[ 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.]
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UNIONIZING MADE ME A DIFFERENT PERSON  
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Emily Markwiese
June 28, 2023
Jacobin
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_ 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.
_

The “Glowquarium” installation at Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal
Return in Santa Fe, N.M, Jeff Minton for The New York Times

 

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.

The second time a coworker contacted me about the union effort, I was
in a hotel room in Denver. I had joined a small team to conduct a site
visit for Meow Wolf’s newly announced, most ambitious permanent
exhibition to date, Convergence Station. Six months prior, the
pandemic had just begun in the states. HoER closed indefinitely, and
all Meow Wolf employees ceased in-person work. Within two weeks of
HoER shutting its doors, Meow Wolf let go of close to half of its
full-time employees and immediately brought on a substantial number of
highly paid, out-of-state themed entertainment contractors.

The shockwave of the layoffs persisted. Many of us were afraid of
another round. We’d seen some of our oldest friends and
collaborators lose their jobs; we had taken on the work of the people
in our departments who were now gone. The layoffs for me meant being
reclassified as a technical director, a job that entailed overseeing
the design, production, and installation of the five stories worth of
lighting, audio, and interactive technology projects in Convergence
Station — and a significantly greater level of responsibility than
my previous role.

Those of us involved with construction on the Denver project were
required to work in person, and the fear of infection with COVID-19
was present at all times. I had just returned from a long, bitterly
cold day on the construction site when my phone rang. It was a
coworker of mine who I didn’t have regular conversations with.

MWWC artists installing part of the Cosmohedron in Meow Wolf’s
Convergence Station. (Emily Markwiese)

“I know you’re busy, but your name keeps coming up, and it would
mean a lot to a lot of people if you came to the next meeting,” she
said, referring to the union meetings. “It’s informal, just
talking.”

A week later, I joined the meeting via Zoom while sitting on the floor
of my living room, in front of the coffee table that had become my
desk since beginning remote work. I didn’t know what to expect, nor
who had been involved up to this point save for the two coworkers who
had approached me. I was afraid to make an appearance, as though I
were crossing some forbidden threshold.

Within Meow Wolf I found a sense of purpose and community that I had
never experienced before. I had watched it change enormously and had
in turn changed enormously within it, and the thought of outcasting
myself terrified me. I feared that being noticeably involved in the
union effort would be seen as a betrayal by Meow Wolf’s original
founding leadership. I had paranoid visions of being deemed
untrustworthy and having my ties to the company irreparably severed.

When I joined the meeting, I was surprised to see many familiar faces.
I was introduced to Milagro Padilla, our campaign lead from the
Communications Workers of America (CWA), someone who I would later
trust with my life. I would stay on for the next two hours, as friends
and coworkers went around describing how burdened by precarity and
overwork they had become over the past several years, how they felt
like we might get left behind by some impossibly huge ship that nobody
at Meow Wolf could control anymore.

The stories shared were those of people who were critical contributors
to Meow Wolf, for almost a decade in some cases, who were now
struggling to live in Santa Fe. Some felt that the workforce had lost
its seat at the table as the company grew and workers were no longer
able to meaningfully influence internal operations or long-term,
future ambitions. Others were sacrificing their personal lives to keep
up with the demand of the postlayoff workload. Most of these people
had known me since I volunteered to assemble hundreds of circuit
boards for the tech team of HoER as an eighteen-year-old. Many of them
had taken me under their wing in the years that I was the youngest
person on staff; now they were some of my closest friends.

Every person that spoke during those two hours ended their message not
with despair but optimism. There was hope that a different way was
possible, that by unionizing we could build a solid foundation to
stand on together that could not be shaken, no matter how Meow Wolf as
a company continued to morph and grow.

I remember turning my camera off momentarily to wipe tears away from
my eyes, as both the pain and clarity of the situation set in. For the
first time in years, I was reconnected with the feeling I’d had as a
teenager joining my first HoER installation meeting, one of
understanding that a group of people I cared about tremendously were
about to do something unprecedented and life-altering together.

When I closed my computer, I knew I did not have a choice but to do
everything I possibly could to ensure we formed a union. I felt that I
owed it to the people in that meeting room who had changed my life.
Now it was my turn to try and do the same for them by joining them in
an effort to unionize.

Going Public

Meow Wolf Workers Collective went public with our intent to unionize
on September 3, 2020, and I had never felt as much simultaneous
excitement and dread as I did the night before. I sat on the foot of
my bed nervously reading and rereading our announcement copy, as
though it would somehow change if I stopped looking at it. On our
private Slack channel, I watched messages from the other organizers
appear on my screen. “Welp. No going back now,” one read.

