The Price of Labor
Union strikes, RTO, and the downfall of Berlin Nightclub
OK kiddos, we need to talk. While I’m not trying to become a labor writer, I do need to discuss this for a minute even at risk of sounding like I’m sitting on my lawn chair screaming at the sidewalk because Trump is leading the polls right now despite being a treacherous fuck facing a running tab of indictments and all of this is going to be pointless if leftists keep acting like chaotic actors unable to triage their respective traumas and get their shit together. Trust me, it brings me no joy to write this—I understand that it’s much more compelling to pander to your audience than call them in—but I promise it’s only with love that I say what needs to be said.
First, let me start by noting that, in theory, unions should be a good thing. The idea is to protect laborers from exploitation, and this was actually a historic year for union wins! Who doesn’t like the collective spirit pushing us towards some utopian vision of equality where we’re all treated like a human beings with a reasonable cost of living? Which is why I have to wonder if this is just a case of when too much of a good thing goes bad when laborers lose sight of the importance of wisely choosing your battles and not using that collective power to exploit people who are not exploiting you.
To illustrate this, I need to draw your attention to two separate union issues that are making me face palm to stifle my screams over the visible disconnect between a social media generation demanding instant gratification that ignores the real-world challenges of trying to operate post-pandemic businesses during an economic recession, all while acting like persecuted labor victims about it that would make Upton Sinclair roll his eyes from the grave. Because the people who cover labor issues are too busy only showing the collective struggle to galvanize and not when these things come to hit everyone back in the face.
In case you missed it, Chicago’s long-running come-as-you-are queer nightclub, Berlin, closed its doors after a 40-year-run in the midst of a union strike….while everyone else is also on strike. Members of the UNITE HERE Local 1—a union organization repping 15,000 hospitality workers in Chicago and Northwest Indiana—had been leading a month-long boycott with demands for employer-provided health insurance and wage increases, both of which owners Jim Schuman and Jo Webster noted that they couldn’t really afford given the “expenses of increased security, insurance and licensing, equipment, rent and more cannot be overestimated and we could not imagine morphing the bar into a bottle service, VIP area venue.” Sounds about right!
Of note, most of Berlin’s events were still either free or $10 for a club that was only open four-nights-a-week for about six hours at a time, even after miraculously bouncing back after a 18-month closure during the pandemic. Also, Schuman has advanced Stage 4 cancer and Webster is their caretaker—something that keeps being mentioned as a side note even though I think it’s kind of a big deal and relevant.
These were the union’s demands:
All workers that work one day a week (<7.5hrs) to be considered full-time
All workers that work one day a week to get full benefits (healthcare, pension, vacation pay, sick pay)
All workers that work one day a week to get fully paid healthcare of $969mthly
All workers that work one day a week to get pension contributions of $635mthly
A $13hr raise for Bartenders that currently make an average of $57hr
A $13hr raise for Barbacks that currently make an average of $47hr
A $13hr raise for Coat Check workers that currently make an average of $35hr
A $10hr raise for Security workers that currently make an average of $22.50hr
According to a statement from the owners posted on Berlin’s website: “None of Berlin’s union employees work more than 27 hours per week; Berlin is only open 25 hours per week. More than half of our employees only work 14 hours per week. Berlin’s part-time employees earn a combination of a base hourly wage plus tips. Our coat check employees, post-pandemic, typically earn an average of $35/hr. Our barback employees typically earn $47/hr, while our bartenders typically earn $57/hr. Our most recently hired security employees earn an average of $22.50/hr, which is above the Chicago average. We always want our employees to be paid well. Our employees work hard and deserve to be paid fairly and competitively. And we believe they are, especially when compared to typical Chicago bars and nightclubs.”
Ex-squeeze me? Coat checkers are making more than security at $35/hour and up to $57/hour for bartenders? Sounds nice! I have a pretty long list of struggling Chicago small business owner friends who wish they could afford to pay their employees that much who are open seven-days-a-week and still doing their best to pay above the legal minimum wage of $15.80/hour to employees that are completely mentally checked out.
Truthfully, I hadn’t really heard anything about this until I receiving texts about it from my Gen X and Millennial queer friends in Chicago—some of whom I drunkenly made out with at Berlin dancing until 4 a.m. then skipping off at the brink of dawn to the original Pick-Me-Up Cafe for cheese fries when it was actually good—who had all but stopped going thanks to the pandemic and the cultural shift catering to younger crowds.
“The demands were insane. Like full benefits and pay for one day of work? WTF? It’s ultimately a small business, not like going after the Walmarts and Amazons of the world,” said a queer small business owner.
“Yeah, it’s a shame and fucked up. I’m all for unions of course, but like…Berlin was only open 3 nights a week and the demands were outrageous,” another wrote.
“Like please fight the good fight, but if we have to have it all at once, we get nothing and nowhere. I’d love to get to a point where you can get health insurance for one day of work a week, or even better, healthcare not tied to your employer at all!! But in the meantime, we are losing out on the most basic kinds of bennies,” said another.
