On August 13, Kansas City’s RideKC streetcar workers voted to join Teamsters Local 955 in an NLRB election.
The vote achieved wide support, with 81% of votes cast as yes according to the unofficial election results. With the vote’s success, 70 streetcar workers will now be represented by the union, including streetcar operators, track maintainers and maintenance workers.
Jerry Wood, President of Teamsters Local 955 said the union is looking to give the workers respect in the workplace, consistent work rules, fair treatment, and increased wages in contract negotiations with their employer, Herzog. He also emphasized that this campaign wasn’t his own, but was instead about the workers themselves.
“I’m proud of these streetcar workers,” Wood said. “They have stood up for themselves, they have built a campaign, and they have earned everything we are doing today. This wasn’t me or my organizer, this was them.”
How did we get here
As context, Kansas City’s RideKC Streetcar is a public transportation rail service. Herzog, a North American rail and construction company, was contracted by Kansas City to administer the day-to-day operations of the RideKC rail services.
The unionization process publicly began on July 2 when the streetcar workers participated in a “march on the boss,” a public event where workers presented demands of unionization to Herzog. Workers at the march said they were dealing with increased workloads due to both the FIFA World Cup and expanded rail routes, along with stagnant wages that weren’t keeping up with inflation.
“The workload keeps increasing and increasing and increasing,” said one anonymous worker at the march. “I love the growth the streetcar has but our pay and benefits are not matching the amount of ridership that we have.”
The Labor Beacon previously reported on this rally in July.
Wood also stated that there was little resistance to his workers unionizing by Herzog and that the city had been supporting them.
“The company really has not engaged in any serious union busting and the city council and the mayor are in support of it. Both sides seem to understand it’s in everyone’s mutual interests for us to go forward and for the workers to form a union.”
On August 13, the Kansas City council unanimously passed a special action publicly supporting the streetcar workers. Councilman Kevin O’Neil sponsored the initiative and introduced it to the city council.
“The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has a long history of representing transportation workers and advocating for improved wages, benefits, workplace safety, retirement security and workers rights,” O’Neil said as he introduced the special action to the council. “I’m introducing this because the election is today and I wanna show them support from myself, the council and the mayor.”
Reactions from workers
Going into the election, the union had what Wood described as a “supermajority” of worker support. This wide backing was reflected in conversations with employees before the election took place.
“We’re feeling very good about it, most of us are voting yes for it. I’ve seen a lot of vote yes teamsters buttons around,” said Cassandra Mohling, a streetcar worker who attended a picket in support of the workers unionizing.
Once the results came in, workers were excited.
“I was over the moon,” laughed Siles Batton, a streetcar operator who helped organize her fellow workers for the vote. “I was very confident it was going to pass but seeing what a big margin it was just blew my mind.
I was very excited.”
“It shows that we all want the same thing, we want to better our lives and we want to be united,” said one worker who chose to be anonymous.
Both Batton and the anonymous worker said the union’s organizers played a key part in helping them organize, and that they gave the workers autonomy to decide what they want.
“They’ve been amazing, I really like how it’s more emphasized on the rank-and-file aspect of it,” Batton said. “It really empowers us to be involved in our own union, which I really like.”
“I think Teamsters 955 is the perfect union for us, especially with the work the organizers have done to get us all united,” the anonymous worker stated. “I was with the Union Pacific UTU 1409, no one knows the true brotherhood and the true sisterhood until they’re in a union, and to have my coworkers become family that’s big to me. With my UTU brothers, they became not only conductors I work with but they became brothers and sisters that I could rely on.”
What this could mean for Kansas City
The unionization of the streetcar workers may also benefit Kansas City’s transit system.
Wood said that the extra compensation for the workers will improve the streetcar by encouraging experienced workers to stay.
“Under a union contract with wages and treatment being represented properly, they would be able to have more longevity as workers there,” Wood said. “So you have more experienced workers that show up to work every day and guarantee your street cars are running the way they should be run.”
Audie Mulhern, a streetcar maintenance worker, said that he had personal experience where higher pay results in a better service being provided to customers.
“If we have good quality staff, with good pay, and good benefits and high morale, people are not gonna want to leave working here,” Mulhern said. “Such as with my previous transit agency I worked for which is Metro in Minneapolis, and the turnover was extremely low and that provided us with a better service.”
Since a 2024 union-induced wage increase for Minneapolis’s Metro transit workers, their retention rates for first-year workers there have increased by over 15% as of 2026, meaning that Metro could potentially serve as a precursor to what is happening in Kansas City.
Patrick Sanders — an Independence native — is a student journalist from the University of Missouri-Columbia writing for the Labor Beacon. Before joining the Labor Beacon, he wrote for KBIA News, a Mid-Missouri NPR-affiliated news organization. Sanders's grandfather Bruce was a long-time member of the postal workers union, and his older cousin is currently in IBEW Local 124. In his free time, Sanders enjoys spending time with friends and family, reading, and weightlifting. He hopes to bring his knowledge of policy to benefit workers in the greater Kansas City area and give working people a fighting chance.
