Late last year, Chicago’s beloved queer nightspot Berlin closed its doors amid a controversial union drive. I was first drawn to this editorial in the Chicago Tribune by a prominent photo of my friend Marten Katze looking characteristically cool as hell. (See: above.) Dismayed to find, however, that this powerful image image was appended to a childish anti-worker screed, I decided to speak with a Berlin union organizer and get the workers’ side of the story.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
My name is Jolene and I am 27 years old. I worked at Berlin for six years, starting as a bouncer and ending up as a bartender. I have worked in food service since I was 18, but this was my first time organizing a workplace campaign.
Tell us about Berlin.
Berlin was opened in 1983 by a gay guy and his straight girl best friend. They wanted to open a place where gay people and straight people could dance together, which is why it was located between Wrigleyville and Boystown. They ran it for about ten years, until the previous owner began really struggling with AIDS, and they passed it along to the current owners, Jim Schuman and Jo Webster.
Since Berlin opened, the DJs there have been playing industrial and alternative music. So it already had that reputation, which attracted a more queer crowd. Looking back over my six years there — and the time before, when I was going there under age, as many people have, including everybody who worked there — the parties being produced there, and the people making stuff happen there were all alternative gay people, queer people, trans people, who might not be able to pitch their shows at other bars or clubs.
When I started, Thursday nights weres dedicated to different club kid parties. We had stuff that referenced back to Berlin’s roots. We had the Wax Trax night, which was a party I really loved, highlighting a Chicago industrial label run by two gay men. Berlin was trying to create a space for this kind of alternative gay position. It was really cool and beautiful and it was something that, when I first came in, I was very excited about.
Tell us about your coworkers and the kind of community you all have.
It was the kind of place that once you got in, you felt happy to be there. It was in many ways a great place to be. Even for the parts of the job that sucked, you could at least be like, “I’m among friends.” All of the people who worked there got along really well — or at least I got along with everybody! One of my coworkers, Gary, had been there for 28 years by the end. Another coworker had been there for like fifteen years. That was not uncommon.
If you ask any gay person who goes dancing and is part of nightlife, even if they’re over in Boystown in that scene, they would probably say: Berlin, that’s a great place to dance! Love that spot! It was its own imperfect-perfect thing, and people loved it, flaws and all. It’s a space that people have fondness and tenderness for, and it was also such a rowdy thing! When I would tell people where I worked, they often say: “Every time I go there I can’t remember what happened!”
I came to recognize the difference between Berlin as a community space and Berlin as a business. In many ways, people were feeling Berlin as a community space, and that’s part of why it was so long-lasting. But the parts of it that were “Berlin as a business” are what brought it down over time.
Why did you decide to form a union?
There was this real distance between what Berlin said it was, and the reality for the people who worked there. There were a lot of cool and beautiful things about it, but within six months of working there I was one of the most senior security people, because all of the other security people quit at once. Over and over again people would ask: “Can you pay us more than minimum wage?” In my time there I heard three or four different managers say “I’ll talk to the owners about paying you guys more,” and it never went anywhere.
There’s also the bullshit you’re dealing with, especially on the bouncer side of things. When you’re on the floor it gets so crazy, you’re dealing with people picking on you, hitting on you, some of my coworkers watched a guy get his face cut open, there were more than a couple times someone threatened to shoot me with a gun, and another guy even showed me his gun once. So there was the philosophy of Berlin, and then the reality of it.
Even outside people feeling undervalued in their wages, people wanted Berlin to live up to that philosophy. One of the things in our contract negotiations that was a real sticking point for the company, that they wouldn’t move on, was they wanted to be able to hire temp security agencies, and specifically, this one agency they were contracting with called Walsh Security. This company was being contracted by most of the bars in Boystown before the pandemic. But in 2020 when the Black Drag Council got together and tried to make Boystown a less racist place, they wanted clubs to stop hiring Walsh Security. It is run by Chicago cop Thomas Walsh, who once beat a Black security guard in Boystown, calling him racial slurs. They wanted to contract this, basically, racist paramilitary force. Berlin had agreed, along with all the other bars in Boystown, that they would no longer contract with this guy, but they turned around and still wanted to do it.
Another thing they were refusing to move on is they wanted to be able to check people’s credit score as part of hiring and promotion. It was a practice they weren’t doing, but they wanted to “retain the right” to do it.
Had they hired some kind of outside consultant? That is such a strange demand for an alternative queer bar.
Throughout the entire negotiations, the person we were talking to was their lawyer, the owners were never there. It was unclear what was the counsel they were receiving, and what were their bullish positions on things. But the owners were notoriously hot-headed and stubborn. To me, if you want to retain the right to check people’s credit before placing them in any position, it says you want the right to discriminate.
Let’s take a step back and talk about how the campaign began and how you organized it.
There was a period after the pandemic when my coworkers on the floor, who weren’t bartenders, would come up to me and say “I’m dealing with this thing tonight, and this thing, and this thing, and it really sucks and makes me sad — and I’m not getting paid enough!” Eventually I replied well, we can always unionize. And it turned out they had already started a group chat, to vent and talk about their shift, but also to discuss the possibility of a union. I think the only reason it hadn’t gone forward was people didn’t know how to start that process. Fortunately, my roommate had been in the Howard Brown healthcare workers union, and had the contact for UNITE HERE Local 1.
