NORTHALSTED — Employees of the storied LGBTQ+ nightclub Berlin are on strike, months after the National Labor Relations Board accepted their petition to unionize.
Employees walked out of Berlin, 954 W. Belmont Ave., at 10 p.m. Friday — the club’s opening time — to picket outside, with headlining drag performers Irregular Girl and Siichelle canceling their performances in solidarity.
They remained on strike Saturday, walking the picket line for second night as the six performers slated for the club’s Saturday Night Drag Show canceled their performances.
Workers called the strike after Berlin owners Jo Webster and Jim Schuman repeatedly failed to attend bargaining sessions with unionized employees, bringing contract negotiations to a halt, organizers said.
But in a statement, Berlin management said it had been “blindsided” by the strike.
Management said they had received “additional proposed contract terms” two days prior to Friday’s walkout, although strike organizers said that a proposal for raises and improved health care access had gone unacknowledged for weeks.
“This is a disappointment to everyone here at Berlin because we believed we were progressing in our contract discussions,” the statement read.
Berlin employees unionized in April with Unite Here Local 1, a Chicago-area service workers union, after a months-long push, according to the Tribune. The nightclub has been in business since 1983.
Employees told Block Club they were organizing for better pay, access to health insurance and improved on-the-job training.
Progress on a contract has been slow in the intervening months, Berlin bartender Jolene Saint said. A list of economic proposals, including raises and improved health care access for staff, has sat for six weeks without a formal response from club management, she said.
Saint has worked at Berlin for six years, starting as a security guard — one of the club’s most difficult and lowest paid jobs that usually offers workers “no sight of a raise,” she said.
Saint was among the first to push for a union. She now sits on the union’s bargaining committee. She said Webster and Schuman’s absence at bargaining meetings has made negotiations intractable.
“It would be very easy for Jim or Joe to come to one of these sessions so we could have an honest conversation about reaching a contract that, you know, it’s actually beneficial to the club and beneficial for workers,” Saint said.
“Them not being at the table is really dragging this whole contract negotiation on much longer than it needs to be dragging on. And in the meantime people are still getting paid minimum wage. In the meantime, people still feel precarious,” Saint added.
Untipped security staff at Berlin make minimum wage, $15.80 an hour, according to Saint. The workers’ proposal would raise that to $25 an hour, Saint said, the rate that “should be standard” for the difficult work security staff do.
Management said in a statement that they had “already agreed to many of the union’s highest priority requests, including those involving security and training” and said that they “have been constructively working with our employees to reach a contract that is fair to the workers but is also financially responsible.”
For tipped workers, this weekend’s strike will cut into one of the club’s busiest weekends, worker Leo Sampson, who performs at Berlin under the drag name Luv Ami, told Block Club.
Sampson said “Strapped” — the performance workers walked out of on Friday — is the “biggest party, and Berlin’s biggest moneymaker” of the summer.
“A lot of workers favored the strike happening on the biggest night, knowing that we would be missing out on a lot of wages because we know how important this is right now,” Sampson said.
A GoFundMe for the bar’s unionized workers and performers losing their weekend wages had raised nearly $7,000 as of Saturday night. Organizers told Block Club it should be enough to cover lost wages.
The bargaining committee has been able to make some strides in the past months. Saint said she and other committee members successfully worked with Webster and Schuman’s lawyer to develop a new set of training protocols designed to make working at the club safer for security and wait staff.
Saint said she hoped the strike would inspire management to pick up the pace.
“We are willing and able to go on strike and they need to stop dragging their feet,” she said.
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