Sesame Street Workers Say, “U Is for Union”

In 1975, New York City garbage collectors went on strike, leaving 55,000 tons of “reeking, leaking, rotting, rain-soaked garbage” crowding the streets, The New York Times reported. Manhattan business owners and tenants were repulsed, but one longtime Upper West Side resident was thrilled: Oscar the Grouch. In an episode of Sesame Street that aired a few months later, Oscar excitedly reads a newspaper story about a garbage strike. Reveling in the mountains of filth rising around him, he hopes the workers never settle. “Anything ragged or rotten or rusty,” he sings. “I love trash!”

Decades later, the workers who help “animate” the muppets, including the misanthropic Oscar, launched their own unionization campaign. On April 23, employees of Sesame Workshop—the nonprofit that produces Sesame Street—voted overwhelmingly to form a union with the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153. The National Labor Relations Board approved the final vote count of 55 to 19 today at its office in lower Manhattan.

While many of the puppeteers, actors, and crew members on the show have long been represented by entertainment unions, the new union covers the employees who bring Elmo and friends to life: artists, early-childhood experts, fundraisers, and more. Organizers see their campaign for dignity and respect at work as a natural continuation of Sesame’s mission to teach children to grow “smarter, stronger, and kinder.” “Workers at Sesame are deeply committed to doing things that are kind and fair,” said Phoebe Gilpin, a senior director of formal learning at the Workshop. “These are the same values that bring Sesame into so many people’s homes. And we weren’t seeing consistency in that in our workplace itself.”

Sesame workers are standing arm in fuzzy arm to fight for job protections as the show’s financial future becomes more uncertain. In December, Sesame lost its distribution deal with HBO, which has provided $30 million to $35 million in annual revenue since 2015. In recent congressional hearings, the Trump administration and Republicans have made Sesame the face of “woke” government programs and slashed USAID grants that fund the show’s overseas programming. In April President Trump posted on Truth Social, “REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS, THE RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY.”

On March 4, citing financial strain, Sesame Workshop announced that it was laying off nearly 100 people, about 20 percent of its staff, just hours after workers announced their union. Having a union in place in the future could help protect workers from further cuts as the show confronts changes in the media and political landscape. Gilpin, who was among those laid off, said that management should have bargained with workers over the extent of the cuts and severance packages offered. A union would allow the Workshop to respond to political changes “in a way that protects workers,” she said. “Rather than what the company is doing, which is sacrificing workers.”

While workers called on the nonprofit’s management to voluntarily recognize their union, Sesame instead followed a standard union-busting playbook, deploying anti-union talking points in e-mails to workers and information sessions, dragging out negotiations over the bargaining unit, and filing last-minute challenges to workers’ right to vote. “They want to isolate people as much as possible,” said Nancy Chong, who works in philanthropic development at Sesame. “But it really did bring us closer within the union.”

Sesame Workshop employees announced they were unionizing in March at a block party outside the nonprofit’s Midtown Manhattan offices. Workers held signs reading, “Today’s letter is U for Union!” and sang updated versions of classic Sesame songs like “The People in Your Neighborhood”: “Who are the people in our union? They’re the people on the street each day.” The celebration capped a nearly two-year campaign of worker-to-worker organizing that went from the Cookie Monster Conference Room to on set between takes.

The union says it’s fighting for fair pay, opportunities for advancement, and permanent positions for contracted staff. Sesame relies on contract labor for many roles, and workers can be kept in temporary status without full benefits for years. “We’re not asking for the moon,” said Julianna Lopez, a former marketing manager at Sesame who was laid off. “We’re just asking for things that make our working lives and our regular lives more livable.”

The evening before the union went public, Local 153 secretary-treasurer Nick Galipeau called Sesame Workshop CEO Sherrie Rollins Westin to give her advance notice. After Galipeau introduced himself, he heard a long pause and then the call disconnected. He tried calling back but the call went to voicemail, and he left a message detailing the union’s plans. “I never got a return call,” he said.

The next morning, over 60 workers marched to Westin’s office to deliver flowers and a Sesame Street book about mutual respect and sharing, but she was not there to receive the offerings. Workers then gathered outside the office to announce to community allies and the press that they had collected unionization cards from a majority of employees, and urged management to voluntarily recognize their union.

Just an hour after the block party, Sesame management held a meeting in which it announced the mass layoffs. “It was like the highest of highs to the lowest of lows immediately,” said Lopez. “We were literally singing songs outside and then we go upstairs, and it’s like the world fell out from under us.”

Over the next 48 hours, Lopez, Gilpin, and nearly 100 of their colleagues were laid off in under-10-minute Zoom meetings in which managers read from a script. Gilpin got the calendar invite for her meeting while dropping her child off at pre-K (subject line: “Transition Plan”).

Many workers, including those who have been with the organization for decades, were laid off without severance. “The day we announced the formation of the union is the day people were notified that they would be laid off,” said Nati Kahsay, an organizer with OPEIU who has supported the Sesame campaign, “So we didn’t even have an opportunity to push back or to organize around the terms and conditions of the layoffs.” In solidarity with laid off colleagues, the union launched a merchandise store and a Hardship Fund.

Sesame argues that the layoffs were a financial necessity, claiming that without cutting costs, it would face a $40 million deficit in 2026. Two months before the layoffs, HBO announced that it was dropping its distribution deal with Sesame, a substantial revenue source that allowed the show to produce additional episodes each season.

