REI Workers Set the Stage For a Theatrical Showdown in Soho…

Union-busting companies know how to deal with walkouts, sickouts, boycotts — and even limited strikes — pretty handily under existing labor law. But how in the world do they confront a theatrical production that puts their exploitation and worker abuses center stage?

How do they contend with art?

New Yorkers are gonna find out very shortly how the bosses at REI’s flagship store in Soho deal with it because the green vests there are developing a new play in conjunction with the Working Theater aimed at an eventual Off-Broadway production — and it dramatizes the workers’ ongoing fight to secure a first contract — as it happens.

“I knew I was gonna write a play about my day job — but I thought it was gonna be a comedy about greenwashing or actors having day jobs, something a little bit lighter than what I ended up with,” Foot Wears House playwright Laura Neill tells Work-Bites. “When I was hired, I was told REI is unionized. I was like, ‘Oh, great, this is amazing; I love being part of the unionized workforce.’”

As such, Neill anticipated a good contract with solid union protections would soon follow.

“And then I realized, of course, that REI is not bargaining in good faith at all,” she says. “And so, this play came out of that.”

Neill and some of her REI co-workers performed an excerpt of Foot Wears House at a special Working Theater showcase held earlier this week in Manhattan. A full reading of the developing production is slated for Saturday, February 24, at the Hudson Park Library. The event is free and starts at 2 p.m.

REI management is on record saying it doesn’t believe “union representation is the best path to improving work situations for REI employees” and that it is instead committed to “creating an employee experience that is so compelling that the need for union is not necessary.”

Cue the violins.