The Biggest Recent Union Wins Were in Art and Bacon
The labor movement improves lives for all kinds of workers, and the two largest National Labor Relations Board elections of the month of May were at two very different workplaces: the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and Dold Foods in Wichita, Kansas.
The path to better pay and more stable and dignified working conditions for everyone from art school professors to bacon workers runs through unionizing. (Daniel Acker / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
What do arts faculty in New York City and bacon processing workers in Wichita, Kansas have in common? I asked ChatGPT this question, hoping for some connective thread for this article, and it spat the following back at me: “They both spend their days transforming raw material into something people either deeply savor or completely misunderstand. (And neither gets paid what they’re worth.)”
An apt parenthetical, as the answer I was coming around to was that they voted in the two largest National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections in May: one at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, and the other at Dold Foods, a bacon processing plant and Hormel subsidiary in Wichita.
According to Justin Elm, adjunct faculty at SVA and one of the original members of the organizing committee, organizing really started after the part-time faculty strike at the New School in 2022, which resulted in better working conditions for part-timers. Jensine Eckwall, another member of the organizing committee, teaches illustration at both SVA and the New School and saw firsthand the gains made at the latter. It was this experience that led her to join the organizing committee.
All faculty at SVA are adjunct faculty, faculty members who are paid by the class, and Elm was straightforward about the faculty’s motivation to organize:
To be blunt, it’s about pay. . . . We’re paid only for in-class time. On paper, it appears that your hourly wage is much better than it is. But you’re only paid for in-class time. So if I teach a three-hour class, I get paid for that time, which is all well and good. But all of the preparation for the class, all of the grading, putting together course shells with interactive media, etc. — all of that is unpaid labor. That’s a major problem. SVA will say that our hourly rates are much higher than elsewhere, at Pratt or the New School, but they don’t say it’s just for in-class time.
Both Eckwall and Elm also said that faculty were frustrated by the fact that SVA provides no real guarantees of employment renewal from semester to semester and regularly cancels classes without much warning. “There’s no guarantees of reappointment,” Eckwall told me. “You’re told that your class is running, or you’re told that it’s not. You’re not given any reasoning; you’re just sent an email. So you’re not guaranteed anything at all.”
With a 568–167 victory in May, SVA faculty are hoping to quickly get into collective bargaining. The bargaining committee still needs to canvass the faculty as to their demands, but Elm thinks that wage increases in line with inflation, enforceable course-provision contracts, kill fees for cancelled classes, and annual agreements for faculty that regularly teach the same classes year to year could all be on the table. Elm and Eckwall both also hoped for great improvements to their health insurance plan. While adjunct faculty don’t typically get health insurance, the plan that SVA offers its faculty is very expensive. “For some faculty, their entire paychecks go toward health insurance because it’s so costly,” said Elm.
Fighting for Better Pay and Conditions at Hormel
The second-largest NLRB win of the month of May was at Dold Foods in Wichita, Kansas, a subsidiary of Hormel Foods. The election for this bacon processing plant actually happened back in December 2024, but the company was able to drag out challenges over sixty-four votes until a final tally in May. Despite the challenges, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 2 won out, 277–266.
Martin Rosas, president of UFCW Local 2, said that this was a worker-driven campaign. After reaching out to Local 2 for assistance, Dold employees created their own pamphlets and flyers to distribute around the facility and were active in recruiting other workers on social media. Organizing committees were built by workers around shifts (three a day), and they were able to achieve a remarkable amount of unity within a diverse workforce.
According to Rosas,
You’ve got people from Vietnam, Africa, Mexico, the US. The workforce in that plant is very diverse, and they were all united for one sole purpose: improving their working conditions and their benefits. . . . One of the things that was instrumental was that quality control and maintenance people were working with production people. Usually you don’t get these departments to work together. But in this particular case, everyone worked together to unionize their facility and get a contract.
Hormel hired a firm that ran a typical anti-union campaign for several months before the vote, intimidating workers and misinforming them about their rights under the National Labor Relations Act. Hormel has continued to call for objections, even after dragging out the tally over five months, and Rosas recently sent a letter to them calling for good-faith bargaining.
UFCW has a significant foothold at Hormel, including at its plant in Austin, Minnesota — site of the prolonged strike in 1985–86 that was one of the most bitter labor conflicts of the Reagan years, the subject of Barbara Kopple’s documentary American Dream. Workers at other Hormel plants have sent the clear message to Dold workers that there’s one path to better wages and working conditions, and their example helped counter the employer’s misinformation campaign.