On Friday, November 17, members of the Berlin Union and the lawyer for the beloved Lakeview queer club met for what workers didn’t know would be their last bargaining session. Staff, party hosts, DJs, and patrons were riding the high from a successful four-week boycott. For months, the club’s owners, Jim Schuman and Jo Webster, hadn’t countered any of the union’s economic proposals (like those asking for higher pay and health insurance), so union members had hoped a boycott might finally force a true back-and-forth.
Jolene Saint, a former bartender at the establishment, remembers telling this to the bar’s attorney as they sat opposite each other. “The boycott’s been going on for four weeks, is the intention to close the club?” Saint recalls asking management. “And they were like, ‘No, the intention is not to close the club. We have no intention of closing the club.’”
“And then four days later, they closed the club.”
Now five months after the unexpected shuttering of one of Chicago’s oldest queer bars, Saint has a new job at a French-cuisine restaurant off the Blue Line. She’s planning an escape from the service industry; she wants to become an electrician. Chicago Women in Trades offers free training for women interested in working construction or manufacturing jobs. Saint’s thinking about applying. Chelle Crotinger, a former security guard at the venue, is working at a sandwich shop, fresh off a gig cleaning at a culinary school. He was shocked and disappointed when he learned Schuman and Webster would close the doors of the 40-year-old nightclub forever. “There wasn’t a true effort given [to meet in the middle] from the other side,” they say. Saint was crestfallen when she heard the news. “I thought that the union and management were on the same page about [the club] needing to continue to exist,” she tells me. “But it seems like, for Jim and Jo, they only wanted it to exist if it could be on their terms.”
Irregular Girl is a drag queen and party curator. She’s known for throwing Strapped, Berlin’s monthly transfemme- and transmasc-positive lesbian party. Strapped was the club’s busiest night. It was also the first event to be canceled last summer when workers called for a boycott. The union kept Irregular Girl in the loop about their organizing tactics, and she’d use her platform—like her 15,000 Instagram followers—to get out the word. In the days leading up to the bar’s abrupt closure, she thought the pendulum was swinging in the favor of the united front of workers, performers, and patrons. She thought everyone was in agreement in thinking: We need to end the boycott and go back to the club. “Eventually, the owners will realize what they’re doing,” Irregular Girl remembers thinking. Surely, she thought, “they’d come to the table and have a conversation with us. But they didn’t want to do that.”
As far as I can tell, the only public comment from the bar’s former owners on negotiations with the union came in a statement Schuman and Webster emailed to subscribers and posted to Berlin’s website on October 26. (I tried multiple times to reach them for this story, but neither responded to any of my emails or phone calls.) One of the union’s chief grievances with the owners was their refusal to attend bargaining sessions. In the statement, the pair defended their actions, writing that Schuman had stage four cancer and Webster was his primary caretaker, so they entrusted Berlin’s management and legal counsel to lead discussions and bargain with workers on their behalf.
It seems like, for Jim and Jo, they only wanted it to exist if it could be on their terms.
Saint and Crotinger call the letter “slanderous.” Crotinger says the owners’ reasoning for not showing up to the negotiating table is “bullshit.” The owners never offered a virtual call. Meanwhile, they say, Schuman and Webster stayed at the bar until close for several days around Pride weekend last June. Schuman spent more time at the club than Webster did, Saint adds. “And frankly, it’s also deeply disingenuous to cite your medical condition when one of the things we’re asking for is health care. ’Cause if any of us got the same diagnosis that Jim got while we were working at Berlin, there’s nothing we could have done.”
