Barack Obama once told American workers exactly what to do if their boss treated them badly.
"If I were looking for a good job that lets me build some security for my family, I'd join a union," he wrote in 2016. "If I saw a problem in my workplace, I'd organize my coworkers to do something about it."
Four months after the Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago, his own employees did just that.
On October 7, workers at the Obama Foundation and the Obama Presidential Center went public with a union drive, hoping to protect themselves from the organization that carries his name. They're calling themselves Obama Workers United and organizing with AFSCME Council 31, one of the biggest public-sector unions in the country. The drive covers more than 250 workers in Chicago, Washington and remote jobs across the country. Sixty-eight of them signed an open letter.
The letter describes a workplace in revolt. Workloads keep "increasing." Leadership offers only "vague responses." The staff is losing people at a "high turnover rate," with employees who "continue to leave, taking with them their institutional knowledge and expertise."
The specifics are worse. Employees learned there will be no raises this winter, while their healthcare costs go up. Their paid time off has been cut, and promotions have been suspended.
"We're the ones who are facing those impacts, and we don't even have a seat at the table," said Luke Gilday, a foundation employee on the organizing committee.
The workers also asked leadership not to spend money on "anti-union messaging, anti-union lawyers, or anti-union meetings." That's the Obama Foundation's own staff warning management in advance not to bust their union.
Now look at who sits at the table.
The foundation is run by Obama's inner circle. CEO Valerie Jarrett, his longtime White House senior adviser, was paid $740,000 in 2024. Six of the foundation's 10 highest-paid executives held senior jobs in the Obama administration or on his campaigns. Former Obama aides have pulled in $400,000, $540,000, and up to $626,000 a year. Jarrett's paycheck is bigger than what the heads of the Carter Center, the Reagan Foundation and the Clinton Foundation make.
Meanwhile, the people giving tours and running programs are told there's no money for raises.
There's plenty of money. The foundation sat on more than $1.1 billion in assets at the end of 2024 and built an $850 million campus on 19.3 acres of Chicago's South Side. It did promise Chicago a $470 million endowment to keep the place running. As of this spring, about $1 million had actually been deposited.
The money coming in is shrinking fast. Foundation revenue fell from about $311 million in 2023 to about $210 million in 2024, a drop of nearly a third in one year. When donations dry up, the insiders on the top floor keep their salaries and the front-line workers lose their raises, their time off and their promotions.
Obama built a political career on telling corporations to treat workers with dignity. In 2007, campaigning for president, he promised union members that if their right to bargain was ever threatened, he would "put on a comfortable pair of shoes" and walk the picket line with them himself. Then Wisconsin's union fight broke out in 2011, and he never showed up. Fact-checkers later confirmed he never walked a picket line with anyone.
Now the picket line could be at his own door.
The foundation's statement on the union drive was as polished as you'd expect: "We are deeply committed to the fundamental right of workers to organize and make their voices heard." The workers say they've been trying to make their voices heard for months and keep getting "vague responses."
His name is on the building, and his advisers run the foundation. The people who keep the doors open say the only way to get heard was to do what Obama told every other American worker to do.
The center opened in June, and by October the staff was organizing to protect themselves from his foundation.