Of course, no one wants to go on the record for fear of getting dragged about it—even if the reality is that financially strangling a small nightclub to the point of closure about the moral failings of the U.S. government and socialized healthcare doesn’t exactly help the LGBTQ+ community. And if you’re friends with the people who went on strike, you’re probably going to keep your mouth shut unless you don’t want any friends (precisely why everyone constantly shit talks everyone).
I understand that any criticism of the hospitality industry, unions, or queer communities, can come off like punching down, but it also seems like the collective all-or-nothing leftist activist mentality has damaged people to the point they’d rather self-sabotage and have nothing while feeling sorry for themselves when there are better ways to address issues like universal healthcare and pay inequality. In this case, the union’s demands weren’t rejected because the owners are anti-union or exploitative, but rather that the demands were unreasonable and could not be met.
As expected, there is a GoFundMe for the unemployed staff even though all of these places are hiring right now—many of which are salaried and have benefits, including at other queer-owned restaurants. Can someone explain why they need a GoFundMe?! I don’t mean to sound like Barry Bootstraps over here, but come on!
While I fully acknowledge that Chicago is a city of haters and have sympathies for those who don’t have many places to go at a time as these spaces are rapidly declining, Chicago is still blessed with better-than-average gay and queer clubs, spaces, and event options—most of which are very niche and probably don’t have an extra $500,000 sitting around, no matter how much angry little DSA internet trolls want to claim it’s about ownership greed.
I don’t know how much Jackhammer employees make at a leather and rubber fetish bar that is open the same amount of days and hours and where drinks are roughly $5, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume they’re probably making about the same as every other hospitality worker in Chicago unless you work for a nice restaurant or high-volume bar where the drinks start at $15. I also assume the split among everyone is much smaller when you stick 11 different drag performers on the same stage like Roscoe’s Tavern does. Unfortunately, money does not magically appear from good intentions when it’s the same dollar bill being recirculated every week—particularly when there are many mouths to feed outside that community as well, including the undocumented corporate hospitality workers in the UNITE HERE network.
To achieve their demands, union employees argued that the owners could add daytime hours and double the price of drinks. Great idea! Just completely change your business that has been around almost twice as long as some of these employees have been alive to include a pricing strategy currently contributing to the overall inequitable situation continuing to test the limits of small businesses that we now find ourselves in while you’re on your deathbed. Or, you could always open your own worker-owned dayclub/nightclub that will fulfill this new business model?
Here are a few resources to get started:
Chicago Recovery Grant Application for Community Development
LGBT Business Enterprise Certification via LGBT Chamber of Commerce of Illinois
If there’s anything I have learned from covering the hospitality industry for two decades, it’s that not all great ideas become successful businesses, not all owners are great with money, and not all problems are visible. For example, in 2013, one of Chicago’s only lesbian bars, T's Restaurant and Bar, was shut down by the Cook County Sheriff after owner Colm Treacy was facing his third audit in five years and over $100,000 in fines after participating in a wire-tapped FBI sting with an auditor over a 2007 bribe—another covert cost of doing business in a city as a notoriously corrupt as Chicago that surely the owners were not going to go on the record about.
After losing their lease in 2015, longtime goth club, Neo, brief moved to Debonair Club before turning into an event-based homage to a place that will never be replicated. Meanwhile, Debonair Club shut down last September after a shooting, while also citing financial problems. Would be so much cooler if it was 2006 when we still had Danny’s, Club Foot, Beachwood Inn, and all of the other truly independent places that made Chicago so universally cool with zero expectations, but here we are.
Unfortunately, a lot of the work that goes into saving our stages, restaurants, and creative spaces is a labor of love and a thankless task as part of the commitment to ensure that the things you like stick around without turning into a corporate investor rehab concept project. If it wasn’t, places like Chicago wouldn’t have been losing their creative class for the past two decades to the coasts. And, if you find that after six years of working behind the bar that you are not making enough money, there is always a high-volume bar in the Viagra Triangle where you can get another shit job being treated like shit and stand to make a lot more money for it while deciding if this is still the profession for you.
Presumably, the workers who are upset about not making better money have never been small business owners in Chicago, otherwise they would recognize what a futile argument this is. Instead, the reaction is always: “How could this have happened? So sad!” Because this is what happens when you surround yourself in a fantasy echo chamber rather than use your collective brains to organize in a way that is useful. Who ever said running a small business was easy—especially in Chicago?
Imagine if everyone invested the same level of effort spent tearing down a small nightclub into the fight for universal healthcare. Why do we feel the need to fragment ourselves into individualistic unions designed solely to benefit members that use their collective bargaining position to mobilize for other union causes while ignoring that many people are not in a union and can also benefit from collective societal issues? If you’re a reader of Jacobin and New Inquiry, your answer is probably, “Well yeah, but.” Which is where I bring you to the latest fight being waged by the Hearst Media Union: a mandated 3-day in-office hybrid work week three years after COVID.
