This week, we’re staying in Southern California, where the workers of Touchstone Climbing Gym in Los Angeles have been negotiating their first contract with their employer. Touchstone Climbing, a regional climbing gym with over a dozen locations in California, experienced a wave of unionization in its Los Angeles locations early last year. The successful campaign with Workers United created a wall-to-wall union at each of the company’s five locations in the Los Angeles area. Members of the LA-based gym are often themselves union members, and the response from the climbing community has been overwhelmingly positive.
However, workers have been navigating a frustrating negotiation in order to reach an agreement on a first contract. Chief among workers’ demands is better communications, higher safety standards, and better pay.
With me today to discuss their unionization, and their negotiations are Ryan Barkauskas, PT desk staff at The Post in Pasadena and Jess Kim, Former Desk Staff at the Post in Pasadena, now FT Workers United organizer.
Mel Buer: Give us an idea of what the climbing community looks like in Los Angeles or in the United States? What does it feel like to you?
Jess Kim: The climbing community is legendary, perhaps just among ourselves, for our comradeship and our support.
We are lucky because in LA we have such a strong union community, and so many of our climbers work in industries that are prolific within the working class and organizing within the working class. So we have Hollywood, all those entertainment unions, which I’m a part of. Ryan works in Hollywood as well. We have teachers unions. We have a very strong community that sees each other in and outside of the gym. We have lots of ways for people to find their people in the gym, and that’s what we love about it.
Mel Buer: You formed this union in the end of 2023, and there were some issues that pushed you to collectively organize. Ryan, do you want to tell us what the issues were and why it was important that folks came together and filed for a union?
Ryan Barkauskas: Yeah, there were a few errors, a few omissions and inconsistencies. We were seeing pay being different from location to location. You could work someone else’s coverage and be expected to not be paid their same rate. There wasn’t a proper ladder of seniority, there weren’t established ways to really protect yourself and have a path to advancement.
Touchstone had this mentality of, “Oh, we’re so mom and pop. We so easily can just directly work with you.” And that works to an extent. But when things come up that jeopardize our safety that worry us, we feel like, “Hey, we’d like to have more communication with you.” That sparked a lot of that organizing. Us feeling like, “But this is our opinion, and wouldn’t you like to hear that?” And to just kind of be told, “No, I think we know best.”
We feel like we don’t have any direct say, and it can make us really feel powerless, especially if we don’t have the best relationship with our managers. We can hope for the best, but that can only do so much when they’re always making it “informal.”
Mel Buer: Jess, how did folks come together in January? What was the process for really coming to start collectively organizing and forming this union?
Jess Kim: When I had started working at Touchstone, I feel like people joked about forming a union, but there wasn’t any real action despite all these frustrations Ryan described.
We had a really unfortunate incident that made the LA Times in October and November of 2023, where there was a threat made against the gym that was very specific, and there was an FBI investigation started. The company communicated so poorly that the workers and the customers were put in danger, and obviously that doesn’t go over well. And the response from the company was not apologetic, it didn’t make people feel comfortable in the workplace.
And because so many people were documenting the status of the threat at these different locations, many of us were talking already, it was pretty simple to be like, “You know what? We’re going to really organize.”
So once we have the comms going, just like classic union campaigns, you do not want to talk about the union campaign openly, unfortunately, because it is really difficult to protect someone from being fired or retaliated against at this stage in the campaign. We had the emails and then we distributed the cards indicating your interest in a union. You want 30% of the workforce to sign to file for an election, but kind of the gold standard in most unions now is getting more than 70% of workers to sign, because you need a bigger majority to win an election.
Mel Buer: What has it felt like to kind of collectively come into your own power as a worker with Touchstone Workers United?
Ryan Barkauskas: It feels empowering, dare I say. Nothing really great comes that easy. It’s just really frustrating to recognize how much work and resistance this will involve. Like you said, companies might sit you down and try to talk you out of it. We had that moment.
Mel Buer: How has the climbing community responded to your unionizing effort, Ryan?
Ryan Barkauskas: Geez, overwhelming support. The community is so accepting. The motto is, “The crag is for everybody.” We take care of nature, we take care of it all. We just want to continue to enjoy this. We want everything that’s left behind to be shared and loved by all. And yeah, like Jess said, so many people are members of other unions, and so they hear about this and they’re checking in. They want to know how to support. The community is really behind us. We have become really good friends, and we are around them constantly, and we’re all invested in each other. So to have them behind us really, really means a lot.
Mel Buer: How have the negotiations been going?
Ryan Barkauskas: Like pulling teeth. We’re met with a lawyer, from a notoriously anti-union firm, who does all of the speaking. We are faced with three other representatives of our company, none of which really add anything to the conversation unless he has a question. In the six months that we’ve been meeting, we have two or three tentative agreements on the contract, and they’re very basic, the ones that we have. So it’s really been a struggle.
Mel Buer: You’ve already talked about the frustration, but what has been the sort of response to the demands?
Ryan Barkauskas: It’s been a lot of legal jargon and slowing down the process, really gumming it up. A large contention right now is something that we’ve had to call out, and that we might be filing an unfair labor practice for this as well, we’re arguing that they’re not in good faith for the fact that we have not received counter proposals on our economic proposals yet.
We had a change in our healthcare that was presented to us with very limited notice that then we had to see if we could bargain, which in itself is unfair labor practice. They’re changing conditions on us. And we very quickly were like, okay, we need to talk about this because this is affecting our bottom line. We’re met with a response of, “Well, if you would like to keep your same health insurance, maybe you’ll all just take a pay cut.” And you can imagine when that was at the table, our reaction and how much that hurt to hear. Since then there has been just a real slowness on the non-economics. They’re doing the bare minimum, so it’s been frustrating to receive lots of words and have to comb through them.
Mel Buer: Jess, what would you say to someone who’s looking to organize?
Jess Kim: When you are organizing for the company, it’s not about money, it’s about power. People do not want to see the power be taken away from them. And you as the worker, you have the power. You keep the company going every day. You are on the floor, you’re facing the customers. If you and your coworkers chose not to work, to slow down work, to not comply with different policies, you truly have the power.
This episode of the Working People Podcast was published on March 15.
