Almost 700 workers serving refugees across the country have a first union contract. International Rescue Committee (IRC) workers at 13 offices joined the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) between November 2023 and July 2025. Ratified in February, the new contract gives minimum 2% raises in the first year, with an additional 1% based on performance.
It also converts temporary positions to permanent positions entitled to severance in the event of layoffs. A quarter of the 38 unionized workers at IRC’s Salt Lake City office were in temporary positions.
Raises for the second and third contract years will be negotiated in the fall.
Bargaining team member Katy Ducos, an immigration legal representative at IRC’s Salt Lake City office, said the union wanted to replace merit-based raises with across-the-board raises, but settled for a combination for now. Ducos said workers often receive negative feedback on performance reviews as justification for low merit-based raises, even though they never received that feedback before. Some managers were also told to limit the number of workers they rated as ‘exceeds expectations,’ meaning that workers could in effect be punished for being on a high-performing team.
A performance-based raise system “just does not lead to fair raises,” Ducos said. “A huge part of why we unionized is so that your ability to have a sustainable and living wage didn’t depend on who your boss was and if they were willing to advocate for you.”
Ducos said bargaining was complicated by the fact that the number of unionized locations continued to grow while bargaining was underway — and by IRC’s bargaining team showing up to negotiations unprepared.
The Salt Lake City office joined OPEIU Local 11 in March 2025. Of IRC’s three Pacific Northwest offices, only Seattle has unionized, while Spokane and Boise have not.
IRC has 29 offices around the United States, including its headquarters in New York, and thousands of employees worldwide.
Labor getting busy in the beehive state
Ducos said she was happy to be part of a Utah labor movement that is gaining energy. Though Utah is a ‘right to work’ state with low union membership — just 3.7% in 2024 — the state once had strong union organizing in railroads and mining. In 2025, the Utah state legislature passed a law banning collective bargaining for public employees like teachers and firefighters. Workers rallied together and gathered 320,000 signatures to place a repeal of the law on the ballot in 2026. State legislators ultimately voted to repeal the law in December.
