Why Attaboy Workers Are Unionizing

On Saturday, April 4, workers at the pioneering New York cocktail bar Attaboy announced their campaign for union recognition. “We believe the only way for Attaboy to maintain its reputation as a world-renowned institution, and to reestablish respect and care for its workers, is to bring ourselves into the decision-making process by forming a wall-to-wall labor union,” they wrote on Instagram.

Unionizing a bar is notoriously difficult. A couple years ago, bartenders at Death & Co.—another lauded, influential cocktail bar that started in New York—failed to drum up enough support for its union drive. As Punch contributor Gaby del Valle wrote in her coverage of the effort, “some of the same things that draw workers to bars—including the ease of job-hopping and the ability to make a lot of money in tips—may make them harder to unionize.” 

And bartenders who do want to organize may feel that they’re taking a risk, especially when management is antagonistic. Recently, workers at Brooklyn’s Achilles Heel alleged that the bar’s closure happened in reaction (or retaliation) to the staff’s intention to unionize. 

But Attaboy workers remain hopeful. I spoke with bartender Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin, who has worked at Attaboy since its early days, about the organizing efforts, Attaboy Local 134’s demands, and what fans of the bar—and skeptics of the union—should know.

Punch: What are some of the issues that your union is hoping to address?
Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin: When Attaboy came into being, it was five guys that worked there: the two owners and three other guys that were all kind of friends. I and a few other people joined the staff maybe six months later. For the first several years of Attaboy’s life, like many places, we just made decisions as a group. There wasn’t a lot of governance… in some ways it functioned as a little bit of a boys club. This is something that’s widespread in the industry, the valorization of suffering in this job. Putting up with harsh conditions is looked at as a mark of manhood or paying your dues or a badge of honor in some way. That was an old-guard type of thing; we all participated in that.

Post-COVID, the landscape has shifted. That cavalier way of doing things is not really acceptable anymore, but some of those things have been really stubbornly consistent in this contemporary era. [Those are] things like working 11 1/2 hours without a break, or eating your food as quickly as possible while standing up somewhere in the middle of the shift. [There are also] things like, if you’re sick, well, just come to work, or find someone to cover you, but if you can’t find someone to cover you, you come to work. And then everybody else gets sick. That’s been one of the things that’s been really prominent since COVID. We have these waves where one person gets sick, then everybody gets sick. There’s no protocol or protection.

And then just basic stuff. This is a world-class institution, so it should be a world-class workplace as well. We need to have better health insurance. Back-of-house people need to be making a living wage and have a more fair pay structure, and they need to have access to affordable healthcare as well. These are all things that Attaboy is capable of and that we think is fair, and that’s why we’re doing this.

You’ve also mentioned issues with management.
One of the biggest [issues we want to address] is a management style that’s foisted onto the workplace that isn’t right for the nature of our workplace. Attaboy, by nature, is a place that involves highly skilled people with [lots of] experience. To function at its best, you need to have many members of staff who have been working there for five, six, seven-plus years, who are experienced enough that they can really execute the complicated service. That’s what makes it such a special place: the quality of the product, the excellence of the service and the sprezzatura, this Italian term that’s like, “making something extremely difficult look easy.” That’s part of what makes us tick. 

Because of that, we have people on staff who have been working there for a very long time. We have people who are former bar owners, like myself, and people on staff who are former general managers of large, high-end restaurants. We have a barback who is a former serial general manager! You know what I mean? We have very highly qualified people in the bar. 

There’s been this management style, since COVID, [where we have] a single general manager who calls the shots in a very unilateral way. Over and over again, the highly qualified, highly experienced staff are left out of the decision-making process about how the bar should function, what we should do during times of transition, how we should tackle certain problems, and how service should be run. That doesn’t make sense to us. So one of the biggest demands that we have is to restructure the management style.

What kind of management style do you envision? One with more evenly distributed leadership?
That would have to be decided with the members of the union and the management; that would be negotiated in the contract. It’s going to be up to our members to deliberate that and find the best way forward, and I have faith that we have, among us, the expertise to solve that problem. We don’t have a definite vision yet, but that’s something that would be decided democratically.

We hope more people in the industry will start to call that into question as well. What we would want to see happen is, if there’s a manager, their job should be to ensure that we have the things that we need to run the place, not necessarily to tell us how to do it and boss us around.

Unionizing a bar is notoriously difficult. Did you have peers that you looked to as models of the union you wanted?
The big case studies that we looked at were Barboncino in Brooklyn, a pizzeria, and to a greater degree, Death & Co. That’s the workplace that resembles ours the most. What happened at Death & Co is definitely something that we looked at to try to learn from, and we’ve had multiple conversations with people who were involved in that. 

But beyond that, I will say that the unfortunate situation is that we’re pioneers here. There aren’t a lot of other examples to draw inspiration from because the industry has almost zero unions. We’re trying to change that. There’s really no examples that we can look at for what works; we’re mostly looking at what doesn’t work and trying to do it differently. 

For the organizing committee, we’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from the works of Jane McAlevey, in particular her books on building power and her theories about how to run successful unionization campaigns. We’ve also taken some inspiration from a book called We Are the Union by Eric Blanc, which is about worker-to-worker organizing. In that book, there are several examples of successful campaigns that we found inspiring, not least of which was the Starbucks Workers United campaign. 