For me, the last straw was the club stopped being open on Mondays, which was one of my shifts, and they didn’t tell me. I found out through an Instagram post! Besides being deeply hurtful, it was also very confusing to me. I didn’t understand why we were doing that. We had very successful Monday parties, so I didn’t understand. So after that happened, I reached out to the UNITE HERE person, and we had a meeting with one of my coworkers. In the course of the next month, we managed to get eighteen out of twenty-four employees to come out for a meeting.
After that, it was the usual song and dance. We had the union certification, and the vote was overwhelming. There were only two no votes. Even the coworkers who weren’t pro-union weren’t necessarily anti-union. A lot of the people who had been there longer were just more confused. The community position of Berlin was pervasive to a lot of people who had been there for a long time. One of my coworkers told me that during the pandemic he took a 50% pay cut so that “the club could stay open.” I feel like he shouldn’t have had to do that, and the fact that they even asked him to do that is crazy! It was so unfair to him. He had been there for such a long time, and they totally didn’t respect him or value him at all.
In the early days people were excited, but it was unclear how willing people were to fight. But over the course of the campaign we found people were very willing to fight for something better. It was very much about wages, better treatment in the workplace, and creating an environment that worked for us. But it was also about trying to create a better community space.
What happened when you went public?
We went public in April. It was very bizarre. One of the owners, Joe, came and gave this very long and rambling speech about how he is not anti-union, but felt that unions are not a good fit for Berlin, and his struggle was the AIDS crisis, and our struggle was different, being trans, and he had never been trans but had worn a dress before so he understood what we were dealing with… just saying a lot of incoherent stuff. It was very odd. If anything, it made people feel more like they needed to unionize.
Another thing that was odd about that meeting was he came in and asked everybody’s name. The owners never knew anybody’s name. I feel like even now they might not be able to tell you what my name is. At the meeting, he used the wrong name for one of my coworkers who had been there a year longer than me! It was this really awkward, bad moment that really highlighted how their position — of Berlin being this family and community space — was overshadowed by the fact that they were living in Michigan, didn’t really know any of us, and didn’t care to know any of us.
Tell us about the contract campaign.
Part of what was really beautiful about the campaign was the community was totally supportive. We had pickets before the union vote. A lot of people showed up to support us. A lot of people passing by gave us verbal support, cars honking horns.
In the last month of the campaign, during the boycott, we would flier outside the club to inform people about the boycott, to give them the ability to make their own decision about whether they were gonna go into the club. I would say most people responded “Totally, of course!” and decided not to go into the club. It speaks really well of the community that they were willing to support us like that.
Same with the solidarity we were getting from the performers, DJs, and people who were contact workers at Berlin. They would cancel shows last minute, come to our pickets, post on social media. There was even a solidarity drag show that raised money for our strike fund. Outside of being a really beautiful display of solidarity, it was very brave of them. Being contract workers, they didn’t have the same protections we had as union workers. They very easily could have been blacklisted from working at Berlin. But they decided to stand up for us anyway. I will always be very grateful for that.
Let’s talk about the boycott in particular. How did it come about?
Like I said, there were a lot of things in the contract that the owners were not willing to move on. One of the biggest was our economic proposal. It’s what we were talking about, and it’s the thing that the company decided to publicize to slander us. We had put in the economic proposal three months prior to their first response to it, and when they finally responded, they said, basically “We think nothing should change.” They said no pension, no healthcare, and no wage increases of any kind.
Actually, they did this thing that Berlin has been doing for years, probably prior to even when I started. Every time the minimum wage has gone up, the owners have said: “We’re giving you all raises!” And when they were pitching us their “economic response,” they said: “We will adhere to the city of Chicago’s minimum wage increase.” Saying you’re going to follow the law is not a response! That is simply not an economic response. It was shocking to me. Even my union rep was confused; they said most companies will come back with something. We tried to bargain in good faith from April to October, and there was no movement. To respond with nothing was not tenable. We didn’t form a union for nothing to change.
There was talk of a strike, but most of my coworkers were in economically precarious situations. So we thought we could do a boycott, in the hopes that some people could get scheduled to work, and it would allow them to weather that period better. When we launched the boycott, I was expecting at most, three weeks. All we really wanted was the company to come back with something. Frankly, I was not expecting us to get a pension. The healthcare would have been cool, but if the final contract didn’t have the healthcare in it, I would not have been surprised.
All I was really looking for was a wage increase for security. They, more than anyone else at the club, needed it. I wanted wage increases for the bartenders too, and I think Berlin totally could have done that, but they held firm on not wanting to give us anything. It was just really disappointing. With the contracted security issue; there were a number of places in the contract where we tried to get them to invest in the people who worked there, in training, in creating a security workforce who could deal with both kicking people out of the club and putting care into the community. But they just kept holding onto wanting to retain outside security.
There was so much of the process that was just bizarre. A week after we launched the boycott they canceled one of our bargaining sessions, instead of meeting with us to potentially end the boycott. I would say throughout the process they canceled 20% of meetings. They said that they wanted negotiations to come to a swift end, but everything points to the contrary. So the boycott continued for a month, until the owners announced the club was closing.
Do you think they were serious about keeping the club open?
I can only speculate, and can’t speak to their side at all. But many of my coworkers share the sentiment that they were not, and quite frankly, at this point, I share that sentiment too. A lot of the posts and articles I’ve seen from anti-union people have said that the club closed because of the boycott. But the point of the boycott was not to close the club. When I was out flyering, one of the main things I said was: “I’d much rather be bartending right now.”
I really loved working there, and wanted to keep working there. The decision to close the club was fully Jim and Jo’s decision. It was a really despicable decision. Throughout the process, they didn’t seem to take us seriously or believe in any kind of world that worked for the people that worked at the club.