The head of a 153-year-old Quaker school in New York City says that “Quaker values” are the reason she is trying to dissolve the school’s labor union by using a Trump administration labor board ruling that allows religious schools to exempt themselves from the requirement to bargain with unions.
The labor battle has arisen suddenly at Brooklyn Friends School, a private K‑12 school where tuition can run close to $50,000 per year. In May of 2019, about 200 staffers at the school voted overwhelmingly to unionize with UAW Local 2110. Theirs is a “wall to wall” union, including not only teachers, but also maintenance and cafeteria workers and office staff. The union drive overlapped with the November 2018 appointment of Crissy Caceres as the new Head of School at BFS. According to Maida Rosenstein, president of UAW 2110, Caceres convened a staff meeting shortly before the union election to encourage employees to vote “no,” arguing that a union would be antithetical to the Quaker method of decision making by consensus.