Workers unionize at top NYC cocktail bar Attaboy

Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated periodically with new information. If you have tips about what’s going on at Attaboy, please get in touch by emailing me ([email protected]) or texting me on Signal (dinfontay.11). Anonymity available.—Dave.

The staff of one of the world’s best cocktail bars has gone union.

On Saturday, workers at New York City's Attaboy, an influential cocktail bar in New York City that is often rabjed among the global hospitality industry’s most elite outfits, went public with a union drive. They are organizing independently as Attaboy Local 134.

A press release issued by the union did not include the number of workers involved in the drive, or the overall headcount at the prestigious bar, which was founded in 2013 and recognized as North America’s best in 2022 by The 50 Best Awards. A representative for the union did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The drive is significant both because of Attaboy’s global prominence in cocktails/hospitality, and because that sector has been especially resistant to organizing even amid historic popular support for the labor movement. In fact, NYC has been the site of some of those battles. For example, bosses at Death & Co (another rarified downtown Manhattan cocktail bar with some Attaboy overlap) busted an initially promising union drive in early 2024. More recently, Greenpoint’s Achilles Heel abruptly shuttered following its workers’ unionization with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in February 2026.

In its announcement of the drive, Attaboy Local 134—named for the bar’s address on Eldridge Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side—outlined its goals for organizing, which include changes to the bar’s style of management, improved transparency, and better benefits and protections on the job.

“What we are asking for is pretty basic,” bartender Chris Hughes said in union’s release. “We want to have a say in the decisions that affect our working conditions and our livelihoods.”

Attaboy management did not immediately respond to a request for comment.