The union wanted the owners at the negotiating table because none of the representatives sent by Schuman and Webster wielded decision-making power. There were only ever interim managers at bargaining sessions, and the bar’s lawyer never set foot in the building. Instead, workers traveled to bargaining sessions at the lawyer’s downtown office. Saint remembers one of these sessions, when she and her coworkers recounted to management the physical toll of the job. They shared that many union members lived in financial precarity, and even told how two of their coworkers were unhoused for the majority of the negotiations. “Jim and Jo weren’t there. So they couldn’t hear it,” Saint says. “I don’t know how they would have responded to that because all we got in response was the lawyer nodding his head and going, ‘Yes, I will bring that to Jim and Jo.’” The union says they’d offer proposals during bargaining sessions but wouldn’t get an answer back from ownership for at least three meetings. Sessions went from occurring every two weeks to once a month. The owners’ lawyer sometimes canceled meetings at the last minute because they had nothing to share. To the union, it felt like stalling.
Early in negotiations, the union asked for additional training and security equipment for staff. The owners were quick to act. But in response to the union’s demand for a $25 per hour minimum wage (excluding tips), the owners countered that Berlin’s wages were already competitive. According to management, Berlin’s part-time coat check employees, barback employees, bartenders, and security earned average hourly pay (including tips) of $35, $47, $57, and $22.50, respectively. In their statement, Schuman and Webster claimed the bar’s wages were above average for similar positions in the city.
Crotinger, who worked security for the club, and Saint, a bartender, say those figures were inflated. “Forty-seven dollars an hour for barbacks is hilarious,” remarks Crotinger with a laugh. Saint adds, “If I was making $57 an hour, I wish somebody would have told me. By the end of last year, I didn’t even clear $20,000.” Saint says there were a few nights she would make $57 an hour. But just as frequently, there were nights she was lucky to make $15 an hour since tip-reliant wages are so inconsistent.
Tips at the bar were divided between barbacks, who got one-quarter, security, who got 10 percent, and bartenders, who took home the other 65 percent. The union tried to address the wage disparity caused by unevenly divided tips by phasing them out altogether. Saint tells me she’s worked nearly every position at the club. Bartending, the most lucrative position, was by far the easiest. Security staff, on the other hand, were paid the lowest, despite working one of the most difficult jobs with the most potential for harm.
Before the pandemic, security didn’t get any tips. Schuman and Webster thought giving them a cut could smooth things over. “But it’s just not a solution to take from Peter to pay Paul,” Saint says. In her opinion, as long as minimum wage was $15, that’s what Webster and Schuman were comfortable paying security. “Every year, when minimum wage went up by $1, Jim and Jo would come to us and they would say, ‘We’re giving you all raises.’ No, you’re not; minimum wage is going up by $1.”
Webster and Schuman insisted that, since Berlin is not a full-time employer, they shouldn’t be expected to provide full-time wages or health insurance. They said Berlin is only open 25 hours a week, with most employees working around 14 hours per week and none more than 27. Saint and Crotinger point out that the club’s hours were set by management. Sometime last spring, Berlin decided to close the venue on Mondays—a day with scheduled monthly parties—because of low turnout. But bartenders and security who worked Monday nights learned about the change not from management but from the club’s Instagram post.
There were other ways management could’ve addressed low turnout before they decided to close the club on Mondays, Crotinger says. For example, if patrons weren’t going to Berlin because the venue didn’t open until 10 PM, maybe they could’ve tried opening at 6 PM, they offered. But instead, “they just said, ‘No, we’re not going to do those things. We’re just going to cut everyone’s hours more, and more, and more, and more, and more.’”
The union also wanted anyone who worked at least one hour to receive health insurance and pensions paid in full by the bar. But, the owners wrote that would cost Berlin an additional $1,600 per employee every month. “It would be nice to pay the employees what the union wants. Unfortunately, agreeing to the union’s demands will make Berlin noncompetitive, and result in a large increase of costs to our customers, causing Berlin’s patrons to go to other venues.” The union’s critics cite this as one of the union’s more unreasonable asks.