Workers said Westin and other Sesame executives’ taking a pay cut could have saved some of their colleagues’ jobs. According to Sesame’s most recent tax forms, former CEO Stephen Youngwood made over $1 million in 2023, while then-president Westin made over $860,000. “Not securing a distribution deal is a management failure,” said David Hamer-Hodges, the director of organizing and first contracts for Local 153. “Yet they are putting the consequences of said failure on the workers by laying them off instead.”

The union also claims that Sesame has a “rainy day fund,” pointing to the fact that the organization reported net assets of $439 million for the end of 2023. “Choosing not to access a rainy day fund during a rainy day is unethical,” said Gilpin. “It is a choice that is being made.”

Some workers say that Sesame management has used the layoffs to quash their union. Six of the seven workers who spoke at the union’s block party lost their jobs as well as a majority of workers on the organizing committee. A group for queer Sesame employees that was the nexus of early organizing was “pretty well gutted,” said Hamer-Hodges. The union filed a complaint with the NLRB claiming that the layoffs were targeted at organizers, which it later withdrew after Sesame Workshop demanded that the union abandon its complaint as a condition of continuing with the election.

Sesame management maintains that the layoffs were unrelated to organizing. In an e-mail to staff, Westin and COO Joseph Giraldi wrote, “The restructuring plan…has been in development for some time. We received the official union notification letter on Tuesday, after restructuring decisions and implementation plans had already been fully determined.”

Leading up to the vote, Sesame deployed “boilerplate union-busting” tactics, said Hamer-Hodges. “They could have done the right thing and acknowledged our card count,” said Lopez. “We’ve already said as a whole that the majority of us want a union.” Management and the union negotiated back and forth for weeks, with management trying to shrink the size of the eligible bargaining unit. “It was excruciating,” said Hamer-Hodges. “They were delaying as much as possible.” On the day of the election, Sesame launched a last-minute challenge to throw out the ballots of workers who would be laid off in the coming months, which was thrown out by an NLRB board agent. “Sesame Workshop respects its employees’ right to form a union and seek representation, and we remain committed to fostering a positive, transparent, and collaborative workplace,” said a Sesame Workshop spokesperson in an e-mail.

Organizers say Sesame tried to intimidate workers out of supporting the union using bosses’ standard arsenal of anti-labor tactics. Sesame management said in e-mails and voluntary information sessions that workers could lose their benefits if they unionized and that the union couldn’t promise workers raises. In their e-mail to staff, Westin and Giraldi wrote, “Sesame Workshop is not required to agree to any specific demands for increased wages, benefits or other employment conditions.”

Workers say they see the protections afforded by a union as their best defense as the muppets become a political punching bag for DOGE lackeys. During a recent congressional hearing on taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS, Democratic Representative Robert Garcia asked sarcastically, “Is Elmo now, or has he ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” In remarks before Congress in March, President Donald Trump blasted “wasteful “government spending, including “$20 million for the Arab ‘Sesame Street’ in the Middle East.” Project 2025’s chapter on USAID name-checked Sesame Street, calling it “biased to the Left.” The Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency included grants that fund versions of the show overseas.

In early May, President Trump issued an executive order ending federal funding to NPR and PBS. PBS is one of Sesame Street’s distribution networks, but federal funding makes up a small portion of the nonprofit’s overall revenue—4 percent in the most recent fiscal year. Still, in Westin’s e-mail announcing the layoffs, she referenced federal funding cuts as a driver. “Amid the changing media and funding landscape—including policy changes affecting our federal funding—we made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our organization,” a Sesame Workshop spokesperson said in an email to me.

Still, the Trump administration’s anti-woke crusade could have a chilling effect on Sesame’s content. Chong said some of Sesame’s institutional funders have removed certain buzzwords like “climate change” from their agreements with the nonprofit, out of fear that they could have their tax-exempt status revoked. “The hardest thing is knowing how we can stick to our values as an organization,” she said. “And not knowing what we’re allowed to talk about as an organization.”

The new union will protect the workers who help deliver those values to the public. “The reasons that we organized were not specifically about these layoffs, but these layoffs really revealed the importance of the organizing. Your mission is to help children” said Gilpin. “Yet these are the policies and practices that you have in place for your own staff and the children who rely on them.”

At an election-day party in Central Park on one of the first days of spring, workers were jubilant. Wearing vintage Sesame merchandise and tote bags reading “Smarter, Stronger, Kinder, Together,” they chatted excitedly about the rosy-looking results that were trickling in. Throughout the afternoon, passersby approached the group, lured by T-shirts and blankets emblazoned with their childhood icons. As organizers, “Our brand is probably the biggest asset that we have,” said Lopez. “So many people know and love these characters, so it was really apparent to us that leaning into that was a great way of not just representing us as a part of Sesame Workshop but also to signal to others outside of the union, ‘Hey, you know us, you like us, help support us.’”

The union campaign has highlighted that these beloved characters don’t appear in homes across America only through the power of imagination but as a product of the labor of hundreds of workers who want fair pay, job security, and dignity at work. “We wanted to emphasize that there are people behind the muppets,” said Chong. “If you’re a fundraiser, if you’re an administrator, if you’re a graphic designer, we come together to show up as people and workers that are folks who love working at Sesame and creating content that goes back to our mission.”

Toward the end of the party, a young couple pushing two strollers approached the group. “Is this a Sesame Street event?” they asked. Their wide-eyed toddler reached eagerly toward a worker wearing a T-shirt featuring the muppet Count von Count. Handing the parents union pins, one of the organizers replied, “This is a Sesame Street workers’ event.”