The Kennedy Center’s employees are refusing to stand by as President Donald Trump completes his hostile takeover of the storied arts institution.
Following months of volatile layoffs and upheaval in leadership, more than 90 staffers at the legendary venue announced Thursday that they would be moving to unionize.
Raising their banner as the Kennedy Center United Arts Workers, the employees cited concerns with the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to “dismantle mission-essential departments and reshape our arts programming without regard to the interests of program funders, philanthropists, national partners and the audiences we serve” as reason for the union’s formation, according to The New York Times.
President Donald Trump kickstarted a hostile takeover of the center in February, which he has repeatedly criticized as a financially, artistically, and even architecturally struggling institution.
He fired the center’s chairman David Rubenstein and president Deborah Rutter that month, and proceeded to lay off every Biden-appointed member on the center’s board of trustees in swift fashion.
He subsequently named himself the center’s chair and appointed his special presidential envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell, as its president. Beyond leadership, the center’s overhaul has also seen 37 of its employees fired since February with some of its programs being significantly scaled back since as well.
“We demand transparent and consistent terms for hiring and firing, a return to ethical norms, freedom from partisan interference in programming, free speech protections and the right to negotiate the terms of our employment,” the staffers’ statement to The Times continued.
The union will be partnering with the United Automobile Workers, one of the largest unions in the country, who helped file their request for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Thursday.
Members of the union consist of nonsupervisory employees from the center’s art programming, education, marketing, and development departments according to The Washington Post. Administrators from the Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra are also included. Performers are covered by separate unions.
“I think that President Trump is a great supporter of unions, and we invite our new leadership at the Kennedy Center to embrace our union, and we look forward to working with them,” one organizer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Washington Post.
Though most union drives begin internally with employees asking management if they agree to a union’s formation, the center’s employees opted to immediately file with the NLRB out of “fear of retaliation,” according to The Post. More than half of eligible employees will have to vote in favor of the union for it to be created by an NLRB-overseen vote, the outlet adds.
The Kennedy Center has been one of Trump’s many fixations since the start of his second administration. He has expressed hope that the institution can act as a cultural beacon to promote his vision for the country.
Along with his call for sweeping interior renovations, Trump has also called for a realignment of the center’s programming to promote more conservative-minded shows.
He has mused on bringing more “anti-woke” offerings to the center’s programming and expressed a fondness for Broadway classics like The Phantom of the Opera, Cats, and Les Misérables.
The president has a long, documented history as a Broadway fan, and was even a producer for a fleeting moment in the 1970s.
His large-scale takeover of the center has drawn pushback from many artists with some boycotting performances or dropping out of scheduled shows. Robert De Niro notably tore into the president’s overhaul of the Kennedy Center (and Hollywood), in a speech at the Cannes Film Festival Tuesday, quipping “you can’t put a price on creativity, but apparently you can put a tariff on it.”
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