KenCen Employees Plan to Unionize

Citing “a culture of anxiety and uncertainty” and a “lack of transparency,” more than 90 “trust” (nonfederal) employees at the Kennedy Center—about 60 percent of those eligible—have signed cards signifying their intention to form a union. It will be called the “Kennedy Center United Arts Workers” and affiliated with the international union commonly known as the UAW.

Its members would be drawn from nonsupervisory employees from artistic programming, education, marketing, and development departments as well as administrators at the Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra, whose artistic personnel are already members of AGMA and/or AFM.

On May 15 the union organizers submitted the signed cards to the National Labor Relations Board, which will notify Kennedy Center leadership of the request to form a union. Ofttimes employees will ask management to agree to the formation of a union. But in this instance, the fear of retaliation (which is illegal) led organizers to file immediately with the NLRB for an election. More than 50 percent of eligible employees must vote “yes” for the union to be created.

The effort to unionization is in direct response to Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center this past February. One organizer, speaking anonymously to the Washington Post, described a work environment that lacks transparency and features communication between leadership and staff reduced to "emails that are few and far between”; the cessation of all staff meetings; and the arrival of new employees and contractors “in our offices without introductions.”

Mass exodus

Since Feb. 13, 37 of about 400 non-federal staff members—just under ten percent—have been laid off, and another couple dozen have left voluntarily. “That’s a huge number for an organization that is pretty lean,” noted the union organizer. “There’s not a lot of redundancy in our workforce.”

Those seeking a union hope to change the Center employees’ status from “at will,” which allows management to fire someone at any time without reason, to “for cause,” which requires a legally defensible reason for an employee to be fired. That change, along with other conditions of employment and compensation, would be negotiated in a contract with management, if the union is created.

The success of the effort hinges on the vote of those eligible as well as the NLRB’s approval. The latter may be organizers’ undoing. Trump has fired some NLRB members and elsewhere used executive orders to invalidate union contracts for hundreds of thousands of federal workers. Both actions are currently being challenged in court.

Richard Grenell, the Center’s Trump-anointed executive director, opposes unions and is apparently considering breaking with tradition and booking non-equity shows because they “make a lot more money.”

These headwinds notwithstanding, the organizers are hopeful, suggesting (with naiveté) “that President Trump is a great supporter of unions.”

The Washington Post