“We didn’t want exactly what we were asking for,” Saint says. “We understood that wasn’t necessarily within their power. This proposal that they keep citing as the thing that made Berlin close was our ideal world, our perfect world. We did not expect to get everything that we asked for. We expected them to come to us with some kind of reasonable counterproposal. And they never attempted to do that.” Crotinger says, in reality, workers never expected to win a pension. It was something they included as a bargaining chip, a common negotiating tactic. The union might have, for example, settled for a Berlin-provided stipend for workers injured on the job or even limited coverage from the bar. But without Webster and Schuman at the negotiating table, Crotinger says, it was impossible to find middle ground. The union drafted their proposals blind—they weren’t permitted to view the company’s financials without signing an NDA—so the only way to discern what was reasonable would be with the help of Berlin’s owners.
Jason Flynn has been working service industry jobs, like line cook, dishwasher, and grocer, since he was 14 years old. From 2021 to 2022, he helped coordinate the national Restaurant Organizing Project (ROP). The ROP emerged during the pandemic to support service workers when restaurants were forced to close. Initially, the government’s response was to pay out restaurants for quarantine-induced restaurant revenue loss—but there was no recompensation plan for the overwhelming majority of workers in that industry who were not owners.
The ROP mentored service workers across the country on how to unionize, conduct an election through the National Labor Relations Board, and move from direct action to an amicable resolution between themselves and their employers. Flynn says service workers nationwide organized for consistent work schedules, respect from management, health and safety issues, and better wages. He points out that the service industry is one of the least organized industries in the U.S., facing issues like poverty-level wages and low levels of safety. Many service workers “don’t have any social safety net or community safety net to fall back into after they’ve done incredibly hazardous and demanding work for years on end,” Flynn continues. Widespread labor organizing across the industry would require a drastic change, “but it’s also completely necessary for people to not be left broken and destitute at the end of their working life.”
Robert Bruno is the director of the Labor Studies Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He explains that collective bargaining is remarkably flexible. One of the most important principles, he continues, is determining what the employer is capable of paying. Bruno says Berlin’s ownership needed only to look for areas of compromise and they may have negotiated a productive contract that would have also protected their need to make a profit. “The fact that they opposed the unionization drive, the fact that they didn’t send people who had the authority to make a deal at the table, [violate] the basic criterion for bargaining in good faith,” he says. “It seems to me, they were offended by the union drive.”
A union isn’t necessarily about employees winning every proposal they put forward, says Hamilton Nolan, a labor journalist who recently released a book called The Hammer about the U.S. labor movement. Instead, it’s about employees sitting down with management and saying, “We’re all in this together. . . . Let’s talk about how much money this place is making and how that is getting divided between those of us who work here.” Nolan says it’s important to keep in mind that a contract negotiation is just that: a negotiation. “The union always goes in asking for more than it’s going to get, and the same is true with other sides. Then they sort of meet somewhere in the middle. Hopefully, neither side would panic just from the proposals and freak out.”
After the bar closed, Crotinger and Saint say people approached them with condolences and messages of solidarity. But online, the response was far cooler. Union members and performers say they became targets of a wave of harassment. Frequently, according to Crotinger, the people hurling insults were older white gay men. They “were the ones that were buying this idea of the ‘evil union’ and how we wanted all pay for no work,” he says. Irregular Girl recalls an old friend of hers—a pastor—who accused her of “destroying their club” and “ruining their nights.” They received death threats, she says. “People told me to kill myself, said that I should be shot, I was a freak, [they] called me a tranny. All sorts of crazy shit. People said I was a ‘dirty, dirty Mexican’ and called me a cockroach.”
“Were we going to the same bar?” Irregular Girl jokes of the people slinging insults. “Maybe you’re mad you don’t have your space that you had ten years ago anymore. But spaces change. People change. The world changes.” Over the past decade, Berlin became popular for its drag shows because they appealed to BIPOC and genderqueer audiences who might not feel comfortable at other queer north-side venues—spaces notoriously dominated by cis white gay men. But it wasn’t just older gay men who set their sights on the union.
