee and former PWU President. “The Sierra Club, an organization made up of passionate staff and volunteers dedicated to fighting injustice and protecting our environment, is being transformed before our eyes, with Jealous instilling a culture of fear, retaliation and chaos.”
PWU represents approximately 364 Sierra Club staff who work directly for the Club or its 64 state-level Chapters across the United States. Taken together, the Club had eliminated 97 represented staff members between January 2023 and April 2025. Adding the latest job cuts, the Sierra Club is on track to eliminate a total of about 140 union-represented jobs over two and a half years.
These cuts have staff and volunteers questioning why layoffs are taking place despite high organizational spending on unnecessary overhead, with well over $20 million spent on consultants, executive salaries and other executive expenses.
The divided board vote, with one third of Board members voting against his budget, was just another indicator of Jealous’ increasingly embattled position within the organization. In April, 2025, Dr. Robert Bullard, an academic and activist widely hailed as the father of environmental justice, called on the Sierra Club Board of Directors to vote no confidence in Jealous’ leadership.
The Club’s executive leadership has shown signs of disarray as well this year. Notably, Chief Strategy Officer Kevin Harris left just days after he was promoted to Director of Strategy, when it was revealed that he had been employed as the Senior Director of Public Affairs and Community Relations of Crypto.com at the same time he was working for the Sierra Club, collecting a $1 million annual salary addition to his Sierra Club income.
“In this moment of national crisis, Sierra Club and its Board of Directors should be focused on building our power to fight the Trump administration, not removing the people with the skill, experience and passion we desperately need to carry out our time-honored mission,” said Erica Dodt, a Sierra Club employee and Vice President of PWU. Dodt is being targeted for a retaliatory layoff for the second year in a row, this time while she is on parental leave.
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The Progressive Workers Union (PWU) is part of a bolder, more diverse labor movement fighting for economic, environmental, and racial justice by building worker power and solidarity in the nonprofit industrial complex. The union was founded by Sierra Club workers in 1992, taking its current name in 2017. With units at 350.org, Appalachian Voices, Greenpeace USA, Sierra Club, and Union of Concerned Scientists, PWU now represents more than 500 nonprofit workers across some of the largest and most influential organizations in the country.