Rather than organizing with a larger union—like UNITE HERE or SEIU—Attaboy workers have gone independent. Why did you make that decision?
We have observed that there’s really no union that we could affiliate with in New York City that has demonstrated that they have the capacity and the know-how to organize a bar, because none of them have succeeded.

We’ve looked at the experience of Achilles Heel, the bar in Greenpoint that was part of the Marlow Collective and tried to unionize [earlier this year]. They were operating under RWDSU, the retail workers and department stores union, and they had a pretty bad experience… They told them not to go to the press; the [RWDSU] did not organize any protest action or anything like that, and they just told them “We’re going to file an unfair labor practice, sit tight.” But meanwhile, 20 people had left their jobs.

For us, forming an independent union has been about having autonomy over how we run our campaign… Several organizations—in particular EWOC, the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, and the DSA labor working group—have offered resources to us, in addition to other individuals in the labor movement who have volunteered to help us in their capacity as lawyers and organizers. So we have basically cobbled together the type of support we would receive from [a larger] union to get ourselves through this recognition process. Once we gain recognition and certification, then we’ll be gearing up for contract negotiations. But for the time being, we remain independent.

You mentioned unsuccessful union drives at other places and how you’re taking away ideas of what not to do. What are some of those things?
We’re definitely not pursuing a campaign where we don’t [try to organize for] outside support. We need the support of the community, the industry and the labor movement at large to make our campaign really visible and to demonstrate to the owners that this is a popular idea, this is a good thing, and there’s lots of reasons why they should recognize it. Their union-avoidant lawyers that they’ve contracted and the other business owners [whose advice they’ve sought out] are not the only voices they should listen to. They should listen to workers—their workers and others in the industry—and they should listen to the community generally. That’s one thing that we’re really focusing on, building that outside support.

It seems like your union drive has seen lots of support so far from the community. But do you have a response to the people who are like, “You’re destroying a legacy!”?
There’s been some haters on Instagram. They made a lot of noise on our first post, basically, and then after we posted our platform, we didn’t hear much from them again.

It’s an unfortunate reality in America that anti-union propaganda and anti-union sentiment has been so pervasive for decades, and it’s coming from the owner class and the lawyers, the people that make their money busting unions. They’ve been really successful at getting that narrative—that unions are bad and what’s good is job creation— to really stick in the heads of a lot of working-class people. Yeah, job creation is good and important, but what’s even more important is good jobs and jobs that make people’s lives better, not worse. That’s the job of unions. 

At the end of the day, all a union really is is workers coming together to bargain with their bosses over their working conditions. Who wouldn’t want that? Anybody who has a boss needs to have a union so that they can make their working conditions better. The union doesn’t suddenly get the password to the bank accounts and clear out all the money. It’s about negotiating. 

You had set a deadline of Monday, April 12 for voluntary recognition. What has happened since?
Unfortunately, the owners have not recognized the union. They didn’t reply to our email requesting voluntary recognition. Since then, we have petitioned for an election with the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], and [Attaboy management] retained the same union avoidance council as Death & Co. did.

As soon as I saw that [lawyer] was on the documents, that was a signal to us that they were going to engage in union busting, which was really disappointing to us, though it doesn’t come as that much of a surprise because that’s the industry standard, right? That’s the common practice. That’s what we’re gearing up for now. 

We’ll have about three weeks to do our organizing, run our campaign, shore up our support and avoid their union busting as much as we can to win our election. But, in the meantime, we will be continuously leaving the door open [for management] to recognize the union. They can do it at any time. We’re going to continue to ask them to do that, and we think it’s the right way forward. We feel confident that we can win our election, but things will be a lot easier if they recognize ahead of it. If they recognize, we will withdraw our petition and we can just get down to business bargaining a contract and normalizing relations at the bar.

For fans of the bar who want to support the union, what should they do?
They should follow our Instagram and repost all of our content. They should come to the bar and show their support to us. They can bring handwritten notes; we would love to be able to post those things on our Instagram. They should write emails to the owners of Attaboy and tell them that they think they should give us voluntary recognition. There’s a variety of ways they can support and more ways will be announced on our Instagram as we move forward. There will be events people can look forward to as well.

And for those who are skeptical, what should they know?
I want to reiterate something that my colleague Chris [Hughes] said, which is that we’re doing this because we love the bar. A lot of the negative comments that we’ve gotten are framing it as though we’re attacking the bar and the owners and trying to villainize them. [There’s this idea that this is] about vengeance or being vindictive. I want everybody to understand that organizing a union is a lot of work. It’s not worth that work to just take pot shots at someone or try to fuck somebody’s shit up. Sure, we may have our differences with the owners—that’s a part of this, and we want to negotiate a better situation with them—but we’re doing this because we believe in the bar, we love the bar, we love each other, and we want our workplace to be better. We truly believe that it will make their business better as well. This is coming from a place of love.

We also want to prove that it’s possible. We want other people to feel like they have the agency to make their workplaces better as well. This is not about bringing somebody down.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.