Actually, I’ve got two news stories that will bring a smile to your face and a bounce in your step.
• The Sierra Club is facing significant layoffs:
Sierra Club, the largest anti-nuclear environmental group in America, appears to be coming apart at the seams.
Last month, Ben Jealous, the 130 year-old organization’s new Executive Director, announced major layoffs. The Sierra Club, he told employees, was restructuring and needed to cut its budget.
“The Sierra Club says the layoffs—the precise number yet to be revealed—are meant to help fill a projected $40 million shortfall for the coming year. (For context, the Sierra Club spent $151 million in 2022.),” reports The New Republic. “The budget the group’s board of directors approved the day before the call features drastic cuts that would purportedly shrink that deficit to just $2.3 million.”
More than an eighth of the NGO’s workforce lies on the chopping block. The unions that represent the Sierra Club employees argue that the restructuring process has been top-down and unfair. It seems Jealous to have announced the layoffs to E&E News before he told employees, according to reporting from the New Republic.
The Sierra Club is unionized? Serves them right.
But wait—there’s more!
• Planned Parenthood is laying off staff, too. Seems they didn’t plan too well.
Officials with the far-left, pro-abortion organization Planned Parenthood have announced that the national office will be firing dozens of employees and restructuring their operations, one year after a Supreme Court ruling forever changed abortion policy in the United States.
According to NPR, union officials speaking on behalf of Planned Parenthood staffers say that they have been told to prepare for layoffs of anywhere between 10 and 20 percent of the national organization, which amounts to roughly 80 people. In a statement by Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the organization claimed that it would simply “reimagine” its national operations, including an investment of $70 million in various affiliates.
Union representatives from Washington D.C., New York, and San Francisco, however, released a joint letter condemning the decision, claiming that the move would be “pushing out some of our movement’s brightest minds.”
Call me cynical, but I bet both the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood are privately hoping for a Republican president in 2024, because fundraising always goes up for lefty groups when a Republican is in office.