I was full of hope for what we had created together and the potential
it had to change our lives for the better, yet overwhelmed by the
acknowledgment we were all doing this for the first time. I felt the
weight of knowing that what we were about to do was irreversible, and
that no matter the outcome, it would personally affect the lives of
everyone who worked for Meow Wolf. We trusted each other entirely but
did not know how it would end.

For me, going public with our union demand was a point of no return.
While I believed Meow Wolf’s leadership would share in our vision of
hope for the future, I knew there was a possibility I might be labeled
as a troublemaker among management and thus denied career
opportunities or become an easy target for another round of layoffs.
Still, I knew that things could not go on as they had, and that moving
forward, I had to openly display my belief in and commitment to our
union, no matter what personal risk it might entail.

As weeks lengthened to months, I became increasingly outspoken. To the
surprise and dismay of everyone who had been involved with organizing
up to this point, Meow Wolf’s executive management immediately hired
a notorious anti-labor law firm, Kauff McGuire & Margolis, and came
out in clear opposition to the union upon learning of its existence.
The organizing committee was operating at full capacity countering the
anti-union propaganda that had been pushed out to the workforce by
every level of management, engaging in a near-constant stream of
organizing conversations, and preparing for an election. Each day came
with a new series of crises, and just staying afloat began to feel
crushing.

Management’s anti-union campaign had scared many of the on-the-fence
workers in the bargaining unit and instilled hostility toward the
union in a small but outspoken portion of the workforce. A handful of
the most vehement opposers made a staff-run website entitled
“Reunion for Meow Wolf” in which the union was painted as corrupt
and harmful, only concerned with getting dues and doomed to tear the
company apart from the inside. Within a given hour of a relatively
normal day at work, entire departments would move from supporting to
opposing the union. It was not unusual for explosive arguments to
break out on the shop floor.

MWWC artists finalizing a diorama in Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station
. (Emily Markwiese)

One organizer had a coworker and friend storm away from him
mid-conversation, insisting the union would strip artists of their
creative freedoms. We later learned this worker’s manager had made
an unfounded claim to their team that unionizing would prohibit Meow
Wolf employees from performing on site installations in new project
locations. After a particularly heated meeting, one of my closest
friends and I angrily hung up on each other while unsuccessfully
trying to resolve our differing stances on unionizing.

I began to feel a pervasive sense of doubt. There were so many
scrambled and discordant projections of what a union would mean for
the future that I now struggled to see clearly what that union would
look like.

I was frustrated and needed someone to talk to who had been through
this process. I had been closely following the social media accounts
of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) union through its successful
election and into its first collective bargaining agreement. Through
an Instagram direct message, I formed a relationship with two of the
main organizers. I asked them to meet over Zoom.

Up until this point, I had viewed our union effort as isolated to Meow
Wolf itself. But in talking with them, I saw we were part of a
historic wave of newly organized art workers.

Crucially, they spoke about how their contract had already begun to
change their lives, how much relief and stability it had brought them
and their coworkers. Hearing what they’d accomplished,
what _we_ were fighting for began to come into clearer focus. Giving
up now would mean letting go of the future my coworkers and I had
imagined together in the early organizing meetings, one where we would
see each other thrive.

Talking with the BAM organizers put more into perspective for me than
just the life-altering potential of a good union contract. I had lost
sight of the fact that the disillusionment and hopelessness I felt
were successful outcomes of an expensive anti-union campaign — one
orchestrated by corporate lawyers in another state who had never
struggled alongside the people that made up the union they aimed to
defeat. Management had the resources to fund an anti-union campaign,
but I trusted that we had the resolve to render it obsolete. Years of
building multiversal worlds together had taught us how to do the
seemingly impossible; now we were going to unionize Meow Wolf.

After the Election

The week of our election, management called for a town hall with
representatives of the union. Among the organizing committee, we
viewed this as a damage-control gesture. The invitation came shortly
after we openly identified a series of “informational sessions”
the company carried out as having been captive-audience meetings
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From the moment we announced our intent to unionize, management
doubled down on projecting the image of Meow Wolf as a radically
progressive company, insisting they were not engaging in anti-union
tactics. This image became increasingly difficult to uphold the more
we publicly drew attention to the reality of the situation.

Still, given the extremely polarizing effect the anti-union campaign
had on interpersonal relations at work, we felt it was important to
show our coworkers we did not have to be discouraged. In the town
hall, one executive referred the workforce to UnionFacts.com, an
anti-labor website owned by the infamous right-wing corporate lobbyist
Rick Berman. Another high-level director from the company’s social
impact division depicted the union as an aggressor that threatened to
break apart the “Meow Wolf family.” The night before, those of us
who were chosen to represent the union met to remind each other that
our power is in our unity, while anti-union efforts have only fear to
rely on.