Berlin’s closure seemed to stoke the flames of conservative business interests that have often fought against the rights of workers. “Berlin has been the target of a devastating strike and aggressive boycott following the unionization of its staff and a series of what would be impossible demands for any small business, let alone one in a trade as fickle as that of a bar,” chided the Chicago Tribune editorial board. “Berlin was a soft target for radical overreach. For many who treasured what Berlin always stood for, for those who relied upon its enigmatic tolerance from the beginning, long before such clubs became cool, there is both sadness and irony in what has occurred.”
Nolan, the labor journalist, says it’s common for companies to tell employees that, if they unionize, it’ll force the business to close. “But usually, that’s an empty threat. And it doesn’t happen most of the time. Usually, it’s just a scare tactic. [It’s] part of the anti-union playbook.” Bruno, the professor, says no workplace is too small for a union because workers’ interests are different from their employers’. In fact, he says, nonunion studies show small- to moderate-sized employers without trained HR managers are more likely to break labor law than large corporations. “They don’t know that there are certain requirements for lunch breaks or requirements related to what you can have in an evaluation, [like] what questions are appropriate,” Bruno says. “They don’t have an HR department that does a good onboarding. There’s no employee manual.”
From Crotinger’s perspective, Webster and Schuman positioned themselves as “just little guys [who] can’t do all this big official [union] stuff.” He thinks Berlin’s owners created a predatory environment for queer workers, who felt a responsibility to protect their peers despite low wages, and toward the patrons, who had to tip generously for the workers to make a living wage. Although the pay was shit and security was constantly at risk of injury from unruly patrons, he says, queer people who patronized the bar weren’t protected if workers didn’t do their job well—and with a sensitivity only they could provide.
Bruno suggests the union, whose demands for fair wages and health insurance were supported by many in the queer community, received so much backlash after the club closed because its patrons were grieving and looking for someone to hold accountable. “But [they’re] not well educated on the role of organized labor,” he adds. They “don’t understand the back-and-forth of how bargaining works.” On top of that, people who attended the club valued it as a safe space. They connected more with the service it provided than the abuse its workers experienced. “It can be hard for all of us,” Bruno says. “When we order on Amazon or buy a car, do we connect as consumers? Or do we connect as fellow workers? Too often, we don’t connect as other workers having a human experience. We might just make one click and say, ‘Hey, my package arrived.’ [We] don’t [always] think about the kind of abuse it took for a worker to get that done, and how little that worker was paid to get that product on [our] front porch.”
In their statement, Schuman and Webster recount how they took over Berlin three decades ago, after their friend and original venue owner, Tim Sullivan, passed away from AIDS in summer 1994. The iconic venue, opened in 1983, always sought to be a place where people of all races, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds felt welcome to celebrate life. But it couldn’t continue to operate under the economic uncertainty introduced by the union’s demands.
Saint says Berlin’s ideals shone through on many nights and at many parties. But she says there were plenty of times when competing visions for the club, from the perspectives of management and workers, were at odds. She recalls that the union asked for the club to stock the overdose reversal drug Narcan—and to be trained to use it. Webster and Schuman allegedly refused to do so. They thought having Narcan on-site would be a liability. “There was the desire to have the ideal community space. And then there was the desire to be a business that’s making money,” she says. “And unfortunately, I think these two desires can clash.”
Crotinger says the moments Berlin felt like the ideal community space came from the queer workers and performers who put on adventurous, genderqueer, and BIPOC shows. Adds Saint, “I think the people made Berlin what it was, not Jim and Jo. And at the end of the day, the people who decided to close the club were the owners.” Crotinger thinks, overall, Webster and Schuman’s email paints the situation in “rosy colored glasses.” They say the owners, who also own property in Michigan, aren’t as closely connected to Berlin’s magic as they claim to be. It’s “nostalgic-core. This whole letter is set 40 years ago, like the letter is not set in the current day,” Crotinger says.
