Anti-Union Org Targets West Vil School Where Pete Seeger Taught

WEST VILLAGE, NY — Songwriter Pete Seeger would likely reach for his guitar and sing a few bars of "Whose Side Are You On?" if he knew a national anti-labor union group was coming for the union at a pricy West Village school where he used to teach.

The City & Country School, a private institution at 146 W. 13th St., faces a union challenge from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, according to a petition filed Tuesday with the National Labor Relations Board.

"The City and Country School educators who signed this petition are simply requesting an NLRB-supervised secret ballot decertification vote," said Vice President Patrick Semmens. "We hope they get one promptly, as is their right under the law."

The challenge comes more than a year after 59 of 85 eligible school workers voted to join the Technical, Office and Professional Union, UAW Local 2110 in March 2022.

In doing so, workers at the pre-k-through-middle school — where tuition costs up to $58,600 a year — joined those at the ACLU, Columbia and Barnard universities, HarpersCollins, Manhattan Country School, Museum of Modern Art, The Tenement Museum, The Whitney Museum and the State Bank of India, as well as other white-collar workers.

But now the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the anti-union organization behind a similar failed effort nearby at the Reserve Roastery Starbucks in the Meatpacking District, has launched an effort to dissolve the union.

Their challenge might also have rankled founder Caroline Pratt, the progressive educator who opened the school in 1914 and famously invented wooden block play that appears in the Ken Burns 1981 documentary "Brooklyn Bridge."

Seeger taught at the school for two years in the late 1940s and actor Matthew Broderick attended the school as a child.

The NRWLDF is the same group behind numerous Supreme Court cases seeking to roll back union protections across the country, including 2018's landmark Janus v. AFSCME.

According to past reporting, the group has deep connections with the far-right anti-communist John Birch Society and the Koch brothers.

In 2012, the Koch's funneled over $1 million to the organization, reported PR Watch.