The MWWC Bargaining Committee in front of Meow Wolf’s House of
Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico. (Emily Markwiese)

We spoke confidently about the logistics and legalities of getting to
a contract, but more important, articulated a common message. As Meow
Wolf continued to find its footing as a company, we needed to do the
same as workers. We were telling the company to trust us as the
experts of our own livelihoods, to let us lead the way in making Meow
Wolf what we believed it could be.

The workers of Meow Wolf voted, via an anonymous third-party election
software, to form the Meow Wolf Workers Collective on October 20,
2020. Meow Wolf, at this point, accepted it was the will of its
employees to unionize.

At work the next day, there was an unmistakable sense that even though
we’d been collaborators for years, even though we’d gone through
myriad harrowing moments together, we were seeing one another in a new
light for the first time. This was the feeling of true solidarity.
Milagro would often tell us, “We win on hope.” I saw that he was
right.

Three months after we won our union, I was elected to the bargaining
committee alongside nine of my coworkers. Negotiations went on for
eighteen months. For the better part of a year, we would return home
from twelve-hour days on the construction site to begin
three-hour-long proposal drafting meetings.

I am, generally, a soft-spoken and calm person. I tend to inwardly
process difficulty; rarely do I externalize big emotions. In the final
week of bargaining, I found myself crying tears of rage, struggling to
speak through a clenched jaw to a board member and top-level executive
after receiving a wage counterproposal that would leave so many of my
peers in the same precarious condition they’d been in for years.

MWWC technical systems engineers installing in Meow Wolf’s
Convergence Station. (Emily Markwiese)

In the bargaining room, I learned that anger, when it is over
injustice, is an emotion to be honored and wielded, never ashamed of.
Unionizing taught me that conflict has a place in growth. Real change
is uncomfortable, disorienting, and ultimately unknowable until
you’re on the other side of it.

It is also what leads to moments like the one I had standing outside
of work the morning after we’d reached a tentative agreement at
midnight, when a coworker ran up to me with her arms open. As we held
each other she said, “I didn’t realize this is what it felt like
to be taken care of.”

Our contract doubled parental leave from six to twelve weeks, secured
$1 million in immediate wage increases for existing workers,
guaranteed non-merit-based yearly raises, and instated overtime for
salaried employees, matching 401k contributions, a labor-management
committee, and layoff protections, among many other wins. Within the
first week of reaching a tentative agreement, multiple coworkers
confided that they had planned to resign but changed their minds —
the union had restored their motivation.

One of the employees who had publicly signed his name to the Reunion
campaign sent me an Instagram message saying he now realized he’d
been misled. The contract was ratified with a 99 percent yes vote one
month later. The labor-management committee began meeting to resolve
workplace issues that had long afflicted the workforce but had largely
gone unaddressed by management. Union stewards were regularly
accompanying their coworkers to meetings with their supervisors to act
as advocates in difficult conversations. The wage adjustments in the
contract kicked in, which for most of our bargaining unit meant the
first meaningful raise they had seen in over five years, and the
difference between being able to continue living in Santa Fe or being
unwittingly pushed out to a less expensive location.

At work, there was a collective feeling of relief and excitement for
the future. I had not felt this hopeful about Meow Wolf since the
night we unveiled the House of Eternal Return to the public six years
prior.

Not long after the opening of Convergence Station, Meow Wolf workers
in Denver organized and won voluntary recognition from the company,
doubling the size of the Meow Wolf Workers Collective overnight. A
friend asked if I’d share some words of advice with the newly
elected bargaining committees.

The most important thing I could think to say was this: Sometimes,
when it gets really hard, and it will get hard, you will feel like you
just want everything to go back to normal. You’ll maybe feel like
you’re tired of fighting, of being in difficult conversations. You
might feel frightened by the understanding you are at the steering
wheel of a ship that is going to change yours and others’ lives
forever. You are going to have to challenge the parts of yourself that
are afraid of conflict and discomfort.

But what is waiting at the end of that tunnel is a significantly
better quality of life for you and your coworkers. What is on the
other side of that fear is the true meaning of solidarity, when you
take a risk for people you don’t know because you don’t want them
to go through the things you have gone through. Do not let your fears
drive you. You are going to be a different person at the end of this,
and that is a precious thing that can never be taken away.

_Emily Markwiese is a union organizer living in Austin, Texas._

* union organizing
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* Labor transformation
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