Comedy company votes down unionizing

Bill Knight column for Thursday, Friday or Saturday, Nov. 30, Dec. 1 or 2

Days before Second City’s comedy troupe brought its touring shows to East Peoria, Aurora and Glen Ellyn, 111 of the company’s full-time and regular part-time food-service workers – including bartenders, cooks, dishwashers, hosts and servers – at its sites on North Wells Street and West North Avenue in Chicago voted on whether to unionize with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), an independent labor union that represents some 35,000 U.S. workers.

The effort failed, and the consequences are no laughing matter.

In balloting Nov. 17-18, 96 employees voted, with 23 favoring unionizing and 73 opposing, according to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Many well-known comedians started at Second City, including John Belushi, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Joan Rivers, Amy Sedaris, David Steinberg and George Wendt.

The actors who perform at Second City or its touring troupes are represented by the Actors’ Equity labor union, and they signed a letter of support for the unionization effort.

It wasn’t enough, apparently.

Second City, Inc. has produced some film and TV projects a operates a film school and a job-training program that uses comedy techniques for some employers. The corporation’s revenue grew from $30 million in 2012 to $55 million in 2016, according to Crain’s Chicago Business.

The successful business isn’t amusing for some workers, though.

The union drive stemmed from discontent about wages, a lack of regular hours, and having no real voice on the job.

Many Second City workers make about $11 an hour, which is Chicago’s local minimum wage. And after wages were frozen last February, maintenance workers laid off – requiring others to pick up that work with no additional compensation – and the past practice of a weekly stipend for part-time workers to help pay for health-care coverage was dropped, some employees launched the organizing drive.

“We want to hear our employer and we want to be heard by them, simply and fairly,” said server Gina Harrison at a press conference days before the vote. “Our goal is a collective voice on the job.”

The organizing committee sought that stronger voice in the workplace plus a $15 hourly wage and an end to the long wage freeze.

Some organizers blame the loss on familiar union-busting maneuvers such as captive-audience meetings that workers were forced to attend to hear misinformation about unions. It’s unclear whether that will be brought to the NLRB as an Unfair Labor Practice, or the election results will be appealed on other grounds, or if organizers will simply try again.

After losing a legitimate representation vote, workers and organizers must wait a year before petitioning the NLRB for a new election.

In a prepared statement to reporter Yana Kunichoff of In These Times magazine, Second City CEO Andrew Alexander said, “We are deeply concerned about the frustration being expressed by some of our employees. We are confident in our ability to work through the issues together.”

But bartender Ryan Andrews, a member of the organizing committee who spoke to In These Times, disputed what “together” means.

“When Second City says it is afraid that there is some third-party entity coming in, they are afraid of us,” Andrews said. “We are the union, we are the members, we are the workers.”

And for the moment, those workers also remain individuals, single employees trying to reason or plead with a profitable company one-on-one rather than as a group – a company that apparently resorted to unethical tactics before the vote.

Funny how that works.