Tenants Union Fights Back | Sylvia and Emily
Wayland
Sylvia (center): We represent the Tenants Union at Atlantic Mills, which is a building in Olneyville that houses a lot of artists and local businesses, and it’s one of the last affordable spaces that you can find in the state and probably the country. It’s being currently bought by developers, one of whom… his office is what we’re right outside of right now. We’re here to demand collective bargaining to ask him to come to the table and respect our rights as tenants. We don’t know if he’s in there right now, but we know he’ll hear about this one way or the other.
Emily (right): It’s the first commercial Tenants Union in the state, which puts us in a fun position of getting to kind of make it what we need it to be. We have a lot of flexibility, but we don’t have the protections that a labor union might have, or even that residential tenants would have. So, we are kind of depending on community support and solidarity within the building to keep it what it is.
Because at the end of the day, Bob Berle and Eric Edelman are coming in, and they’re attracted to Providence because it’s such a creative, diverse community. But they have no interest in preserving that community or letting us stay here, so they’re sort of like, ‘thanks for seeding the ground, now get out.’ They’ve already started evicting people. They say they’re going to leave other people alone if they’re in good standing, but all they have to do is raise the rents, and everyone will have to leave anyways and effectively be evicted, but they won’t look like bad guys.
So, we’re saying, you know, if that’s true, just come to the table and collectively bargain with us. If you want us to stay here, that’s fantastic. We’d love to. It’s the only way, as a worker or as a tenant, to sort of have the same power as the boss or landlord. And they’ve kept saying no. They keep saying ‘that’s not how it works,’ and we are saying, ‘yeah, we know. It’s not working for us, so we need to get on the same page.’
And then hopefully, once they collectively bargain with us, we can all go on our merry ways and make Atlantic Mills even better. Fix the roof, fix the towers. But right now we’re demanding that we stay while they do that.
Sylvia: And setting precedent for other tenants in the future because this is a movement.
Emily: Yeah. We have a 95-ish person union which represents a supermajority of the tenants. It includes both the towers, the flea market, and the furniture store. And then Building 8 in the back is also included.
So that’s what’s at stake for this negotiation.
We’ve been working with Reclaim RI that’s doing a lot of residential tenant organizing as well as SEIU 1199 New England (the New England Healthcare Employees Union) who’s been helping us here. And then we’ve been getting advice from the Connecticut Tenants Union which is a part of SEIU 1199. It’s all part of the same struggle and we are paying these rents, be it the literal rent or the rent of our labor, and we need to see it at the table. It’s getting completely untenable to expect anyone to work and pay rent and have a fulfilling life without that kind of access.
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