There are almost no unionized bars. Here's why

Over the weekend, workers at New York City’s Attaboy went public with a union drive. This is a big deal in part because the cocktail bar itself is a big deal: it is often recognized among the world’s best, and it traces a lineage to the late Sasha Petraske, whose legendary and influential Milk & Honey previously occupied the same storefront on Manhattan’s Eldridge Street from 1999-2013.

But Attaboy Local 134—the workers’ independent union, named for the bar’s street address—is also a big deal because there simply aren’t very many unionized bars. Not in relatively pro-labor cities like NYC, Chicago, or San Francisco, and certainly not anywhere else. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the 8.8 million workers in the United States’ “Food services and drinking places” sector in 2025, just 1.8% had union representation. With the exception of bars attached to hotels/casinos/stadiums/etc., which are sometimes organized as part of broader organizing drives in those businesses, the union bar is a very rare bird.

After half a century of anti-labor legislation, corporate consolidation, media capture, and so forth, it’s not easy to organize any American workplace in 2026. Hospitality operators have the full arsenal of well-honed union-busting tools at their disposal, up to and including summarily shutting down the business where workers are unionizing, like the owner of Brooklyn’s Achilles Heel did in February. But bars and other standalone hospitality businesses like restaurants, coffee shops, and craft breweries also present unique structural and cultural challenges to workers that want to exercise their federally guaranteed right to organize with their coworkers for better pay, working conditions, and a voice on the job.

The physical layout of the industry, with tens of thousands of relatively small shops scattered across the country, is difficult and costly for organizers, who tend to favor bigger facilities with more workers. Hospitals, factories, etc. offer a much better “bang-for-buck” to a union with limited resources (which is virtually all of them.) The wildly successful national organizing drive at Starbucks locations nationwide—680 and counting—is the exception that proves the rule here. Though Starbucks Workers United is represented by Workers United, the baristas’ big innovation has been worker-to-worker organizing—i.e., ground-up instead of top-down.

“That’s just not what's been the culture of our US labor movement” for the past 40 or 50 years, Jonah Furman, a former writer and organizer at Labor Notes who now works for the United Auto Workers, told Fingers in 2022, calling it a “new headspace.” But Starbucks stores are all more or less the same across the country, and its baristas all work for the same boss. (The fact that he made 6,666 times their median salary last year probably helps.) By contrast, the sheer variation from one independent F&B business to the next makes it much more difficult for would-be unionists to organize at scale, and without it, SBWU’s headline-generating, movement-sustaining momentum is extremely hard to come by.

The size of bars can also hobble drives in other ways. As Ben Anderson, Ph.D, a labor researcher, told Fingers in 2022, workers in these businesses often internalize the idea that they’re just too small to be worthy of a union. He recalled a conversation with a craft brewery worker: “I asked him specifically, ‘Would you join a union?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, absolutely, I would join a union in a heartbeat,’” recalled Anderson. “But when I asked, ‘Would you organize a union here?’ He said, ‘Well, no, because we're a really small shop, and I just don't think it'd be viable here.’”

Employee turnover, a potential threat to any drive, can be a particular drag in restaurants and bars, where workers have been conditioned to believe that their jobs aren’t careers and thus aren’t worth fighting to improve. Better to just move on than make trouble. Turnover was “a huge reason the energy left,” Matt Marciniec, a former barista at the Twin Cities’ Spyhouse Coffee Roasters, told Fingers after a failed drive in 2020. As the drive turned acrimonious, workers quit, thinning the ranks of the committed: “They were all supportive of the union but also just weren’t ready to fight it out as long as possible, so they were like, We gotta get out of here, this is not a place for us.”

The relative lack of hierarchy within the hospitality business has also stymied drives. At Death & Co, another high-profile Manhattan cocktail bar where a promising organizing effort collapsed in early 2024, bosses were able to persuade some workers that they were sympathetic to the union’s demands—or even deserving of sympathy themselves.

“I think we as employees don't always put ourselves in the employers’ or higher-ups’ place,” a Death & Co server, Ari Mayaudon, told Fingers following an election that saw the union lose 10-8 after every single worker had signed cards just months prior. (Mayaudon confirmed she’d signed a union card but declined to say how she’d voted in the election.) Anderson referred to this as the “‘we are a family’ myth.” In a close-knit, rarified environment like a high-end bar, where management often looks, talks, and used to be part of the workforce, it can be difficult to convince even nominally pro-union workers to cast a vote that feels like it’s “against” a boss they work with shoulder-to-shoulder.

Pro-union staffers at Attaboy are attuned to these distinctive obstacles. “A victory at Attaboy would send a message to bar and restaurant workers that unionization is a real possibility,” they wrote in a press release debuting Attaboy Local 134 to the world. (Attaboy itself did not respond to a request for comment.) The reverse is also true. A failed drive at Attaboy could underscore the received wisdom that standalone bars are an unnatural fit for unions, and that workers at these elite businesses do not need or want the benefits of collective bargaining. Clearly, some do, and will likely continue to, regardless of the outcome on Eldridge Street. But the stakes are high. One way or another, Attaboy Local 134 is a big deal.

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🤐 [Redactables]: Buffalo Trace Daniel Weller Spelt Wheat

Welcome to Fingers [Redactables], a running list of high-end wine and spirits that are so obscenely expensive that anybody who purchases them should be immediately… well… [redacted]. Taxed into the dirt? Pelted with tomatoes? A third thing that I probably shouldn’t write on the internet? You decide!

Wealth inequality is soaring under the second Trump administration, and you know what that means: revolution! Right? No? We’re not doing that yet? Alright, well, in the meantime, it does mean that stupid status bottles are once again rolling forth from Kentucky’s best distilleries marketing departments to score a slice of that K-shaped economic recovery. Earlier this month, The Sazerac Company’s Buffalo Trace Distillery announced the release of Daniel Weller Spelt Wheat, a new bourbon made with—you guessed it—spelt wheat. Per the release (emphasis mine):

It rules that the press release for any [Redactables] winner could also be featured in Buzzwords of The Week. Maybe a lesson there. The suggested retail price is $549.99 for a 750 milliliter bottle, proving yet again that a thresher separates wheat from chaff, and a Weller Wheated separates fools from money.

🥃 Fingers [Redactability] Rating: 4.5 condo dads suddenly insisting they’ve always been into ancient European grains

🎧 Talking big booze deals and sad Cocktail Guys

Your fearless Fingers editor made some recent podcast appearances that may interest you. Catch me on:

1. The VinePair Podcast on April 2nd for a breakdown of my latest reporting on Reyes Beverage Group’s now-consummated deal with Republic National Distributing Co. for 11 of the latter’s markets.

2. The Brewbound Podcast, also on April 2nd, for more discussion on the above deal, plus analysis on the Tilray Brands/BrewDog/lol situation and a bit on Molson Coors’ acquisition of Monaco parent company Atomic Brands.

3. The Guys Podcast in early March to talk about the Cocktail Guy, an archetype of the modern male experience that will be painfully familiar to readers of this newsletter, with hosts with Bryan Quinby and Chris James. (Sorry I’m posting this one so late, I thought I already had. My bad!)

Big thanks to the reporters/hosts/etc. who included me/Fingers in their work. If you’d like to get My Take™️ on something, get in touch: [email protected]. Can’t do every hit, but love doing the ones I can!

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