On the heels of a historic triumphant win from the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike and only months after winning their own overdue two-year battle to ensure increased salaries, benefits and protections for 560 writers, producers and editors of Hearst—whose annual revenue is somehow about $12 billion between its collective enterprises despite a completely challenged marketplace and absolutely abysmal freelance rates—the next fight wasn’t to increase the amount of full-time support staff that has shrunk after years of mass layoffs that have turned an entire generation of qualified editorial staff into desperate freelancers or jumping ship entirely, or address protections against the use of AI. No! It was bargaining against the return to office for a three-day in-office work week, implemented just weeks after their contract negotiations when they could have addressed this!
Do RTO mandates suck? Sure. Also, three days out of the week with employers who are probably pretty flexible about that seems beyond reasonable, particularly at time when the economy is in the tank and you should be happy to have any job, let alone one as cushy as working in editorial lifestyle magazine publishing. After all, you could always work as freelance and set your own hours from wherever you want! And, if you have a medical condition, they are legally required to accommodate so the point moot in my opinion. This isn’t a disability rights issue.
By comparison, the New York Nurses Union, which fought for basic middle-class compensation and to address the conditions of working grueling non-stop shifts during the pandemic and after, do not have the option to bitch about three-day in-office work weeks. The United Automotive Workers (UAW), which also won big earlier this month to increase the salaries of employees in Detroit while also addressing automakers moves to financially depleted areas in the South to take advantage of cheaper labor rates, strong anti-union labor laws and a lax enforcement against employee intimidation tactics, cannot take advantage of three-day in-factory work weeks. While that union may be rooted in notable value, it has also been plagued by years of corruption hurting its ability to organize new workers because, as I noted in my last labor OpEd: just because you work in a service job or are part of a union doesn’t mean you’re a good or hard-working person, and that unions can also be run by sexist, racist, homophobes, too.
Re: the other argument on the table—employee censorship re: the Israel and Hamas conflict (or Palestine, whatever you need to call it at this point)—this is certainly much different, but I’ll weigh in anyway with my POV as a defected old school journalist: if you are employed full-time at an editorial publication, there are codes of conduct to follow that you agree to upon employment including not using your position to publish personal opinions. Full stop. This is why for so many years profiles on Twitter would include a blurb that said, “My views do not reflect my employer,” even if it seemed to lose meaning after awhile. Because as soon as you say something they don’t like, you can bet they’re going to distance themselves as far away as possible.
The reason for this is to maintain editorial objectivity so your publication doesn’t become a biased, untrustworthy rag—unfortunately often the case in our algorithm-chasing world where media manipulators become billionaires who buy out publications and journalists are now social media activists who engage in knee-jerk real-time sharing of misinformation. Yes, you should be objective otherwise what’s the point? Why not just wield your power to show a balanced perspective or even a conversation between opponents, because journalism is not about you?
Instead, every single publication decided to hold up a biased flag of solidarity, which has only grown worse since Trump went into office and why I felt inclined to present it in this way, even if it pisses a bunch of people off and makes me look “uncool.” Because the reality is that no blinks an eye when the US Supreme Court throws a long-standing constitutional guarantee of abortion out the window, threatening critical rights, including the right to life, security and non-discrimination for millions of people with uteruses—even though 5 million people worldwide showed up for this during the Women’s March in 2017 that suddenly went AWOL—and 508 anti-LGBTQ+ bills are currently on the docket. Opting out because you’re mad things aren’t perfect and deciding to let everything burn to the ground isn’t exactly improving the situation—how do you think Trump got elected in the first place?
I would also like to add that as someone who is intimately familiar with the proliferation of underground literature not only stateside, but in Central and Eastern Europe during Soviet occupation, I believe in a free and just press—including the ideas I don’t agree with. That said, between social policing and the retaliation of that, a 2022 poll conducted by the New York Times Opinion/Siena College Poll showed that only 34 percent of Americans said they believed that all Americans enjoyed freedom of speech completely and 84 percent of adults said it is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism. How exactly do we accomplish anything when we can’t even speak with each other?
I get how satisfying it feels to stick your middle up at The Man and assume that you’re taking a righteous, albeit unpopular stance to fight for what’s just. At the same time, when it comes at a certain cost that works against you, it might be worth taking stock to consider what exactly you’re fighting for and if you’re fighting effectively.
MORE FROM PIPE DREAMS BY THE WEED WITCH
Consumption Lounge: Live, Laugh, Love and Labor
The Weed Witch Guide to Unemployment
Pinking in the Existential Crisis Industry: Who Really Has a Say and What Does It All Mean?
Welcome to the The Weed Witch coven. If you liked this post, click the heart button below and consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Fall down the wrong rabbit hole? Click here to unsubscribe.