The Bohemian Club suffers labor unrest
Secretive, high-end male-only enclave hit by 2-day strike in contract battle
A smoldering labor dispute intensified Thursday inside of one of San Francisco’s most exclusive, secretive and male-only clubs.
Starting with the early-morning kitchen workers, the private Bohemian Club’s staff of bussers, cooks, waiters, dishwashers and other employees walked off the job and onto the picket line, kicking off a two-day strike meant to jolt the club’s managers into making concessions on a new contract.
About 100 employees were expected to strike by day’s end.
Nearly nine months of increasingly tense bargaining between the workers’ union, Unite Here Local 2, and the storied club’s management has done little to bring the two sides closer together on the central points
“I’m talking to everybody, and they’re not happy. Everyone says, ‘No, this is not right.’ The workers aren’t getting the right treatment.”
Qudratullah Afshar, who has worked at the Bohemian Club for 27 years.
dividing them.
At a club known for its opulent soirees and powerful, deep-pocketed membership — initiation fees reportedly are $30,000 — it should be easy to find money to raise workers’ pay and expand their health care benefits, the union contends.
Founded in 1872, the Bohemian Club, on Taylor Street on Lower Nob Hill, does not allow women to become members and permits them to enter the premises by special invitation only. The club also resisted hiring women until it was forced to do so in 1987 after a long legal battle.
Bohemian Club workers planned to set up a picket line from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. Thursday and Friday, returning to work Saturday morning. Both sides consider the negotiations ongoing.
“Overall, this strike is about sending a message to management that we’re fed up with the way things have gone, and that we expect them to reevaluate their position in our future bargaining,” said Local 2 President Anand Singh.
Richard Hill, an attorney at the Littler Mendelson law firm representing the club’s management, said the union has been inflexible and evasive — prone to making sweeping demands, but not specific economic proposals that would help move negotiations along.
“The club is committed to paying wages and benefits that are at the market for private clubs in San Francisco,” Hill said.
Despite the strike, “the club is functioning normally,” said Sam Singer, a spokesman for the organization. “Management anticipated the union walkout and took appropriate actions to staff the club at normal levels. A number of union employees are not participating in the union’s walkout and have come to work today.”
The union’s bargaining committee, made up of a cross-section of employees, voted April 16 to authorize Local 2 to call a strike — the motion passed with 93 percent support.
“I’m talking to everybody, and they’re not happy. Everyone says, ‘No, this is not right.’ The workers aren’t getting the right treatment,” said Qudratullah Afshar, who has worked at the Bohemian Club for 27 years.
He makes $18.25 an hour as a busser and server, but the cost of commuting from his home in San Leandro to San Francisco each day eats away at his earnings, he said. To support his family — four children, his mother and his wife, who works at a hotel — he’s taken a second job at a country club in Burlingame.
“It looks like you walked into San Quentin,” Afshar said of the mood among the club’s workers, referring to the state prison.
“Living in the city, the price of everything is so expensive,” said Oliver Guzman, a server who’s worked at the club for 13 years and lives in San Francisco. He was one of about 25 workers picketing Thursday. The small raises he’s received over the years haven’t kept up with the cost of living, Guzman said.
“It’s not what we need to live in the city,” he said. “We want to say (to management), ‘We want a fair contract.’ ”
The club’s management, Hill said, is amenable to raising wages and negotiating other issues, but said the union has been slow to provide the club with a detailed economic proposal.
In a letter sent to union leaders Tuesday, Hill said the club was willing to raise wages for several employee classes beginning May 1. The club’s proposal includes raising wages for servers by $5 an hour and for front-desk staff by $4.50 an hour. All other employees would get $2.50 per hour raises. The club has also offered to pay full-time workers a “signing bonus” that averages around $5,000 per employee. That offer was made in an effort to avert a strike, and Hill said the club is willing to go higher.
“We want the employees to see that we’re not holding back money. If they go on strike, it’s not because the club is being cheap,” Hill said.
Singh responded by saying the union was “agreeable to immediate wage increases,” but with the caveat that those increases don’t restrict the union from bargaining for higher rates in the future.
It’s not the first time the club has contended with labor issues. In 2016, it paid $7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by 600 employees who worked at its Bohemian Grove in Sonoma County — the 2,700acre campground where the club hosts an annual retreat. The employees charged that they were the victims of wage theft. The club admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement.
Bohemian Grove is known to draw moneyed and influential power brokers, including the likes of former presidents Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, as well as Henry Kissinger and outliers like singer Steve Miller.
The grove is the annual site of a number of “somewhat bizarre” rituals, said Peter Phillips, a sociology professor at Sonoma State University who has studied the club.
“They will burn what they call an ‘effigy of care,’ a big, old skeleton they bring out in a horsedrawn hearse with a band and music and people carrying torches,” Phillips said. “It’s a traditional thing they’ve been doing for over 100 years. They’re leaving the cares of the world behind.”
The club’s health care benefits are “quite good” for full-time workers, said Singh, who leads negotiations on behalf of the union. But around 75 percent of the club’s unionized employees are part-time, he said, and don’t work enough hours to qualify. Singh said the union is looking to change that, in addition to demanding that the club lessen its reliance on ad hoc scheduling, which forces employees to grapple with irregular, changing shifts.
“It is easier to qualify for benefits at a Local 2 establishment than at any employer I’ve ever seen,” said Hill, the club’s attorney.
Singh, he said, is “talking about people who are working 15 to 25 hours per month, and he’s complaining that somebody who works that little isn’t getting full benefits. You have to have a perverse way of looking at the world to feel the club is treating people unfairly because people aren’t getting benefits.”
In addition to haggling over the details of wage and benefit increases, the union and the club are at an impasse over noneconomic issues. Local 2 leadership has called on management to make it easier for union representatives to meet with employees inside the club itself, particularly in the cafeteria where workers take their breaks.
Having unfettered access to members, Singh said, “is an essential function of being able to adequately contact and represent our members.” It’s a level of access the union enjoys at other private clubs and hotels across San Francisco and San Mateo County, he said. Local 2 represents about 12,000 hospitality workers in San Francisco and San Mateo County.
Hill said management believes the union should provide “advance notice” when it intends to meet with its members. The cafeteria, he said, should remain off limits. Conducting union business there would be “disruptive” to the nonunion employees who also take breaks there, Hill said.