Southern Poverty Law Center Announces Massive Layoffs, Blindsiding Staff
Venerable legal institution slashes staff, raising concerns about priorities at a dangerous time.
For over a half century, the Southern Poverty Law Center has positioned itself at the forefront of fighting hate in the South and beyond. With every flavor of hate on the rise, courts severely curtailing voting rights, and a broad-based effort to undermine public schools and libraries, the organization’s work is more important than ever.
So, obviously, they announced massive layoffs gutting whole initiatives. What?
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While mass layoffs across the board would hamstring the organization’s mission, the cuts at the SPLC appear to be focused on a pair of programs: immigrant rights and its educational initiative Learning for Justice.
With the Biden administration adopting Trump’s Muslim Ban logic to block asylum seekers and a humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, immigration presents a pretty substantial threat to racial justice and SPLC is just… walking away. These announced layoffs include “all 16 staff in the Southern Immigrant Freedom Initiative” providing free legal representation to detained immigrants in Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi according to the union.
Meanwhile, educators are reeling from the loss of Learning for Justice:
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For its part, SPLC leadership tried to justify its cuts in a letter reproduced on the next page:
Given these imperatives, we have decided we need to restructure SPLC and have had to make difficult decisions to end some longstanding programmatic work and, unfortunately, eliminate positions which will result in layoffs. We also have identified some teams that can be consolidated to maximize efficiency and eliminate unnecessary duplication of effort.
Given the resources at its disposal and the very generous compensation packages at the top — with its CEO making roughly half a million a year, where’s the need to cut back on major initiatives. The union advances one theory:
A sad day, both for those who lost their jobs and those they’ve been serving.
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UPDATE: We just received the following statement from the SPLC Union:
“The amount of time and energy SPLC has poured into lying about, hiding, arranging for, and conducting these layoffs would be better spent on the work we all came here to do. At a time when educators need the support of Learning for Justice more than ever and the immigrant community is being used as a bargaining chip by both parties, this move demonstrates that SPLC is not being led by the affected communities that it purports to serve. As we see right wing trolls celebrating the layoffs on social media, we know this decision is the wrong one.”
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