The bar’s closure is an apt analogy for queer people who, in their fight for self-determination, face off against a society dominated by cisgender and heteronormative ideals.
Still, the hole left by Berlin is felt by all. Adam Leblanc, lead vocalist for Sixteen Candles Band, stumbled upon Berlin in 2004 when he was trying to land a DJ gig. He’s a big vinyl collector and one of the things he first remembers about the club is hauling a record bag into the venue for a set. He nervously let loose on the decks. It was early on a Monday night. The crowd was sparse. “But I don’t know,” Leblanc tells me. “Berlin was kind enough to let me kind of get my feet wet and kind of find my own identity as a DJ [on] their dance floor.”
He’s now the resident DJ at Beauty Bar in West Town. But back in the early 2000s, he played Prince nights at Berlin, where DJs explored the late artist’s hefty catalog. He also had his own solo show—called L’amour—where he played French electronic and house music. He remembers how you could be on the dance floor “in the middle of it all,” or you could be tucked away at the bar enjoying the music videos that played on the TVs. Schuman and Webster would throw parties for staff and the pair generally made employees feel like family, he says. “It was just such a gathering space. And such an important beacon of light and community and expression in that neighborhood. I’m gonna miss it a whole lot.”
Irregular Girl still has moments when she’s out in Boystown after a show, trying to party and wondering, “Where do I go now?” Berlin was the catchall spot, “just gay people in the room.” It’s that experience she has trouble finding now—but she believes the people who need it will find and recreate it. Occasionally, people will complain to her that they miss the club. She wishes they’d try to move on, like she’s trying to. “We have to find a new space. The bar was four walls full of people who made the experience that you are craving. And [now,] that experience is happening somewhere else.”
Penis Envy, a drag king in Chicago, tells me Berlin was a special place to perform because it was “the home for the freaks” and the “misfit toys.” It’s often more difficult to book well-paying gigs for drag performers whose acts, like his, are more alternative and “weird.” Bar owners want “polished queens” whose appearances adhere to a certain standard of what people think drag should look like, he says. “Steven Johnson doesn’t know what to do when a freaky weirdo comes onstage covered in slime, who might be hitting the fucking splits and doing a flip and lip-syncing down. It scares the people in charge because they want the dollars.” In contrast, Penis Envy says, Berlin provided reliable and consistent bookings for alternative drag styles. He thought of it as home, a place he knew his friends would always be and where he could chat and smile with bartenders.
Former Berlin party curators like Irregular Girl now have to find new venues for their shows. Each time, they walk into those rooms with uncertainty. Will the new spot respect drag as Berlin did? Does the venue have a sufficient budget for performers and hosts? Is there a good relationship between transgender drag performers and security staff? Do patrons feel safe and seen by their workers? Are the workers tipped generously? Do they feel respected? Irregular Girl says she knows bars, restaurants, and theaters are eager to capitalize on drag as it becomes more mainstream—and more profitable. But that doesn’t mean such venues are equipped to treat their new guests, who are mostly queer and trans, with the respect they deserve.
Berlin suffered a tragic, sudden ending. “The doors are locked. The music is silenced and our dreams are now memories,” reads the club’s last post on Instagram. The owners recall some of the bar’s first advertisements in the early 1980s, which declared Berlin the “Neighborhood Bar of the Future.” “Unfortunately, the future is now and it’s time for us to go home,” they write.
“I think the statement makes it clear that they feel defeated by the future, as opposed to feeling able to be like a part of it,” concludes Saint. For Crotinger, Berlin’s magic was on the stage, behind the bar, and on the dance floor. The bar’s closure is an apt analogy for queer people who, in their fight for self-determination, face off against a society dominated by cisgender and heteronormative ideals. “As queer people, we face great, debilitating losses throughout our lives. But while that magic may not all be contained in the same place anymore, that just gives us more opportunities for more magic to be made in other places.”
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