Kennedy Center staffers to unionize after Trump made chairman

Staffers at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts are set to unionize and announced the plans to do so on Thursday. This comes after there have been a number of layoffs since President Donald Trump was inaugurated.

The workers are calling the union the “Kennedy Center United Arts Workers,” and it would be partnered with the international union, the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, according to the Washington Post.

Around 60 percent of the workers who are eligible to unionize, around 90 "trust" or nonfederal employees, have made union cards and turned them into the National Labor Relations Board. The board then told the Kennedy Center that a request to make a union was proposed by the staff.

The Kennedy Center is funded with federal tax dollars, and Trump was unanimously elected to be the chairman of the Board of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, following a vote from the board of trustees over the arts center.

Trump had fired members of the board who were appointed to their posts by former President Joe Biden. Workers hoping to unionize at the center told the outlet, "Communication from leadership to staff has been reduced to emails that are few and far between. We haven’t had any all-staff meetings. Senior staff meetings have been paused."

The workers claimed that there has been a "lack of transparency" from the leadership at the arts center and that part of the unionizing effort is to seek “greater transparency moving forward." New leadership at the Kennedy Center has said that the organization is on the brink of financial ruin. The staffers have said otherwise.

Part of the effort is to also change the status of their employment at the Kennedy Center from "at will," to "for cause," meaning they will be harder to fire. Since the center's leadership has been installed by the Trump administration, Les Misérables actors threatened to boycott a performance because Trump was in the audience and Hamilton canceled its production at the center.