After Trump Takeover, Kennedy Center Workers Vote to Unionize
The nation’s premier cultural stage joins a chorus of voices in the arts demanding just labor conditions as a pillar of free expression.
Michelle Chen
The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has long been Washington, D.C.’s premiere stage for the arts and culture — originating with a 1958 act of Congress, at the height of Cold War liberalism, to advance artistic excellence as a symbol of U.S. cultural soft power. But under the second Donald Trump administration, the center has become the backdrop for much harder political conflict, as well as a roiling labor struggle in the nation’s capital. Since the White House seized control of the center in February, staff members who work on its cultural and educational programming have become increasingly angered and alarmed by mounting signs of managerial chaos, layoffs and political meddling in the historically bipartisan cultural organization. On May 15, Kennedy Center staff announced their intention to form a union with the United Auto Workers, representing more than 172 staff members, in order “to ensure the Kennedy Center remains a beacon for bold, uncompromising art and education.”
In early February, Trump orchestrated a purge of Democrats from the center’s 36-member Board of Trustees, which had previously been split evenly between Democratic and Republican appointees, and replaced them with loyalists. In short order, the new board ousted longtime chair David Rubenstein, installed Trump in his place, and replaced the center’s president Deborah Rutter — who had served in the role for more than a decade — with interim president Richard Grenell, a Trump confidante and diplomat known for serving as a kind of “shadow Secretary of State,” pushing the “America First” foreign-policy agenda while Trump was out of office. The other new board members include a number of MAGA operatives and acolytes, most with little relationship to the performing arts: Second Lady Usha Vance; Attorney General Pam Bondi; Trump’s deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino; head of the White House personnel office and former MAGA super PAC leader Sergio Gor; Allison Lutnick, wife of billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick; Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo; and country music star Lee Greenwood, creator of the MAGA anthem “God Bless the USA.”
Since then, Kennedy Center staff have spent the past few months in an uneasy limbo, watching coworkers be arbitrarily fired and programs slashed, and fearful that their organization’s founding principles are being compromised by Trump-appointed “industry outsiders.” According to the union, 37 employees have been terminated since February, “including veteran administrators in the departments of public relations, marketing, development, government relations, education, and artistic programming.” The remaining staff say the center’s decision-making processes have become deeply opaque under the leadership of Trump appointees “with no formal job descriptions or professional background in the arts” and who communicate little with the career staffers.
While some programming planned prior to the takeover is proceeding, workers say the center is run under a new, unilateral management culture, prompting concerns that, even if they manage to keep their jobs, the staff who had previously planned and coordinated programs and shows with artists across a broad spectrum of genres and fields will lose their creative autonomy as Trump’s political cronies take over programming. Trump has dismissed the center’s past work as overly “woke,” claimed that it wasted money on “rampant political propaganda, DEI, and inappropriate shows” and vowed to revamp its operations. And Grenell announced earlier this month that the center is breaking with past practice to host non-union productions.
Ticket sales have reportedly tumbled by 50% this quarter, though it is difficult to assess the impact because, the union says, data on ticket sales is no longer reported regularly. The current leadership appears to be abandoning the center’s public-facing mission by undermining arts and education programming, for example, by cutting an initiative aimed at recruiting international artists and shutting down the Social Impact division, which supported programs and outreach for underserved communities, including collaborations with activist groups representing LGBTQ communities and communities of color, an artist residency focused on maternal health and “dance sanctuaries” with West African and Hawaiian dance companies.
In addition, the union accuses the new management of “mislead[ing] the public” about the organization’s finances, which had a $6 million surplus in 2023, to justify its funding cuts. This week, Grenell announced that he would initiate a federal investigation into alleged fraud and financial mismanagement at the Center.
Following their successful vote to form a union, center workers are now demanding “transparent and consistent terms for hiring and firing,” or “just cause” protections that would ensure no one is fired for arbitrary or retaliatory reasons, as well as the reinstatement of “ethical norms” to guide the center, including “freedom from partisan interference in programming, free speech protections, and the right to negotiate the terms of our employment.”
“The arts, and the performing arts in particular, is a very complex business,” one union member who works in the center’s programming department explains. “We have deep understanding and knowledge of the center itself and of the art forms, in ways that the folks that have been appointed into positions since February 12th are unlikely to have… We deeply believe that we are the ones most qualified to do this work and want to remain a part of the Kennedy Center for the safety and dignity of the artists and for audiences.”
The administrative and programming staff who comprise the new union include a number of workers who have worked alongside other unions for years, including UNITE HERE and Actors’ Equity Association. But it also includes staffers who never previously considered joining an organized labor movement — until Trump allies took over their workplace.
“I truly had never thought about myself as a potential member of the labor union movement before. But with this turn of events, the Kennedy Center, which has been a nonpartisan institution since its founding, has become extremely political,” one staffer who works in the center’s education department told In These Times. “So I do think it’s important to come together, to bargain for different working conditions that pertain to things like the ability to make creative decisions, the ability to have a seat at the table when programming decisions are made, so that we can protect the needs of the artists, the students and the audiences that we serve.”
The Kennedy Center did not respond to a request for comment.
Other unions have sprung up in the arts and entertainment industries in recent months, signalling not only a growing class consciousness among workers in the sector but also an increasing recognition of the precarity and vulnerability that is endemic to many jobs in creative fields, from low wages to sexual harassment to unstable gig work. In recent months, UAW has been organizing workers at independent movie theaters in New York City, for example, while workers at several private art museums have unionized in order to both improve their working conditions and to combat discrimination and hierarchy in institutions that claim to follow a public-service mission.
While the union drive at the Kennedy Center has arisen in the face of Trump’s direct political targeting, it’s also part of a chorus of voices in the arts demanding just labor conditions as a pillar of free expression.
“The Kennedy Center is not just a building; it’s a group of people, and art in a lot of ways is labor,” says the programming department staffer. “I think that the dignity of our ordinary coworkers who create extraordinary and amazing moments every single day, over 2,000 times a year at the Kennedy Center, is something that is worth standing up for and protecting through a labor union.”
Michelle Chen is a contributing writer at In These Times and The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent and a co-producer of the “Belabored” podcast. She studies history at the CUNY Graduate Center. She tweets at @meeshellchen.
