Deaf young people talking in sign language in the living room
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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times.
“Do no harm” is the guiding principle of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters’ professional code of conduct. But when Joe Klug, 28, worked as a Video Relay Service (VRS) interpreter for a Twin Cities metro area office of Purple Communications, he says this principle was routinely violated.
The VRS field, which allows Deaf and Hard of Hearing people to make phone calls by video interfacing with interpreters, is difficult and fast-paced work. While some calls are social, others can be serious: medical emergencies, job interviews, jargon-heavy discussions with lawyers or sensitive conversations with doctors. Amid heavy staff turnover at Purple Communications, new interpreters struggled to keep up the pace and wait times soared, according to Klug.
“There were plenty of times we were in the center and we were able to see how many people were waiting to meet with an interpreter, and it was 100 plus,” he says. “It didn’t feel like that point of accessibility was being met anymore.”
In January, Klug joined an effort to address staffing and other workplace issues by forming a union. This sent him on a journey that would eventually leave him and his coworkers out of a job, in what former Purple Communications employees say amounted to union busting.
It also forced him to confront a contradiction in his industry. VRS interpretation is considered such an essential service that it is funded by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) through a small fee all phone users pay as a part of their monthly bills. Yet the companies that receive this federal funding are far from publicly accountable. Instead, VRS services are dominated by private equity, a notoriously opaque industry often associated with ruthless cost-cutting and profit maximization.
The private equity firm Kinderhook Industries acquired Purple Communications in 2017, and workers who were hired in the following years describe an environment marked by high turnover, poor service and harsh labor policies. These workers believe that private-equity ownership is partly to blame for the conditions they faced on the job — and for the sudden closure of their workplace earlier this year.
In the fall of 2020, Micah Jane Draeger, 41, started working at the Purple Communications office in Little Canada, Minn., just north of St. Paul.
She describes VRS interpretation as emotionally taxing at times. “It’s rapid-fire, back-to-back calls,” she says. “I could have a caller who is angry and upset and yelling at customer service, and the next caller I have is sad, grieving and upset because they can’t pay their light bills. You go from angry and then swing over to, ‘I’m depressed and don’t know what to do,’ and then the next call could be, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m pregnant.’ You take your 12-minute break and you come back and do the emotional swings again.”
Interpreter Micah Jane Draeger found herself freelancing after Purple Communications closed her Minnesota office, in what she alleges was union busting. (Photo courtesy of Draeger)
Perched in front of a computer monitor with web cameras facing them, interpreters have to be ready to navigate whatever situation arises. Klug, who worked in the same office as Draeger beginning in the summer of 2021, says it can be challenging to navigate different ASL accents.
“If I’m talking to someone from the South, the way they sign is different from the upper East Coast, which is known for much faster sign language,” he says. “In the Midwest, we’ll have different signs. If you go across the U.S., there are well over 20 different signs just for saying ‘birthday.’”
Draeger says there were significant pay inequalities, with no clear logic articulated. For years, her hourly pay sat stagnant at $23. When she asked for an explanation, she says, she got nowhere. Her workplace was marked by a “lack of support from higher-ups,” she recalls.
In the case of her former employer, if you go up high enough, you will find private equity. Private equity firms buy up businesses that aren’t publicly traded on the stock market, often relying on staggering sums of borrowed money that the businesses themselves must pay back. In the last decade, that strategy has helped bankrupt dozens of brand-name retail chains. But private equity has also increasingly burrowed into other arenas of American life, ranging from housing to healthcare to critical communications services.
For consumers, the stranglehold of private equity can mean rising costs and plummeting quality. For workers, when private equity calls the shots, layoffs and reduced staffing often follow, according to academic studies.
Purple Communications is a division of ZP Better Together, owned by private equity firm Kinderhook Industries. There is only one other major company in the VRS interpretation market, Sorenson Communications, and it, too, is owned by a private equity firm, Ariel Alternatives. Since 2017, these companies have maintained a virtual duopoly over the VRS market, according to a recent report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a watchdog group. There are only two alternatives: a small, Deaf-owned company called Convo Communications, as well as a new entrant called Tive.
This private equity “duopoly” enjoys a guaranteed income: Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, telephone companies must provide VRS interpretation. It is free for users, funded by a surcharge on everyone’s phone bills. In 2023, following lobbying from the duopoly, the FCC hiked compensation rates for providers by up to 49%. Yet “these rate increases have not led to significant improvements to benefits, pay, or working conditions,” according to a survey conducted this summer by the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), the union currently trying to organize the sector. Survey respondents also complained of psychological distress and poor mental health support. (Sorenson did offer slight wage increases this fall, after the union drive launched publicly.)
While the VRS market has unique characteristics, private equity’s playbook remains effectively the same: hike rates while making deep labor cuts, as Luke Goldstein noted in The American Prospect.
