Dave Megenhardt, Executive Director of the United Labor Agency in Cleveland, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast as part of the Labor 132 series presented by the Blue Cross Blue Shield National Labor Office to trace the 55-year history of an organization that was born out of a candy bar fundraiser and a dialysis machine.
Founded in 1971 by Cleveland labor leaders who noticed that some union members needed access to kidney dialysis that did not exist locally, the ULA has evolved through several distinct phases. It began with durable medical equipment programs, then moved into workforce development for dislocated workers after deindustrialization, a halfway house for returning citizens, and housing rehabilitation training. Eventually, it built a job placement operation that placed more than 2,000 workers across Northeast Ohio last year.
Megenhardt addressed the current grant landscape under an administration he described as largely absent from workforce policy. The lessons of deindustrialization should teach us to plan for AI-driven job displacement and to recognize the ULA's role in seeding Policy Matters Ohio, which has since become one of the region's most important worker-centered research organizations.
The United Labor Agency did not start as a workforce development organization. It started with a candy bar fundraiser in 1971. A group of Cleveland labor leaders noticed that some union members needed kidney dialysis and their access to it was limited. To help, the leaders sold candy bars, bought a van and a dialysis machine, and paid technicians to deliver remote dialysis to members who needed it.
This approach worked. From that immediate success, the leaders who had built the Kidney Dialysis Center — the ULA's first name — asked a bigger question: what else could organized labor do outside the Collective Bargaining Agreement? The answer to that question, repeated across more than five decades, produced an organization that has adapted to every major economic shift in Northeast Ohio.
The dialysis program expanded into a durable medical equipment operation: hospital beds, wheelchairs, crutches and whatever else union members needed delivered to their doors. That program ran for nearly 30 years, including into Megenhardt's tenure as executive director, before access to durable medical equipment became widespread enough that the need no longer existed.
By the late 1970s, a different and far larger need had emerged. Heavy industry was leaving the region. Plants were closing, and a large number of union members were thrown out of work in a wave that became known as deindustrialization. The ULA pivoted to workforce development, operating a program called JobStart to help displaced workers find new skills and new jobs. Around the same time, the organization opened a halfway house for returning citizens coming out of prison, recognizing that people leaving incarceration needed a structured transition step back into the community to build stability and avoid reincarceration.
Megenhardt's own path into the ULA came through housing. Cleveland had many homes in need of repair and many young people seeking skills. The ULA matched the two: union journeymen built and rebuilt housing while teaching young people the trades. Megenhardt wrote the first grant for that program, which was well-received, and the program expanded citywide. He joined the ULA and, as he put it, never left.
The ULA was not alone. The national AFL-CIO promoted the labor agency model nationwide, and at its peak, there were labor agencies in cities across the United States. Today, only a handful survive: one in Arizona, Las Vegas, New Jersey and the ULA in Cleveland. Others, including agencies in Lake County and Lorain County in Ohio, closed over the years. Megenhardt said that keeping a nonprofit going requires constant clarity about purpose and the flexibility to meet changing needs, and not every organization has found a way to sustain both.
The ULA's answer to that challenge has always been the same: look at what the safety net and other nonprofits are not doing well, and fill that gap. Over time, that focus has narrowed to workforce development, which Megenhardt said is the defining need in Northeast Ohio right now.
Last year, the ULA placed more than 2,000 workers across the region, including more than 1,000 in Cuyahoga County. At the peak of recovery from the Great Recession, the organization placed as many as 4,000 workers in a single year. Each placement, he noted, is not just one person. It is a family, an extended network of people whose economic stability depends on whether one person finds work.
Megenhardt connected the ULA's history directly to the present moment of AI-driven economic disruption. The pattern he described from deindustrialization is specific: there was a plan to export jobs and no plan to replace them. The pain that followed, across Northeast Ohio and communities like it, was not accidental. It was the predictable result of treating workers as expendable while prioritizing capital.
He said the political consequences of that choice are visible today. When people are economically desperate and feel discarded, they reach for inaccurate explanations and for political movements that exploit that desperation. He was not abstract about it: scapegoating immigrants, he said, is a direct consequence of the anger and disorientation that economic abandonment produces.
He sees AI presenting the same crossroads. A small number of companies stand to concentrate enormous wealth. What do the workers displaced in that process do next? Megenhardt said the answer has to be planned for now by organizations with roots in the labor movement that can ensure workers have a voice in shaping the new economy. He said he is happy to talk to anyone interested in starting a labor agency in their community and that the need has never been greater.
Megenhardt described the current funding environment with the kind of precision that comes from navigating it directly. The initial DOGE-era chaos that threatened to wipe out large portions of federal funding has largely settled into something different: not cuts, but silence. No new initiatives. No pilot programs. No energy from the administration around workforce investment. Just flatline.
Private philanthropy is trying to fill the gap, but cannot replace the scale of federal dollars. The result is that every nonprofit that relied on federal support is now competing for the same pool of private money, and some organizations will not survive that competition. Megenhardt said it is the nature of nonprofit work to live close to that edge, but the current environment has made it sharper than usual.
Megenhardt described how the ULA provided the first small grant and initial office space to Policy Matters Ohio when founder Amy Hanauer launched the organization. For the first two to three years, Hanauer and her staff worked out of ULA offices. The ULA also served as Policy Matters Ohio's fiscal agent for approximately 15 to 20 years, handling administrative functions so the organization could focus entirely on research. Since that time, Policy Matters Ohio has become one of the most important progressive policy research organizations in the region. Megenhardt was careful not to overclaim credit: the ULA seeded it, he said, and Policy Matters Ohio did the rest.
The ULA's broader history includes a community hiring hall, a nonprofit temp agency created to fight the exploitation of day laborers, a digital literacy committee established long before digital access was a mainstream policy conversation and a cultural arts program that both brought arts to workers and brought worker-created art to audiences. At one point, the organization commissioned an original play that was later performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington.
One project Megenhardt described with particular care was a 1980 commission for photographer Robert Dorkson to create black-and-white portraits of workplaces across the Cleveland region: factory floors, steel mills, auto plants, light-bulb manufacturing facilities and backstage at theaters. Dorkson passed away several years ago, but his photographs still hang in the ULA offices. They document what work looked like in a unionized city at a particular moment in time, and Megenhardt said that documentation matters.
Megenhardt's Labor Day message was brief and direct. Look back on a year of hard work and recognize your contribution to the economy, then fight for someone else. Fight for those who do not have what you have, for those who want it and for those who need it.
More information on the United Labor Agency is available at ulagency.org.
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