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.
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