Employee Free Choice Act Would Have Made a Big Difference for Professional Dancer

by Mike Hall, Feb 12, 2007

Nikkia Parish says she thought she had “found a home” in the 20-member Washington Ballet.

The Forth Worth, Texas, native began her dance lessons at age six and climbed the dance career ladder from the prestigious School of American Ballet to university training at Texas Christian University, the Pennsylvania Ballet and Dance Theatre of Harlem.

Parish (see video) joined the Washington Ballet in 2003 where:

I kept getting opportunities to do larger roles, soloist, principal roles. You don’t get those if they don’t think you’re capable.…I felt like I found home there. I would have been very comfortable to dance there for several years.…But I knew my career would end someday.

What she didn’t know was that her career at the Washington Ballet would end so soon—in March 2005, just weeks after she and the other dancers voted 18–2 in February to join the Musical Artists (AGMA). Parish’s experience shows why passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, now in the U.S. House as H.R. 800, is critical for America’s workers employed in industries across the board.

Parish, a vocal leader of the drive to win a union, says she was called into the artistic director’s office and told her contract would not be renewed, supposedly for “artistic reasons.” She says it was for quite something else.

He just didn’t want me around the dancers anymore.

Parish believes she lost her job because of the prominent role she played—not on stage—but in the dancers’ effort to form a union and bargain for better wages and working conditions. It was the working conditions she says that fueled the union effort—long, grueling rehearsals on irregular schedules without adequate breaks and time off, resulting in mounting injuries.

In fall 2005, the other dancers elected Parish—who had danced in AGMA companies before—to take their concerns to management.

These weren’t the normal strains and sprains. People were getting hurt with serious injuries, career threatening injuries….People think that machines can work forever, but periodically like a car if there is no oil or lubrication of the joints, something’s going to go wrong, something’s going to break down. It’s the same way with a dancer’s body….We can only go so long before we need to have rest, physically, mentally and emotionally.

The dancers were growing increasingly concerned that the wear and tear on their bodies, coupled with an already short career window, could put a premature end to their dance lives.

Parish says:

The younger dancers were afraid to speak out and didn’t know their rights.

Recalling her past experience working under an AGMA contract with working conditions, hours and schedules spelled out, Parish went to the ballet company’s management with the dancers’ concerns.

I had always danced in a union company and became used to a union contract where there was a mutual respect between management and the dancers.

But after the meeting, little changed; and in December, the entire company—except for one dancer who was hospitalized at the time—signed a petition for union representation.

When they found out the dancers had signed the petition, they were really nice to us, talking gently to us. I thought it was like you might talk to a dog who just started showing his teeth at you.

When the company management told the dancers they didn’t need a union and all the issues could be worked out together, Parish says she had already “heard that song and dance before.”

After the “sugar” didn’t work, the dancers were called into mandatory meetings, as a group and individually, where dance company management railed against the union. There were phone calls to dancers’ homes, anti-union literature and even dinner “invitations” from upper management, all designed, says Parish, to sway the dancers away from choosing a union.

That tactic didn’t work, either. The dancers stayed on point for the union.

But after the 18–2 vote, the battle was far from over. After the Washington Ballet refused to renew Parish’s contract, negotiations for a contract between the company and the union dragged on for more than a year forcing the cancellation in the winter of 2005 of the holiday tradition “Nutcracker.”

Just before a scheduled National Labor Relations Board hearing, Parish and AGMA settled a complaint with the ballet company over her dismissal and today she is managing a bowling alley in Washington, D.C.

I don’t have any regrets about standing up for the union. I don’t have any regrets about standing up for what’s right. I might not be there anymore. But it has helped the dancers who are still at the Washington Ballet company.

She says without the Employee Free Choice Act as law, workers from all walks of life face the same struggle, threats and job loss she and thousands of other workers do every year when they try to form a union to bargain for a better life.

What happened to the dancers at the Washington Ballet, all the things they had to go through, as well as everything I had to go through, could happen to anybody as of right now. The Employee Free Choice Act can put a stop to that.

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