“We weren’t humans who were providing a vital service,” says Draeger. “It’s almost like they forgot that the only reason they existed as a company is because we, the interpreters, were doing our jobs. Private equity doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about the Deaf community.”
Dr. Shaelyn O’Riordan is a Deaf interpreter, which refers to a specialist who works, often in tandem with a hearing interpreter, to ensure communication is effective. People who are native speakers of ASL are able to grasp nuances in communication and culture that non-native speakers are not, filling gaps in communication that can arise due to factors like language deprivation, physical limitations or dialect differences. Deaf interpreters should be staffed and available for calls when needed, according to Dr. O’Riordan; they’re especially important during discussions of sensitive medical or legal matters, as well as emergency calls.
“Private equity holders, by and large, are hearing people who have little-to-no clue about Deaf culture or how important services are to the Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Deaf-Blind communities,” Dr. O’Riordan says. “This means in their acquisition of VRS, they take little notice or accountability in ensuring the staffing of Deaf individuals within the VRS companies.”
The FCC has sought input on whether VRS providers are failing to make Deaf interpreters available when their assistance is needed, and whether to provide additional compensation to providers when Deaf interpreters are added to calls.
We spoke to Dr. O’Riordan over email and through the Deaf-owned service Convo; she refuses to use the private equity-owned VRS companies after several “horrific” experiences as a user. She told me exclusion, and a plummet in quality, has a real impact: “This is my life. I need interpreters every single day.”
Purple Communications did not respond to a list of questions from Workday and In These Times.
Workers like Klug and Draeger were already frustrated, but then Purple Communications did something that pushed them to take action. In October 2023, the company unrolled an arbitration agreement it expected workers to sign, requiring any workplace disputes to be resolved through a private and binding process overseen by the company. Human resources refused to meet with staff as a group, according to Draeger, while management threatened consequences like loss of raises if workers refused to sign. So in January, they finally decided to reach out to a union, a local of Communications Workers of America that represents workers in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Just four days later, on January 11, the company made a shocking announcement: It would close all of its operations in Minnesota — the office where Klug and Draeger worked, as well as a satellite in Bloomington — and lay off roughly 50 interpreters the following month. The workers believe the company caught wind of the union organizing effort.
“We were supposed to be meeting with a union rep that day,” says Klug. “It felt like it was retaliation, and a quick response to any sort of effort to unionize.”
The company justified the closures by saying there weren’t enough calls coming in, but workers were incredulous. “I’m on these phones basically every day,” says Draeger. “We actually do not have enough interpreters to meet the demands.”
When companies engage in anti-worker policies like layoffs and office closures, it also harms service users, according to Dr. O’Riordan: “If interpreters are overburdened, that leads to cognitive stress and rapid decline in interpreting ability. With the fatigue overworked interpreters already have, the sharp decline in quality of service has become obscenely apparent.”
One of the great ironies of private equity is that public pension funds are among its biggest backers, meaning workers are major funders of the industry often faulted with eliminating scores of jobs. OPEIU has now taken up the cause, and a national committee at the union is trying to enlist the workers whose pensions are bankrolling acquisitions to insist on better working conditions — and an end to union busting, as interpreters across private equity-owned businesses continue to organize.
On Nov. 6, Draeger addressed a board meeting for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, along with two other members of the union and Dr. O’Riordan. The retirement system has nearly $2 billion in AlpInvest, a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group that backs Kinderhook, the private equity owner of Draeger’s former employer. She urged the board to insist that AlpInvest be “neutral in all future union organization efforts.”
When asked to comment on this request, a spokesperson for the teachers’ retirement system pointed to a policy directing investment managers to consider a range of factors, including workers rights, when making investment decisions. The spokesperson did not comment on the retirement system’s Alpinvest investments or the union-busting allegations at Purple Communications.
The company’s labor issues predate its private equity ownership: In the four years leading up to its acquisition by Kinderhook in 2017, the company settled at least 21 unfair labor practice charges before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), according to the report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. In 2020, the NLRB issued a cease-and-desist order for a number of behaviors, including threatening employees with reprisals for engaging in union or other protected activities.
For those who lost their jobs at Purple Communications, it’s still difficult to avoid private equity. Klug, who started taking ASL classes in high school, has found work freelancing, and is also working part-time for Sorenson Communications, the other major private equity-owned VRS interpretation company.
“Luckily for me, I’m in the freelance field already,” he says. But other former coworkers had quit outside jobs to work full time at Purple, or were close to retirement, he says: “Now they have to start over.
Draeger, a mother of four, says the closure was financially stressful. She has been freelancing, and says she wants to start her own company, “because of stuff like this.”
Before she worked in this field, Draeger served in the Iraq War. “I was in the military, so I know what it’s like to be just a number,” she says. “The company turned us into just numbers, numbers on a graph or spreadsheet. All these outside forces have taken control of our profession without asking if we’re okay with it.”