Unionizing Made Me a Different Person

[Omaha Steve]

Forming a union with my coworkers at the immersive arts company Meow Wolf wasn’t easy. It was stressful and scary. But we pushed past that fear — and ended up transforming our lives in the process.

06.28.2023

BY EMILY MARKWIESE

My first interaction with a union effort was the December 2019 morning my coworker pulled me aside in our work parking lot to discuss the nascent organizing campaign among our peers, eventually culminating in an ask if I had any interest in attending a union meeting. I now know this was an “organizing conversation” with a worker whose support for the union had not yet been assessed, and that I would have been marked down as a “three” — a worker who, on the one-to-five scale, is neither openly supportive of nor explicitly against unionizing their workplace.

Much of the time, “on-the-fence” workers are on the fence because of a fear of retaliation, apathy, or severe burnout. For me, it was all three. I had heard the words “union” and “collective bargaining” in hushed tones occasionally but didn’t understand their implications or how they were relevant to me and my work at Meow Wolf, the Santa Fe–based punk art collective turned multimillion-dollar immersive entertainment company.

Privately, I assumed it to be the latest in a series of attempts to create superficial change at work that would soon be forgotten. In the four years that followed the successful opening of the House of Eternal Return (HoER), Meow Wolf’s flagship permanent art installation in Santa Fe, few of the dozens of workers who had built the exhibition reaped any proportional benefits of its enormous success. Artists remained among the lowest-paid staff. A seemingly endless barrage of scandals, impossible deadlines, and increasingly out-of-touch corporate executive managers had exhausted the workforce. I was demoralized and under more pressure than I had ever been before.

I didn’t know enough about what it meant to form a union to understand how spectacularly I had misjudged the organizers. I was twenty-three then. Fast forward to a month before I turned twenty-five, and I was a signatory when the Meow Wolf Workers Collective (MWWC) reached a tentative agreement with our boss.

FULL feature story here: https://jacobin.com/2023/06/meow-wolf-union-organizing-workers-union-busting-solidarity