The pole dancers at North Hollywood’s Star Garden Topless Dive Bar have been waging a prolonged labor struggle with the bar’s management, and are planning to make history by joining Actors Equity.
Snyder’s “retirement” – a quintessential moment of jumping before you’re pushed – is a much needed, albeit incomplete, step forward toward greater accountability within the labor movement. For too long, labor leadership,often fairly criticized as “male, pale, and stale,” has been characterized by a self-replicating “good old boys” culture that fosters harassment and misconduct. Although this is far from the norm, it is all the more egregious in a movement built upon notions of justice and equity.
It would have been easy to give up when their workplace closed doors, but the former Augie’s Coffee workers loved their craft and wanted to continue serving coffee. They decided to organize the Slow Bloom Coffee Cooperative in Redlands California, a coffee cooperative run completely by the former staff of Augie’s Coffee, and are organized as SBCC Local 1011 of UE.
Strikewave caught up with Erik Lopez and Matthew Soliz, two former Augie’s Coffee baristas involved with the union drive and the founding of Slow Bloom.