Stagehands say conditions improved after Yacht Club picket

August 21, 2025 by

Local 13 members and supporters picket outside the stagehands’ gate during the Minnesota Yacht Club festival. (submitted photo)

Stagehands who worked the Minnesota Yacht Club festival in St. Paul last month got a bump in pay after union members set up a picket line outside the three-day event, IATSE Local 13 says.

“The picket worked, and I’m very proud that we put it up,” Local 13 business agent Kellie Larson said. “The goal was to inform workers that their working conditions were subpar, and we were able, through the informational picket, to get those conditions brought up to something that was better.”

Local 13 announced it would picket the Minnesota Yacht Club, which drew crowds of around 35,000 to Harriet Island July 17-19, after union members rejected a contract proposal from the live-events company behind the festival, RockForce Labor.

The wages, benefit contributions and work rules in RockForce Labor’s offer lagged area standards set by union stagehands in their contracts with local performing-arts venues, Larson said.

“They put up a hard final offer, I brought that to my membership and they voted it down,” she said. “They said they would rather bring awareness to the public that this was not safe or standard working practices.”

Timing played into the decision, too. Local 13 is currently in bargaining over its arena contracts, and union members worried that agreeing to a substandard contract, even temporarily, would send the wrong message to local employers.

“If I take a lowball offer in that way, just ‘to take the deal,’ I would be undercutting all of the working conditions we have in the Twin Cities,” Larson said.

Among the provisions the union found unacceptable were terms of the so-called “turnaround time,” the gap between when stagehands wrap work on one show and start work on the next. RockForce wanted Yacht Club stagehands to tear down after the last act ended its show and be back to work within six hours, Larson said. Local 13’s contracts provide at least eight hours.

“We start work when everyone leaves, from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.,” she explained. “It’s hard work, and it’s dark, especially at outdoor festivals. You’re walking out of the place at 2 a.m. and walking back in six hours later for sound check? That’s really tight.”

Stagehands install speaker stacks and sound gear, stage lighting, monitors and more. For festivals like Yacht Club, work typically starts early, as stagehands unload and install gear for each act, then run it through a sound check.

“That’s five or six different looks we have to go through,” Larson said. “Sound check for band No. 1, let’s say Green Day, is at 8 a.m. We do a 90-minute sound check and start falling back to each act that will come before them. All day, we’re just unloading gear, doing sound checks, setting up for the next band.

“The work we do is dangerous and hard, and we’re doing it at a time of day that doesn’t make sense for most humans. That’s why we have some of these clauses in place, so we do have the best workers, with the best mental capacity to do the work.”

RockForce Labor launched this spring, consolidating nine live-events production companies into one, with eyes on luring business from “concerts, festivals, sporting events, live broadcasts, awards shows and corporate activities.”

It made a splash in the live-events industry, and Larson said she faced pressure from her international union to get a deal done and prevent any bad blood.

“I tried to bargain with the company,” she said. “I told them, ‘I can give on wages if you can get the turnaround time better. But the company just wouldn’t negotiate, and our members didn’t really feel safe working under those conditions.”

Instead, RockForce subcontracted the stagehands’ work to a Wisconsin-based company, and Local 13 members hit the picket line, where they engaged both concertgoers and stagehands passing through the gate.

“After three days on the line, what I heard from workers inside the gate was that they had transitioned from 1099s to W-2 work, with workers-comp insurance,” Larson said. “And they moved up to the $28-per-hour range. They also moved from no minimums and no double time to a 4-hour minimum and double time after midnight, which kicked in on Saturday.”

If true, it bodes well for Local 13 members’ chances of reaching a deal should the festival return to St. Paul next year.

“We’ll see what we can do to repair the relationship,” Larson said.

– Michael Moore, Union Advocate editor

Filed Under: Organizing, Politics, Union Events Tagged With: , , , , ,

Twins’ summer concert series keeps Stagehands out in cold

July 11, 2023 by

IATSE Local 13 members supported an NHL game at Target Field last year.

Beyonce’s concert next Thursday at the University of Minnesota football stadium will create jobs for about 300 union stagehands – or about 300 more than will be working the Twins’ two-day rock festival at Target Field this weekend.

Local 13 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees today publicly called out the ball club and its festival partner, 555 Event Productions, for hiring independent contractors to cover stagehands’ work at TC Summer Fest this Friday and Saturday, despite the local’s repeated attempts to discuss solutions that would ensure a union presence.

“They don’t want to play ball,” Local 13 Business Manager Wendell Bell said.

The independent contractors, also known as “1099 workers,” will earn less than union scale, with no fringe benefits or coverage under workers’ compensation insurance. It’s a common arrangement for events produced by 555 Events, Bell said.

“These people are notorious throughout the Twin Cities for undermining union labor,” he said. “You’re not getting the quality. You’re not getting the safety. The pay is well under union scale. And if somebody gets hurt, where’s the recourse?”

TC Summer Fest is the Twins’ first attempt at a multi-day festival inside the downtown Minneapolis ballpark. Featured acts include The Killers, Imagine Dragons, The Flaming Lips and Death Cab for Cutie.

Bell, whose union represents about 3,000 behind-the-scenes workers at over 30 Twin Cities venues, began reaching out to the Twins about a month ago to discuss work on the festival, but he said the club “stonewalled” him until 10 days before the event. That left the union with too little time to mobilize an informational picket or public campaign.

When he did finally talk to a Twins executive, Bell said, attempts at a compromise that would have secured some work for union stagehands went nowhere.

“We just wanted to be considered in the jurisdiction of work that we have done in the past,” Bell said. “I understand the business, and there could have been some shared work recourse. That was never even considered or brought to our attention.”

Construction work on publicly funded stadiums in the Twin Cities has been covered by project labor agreements (PLAs), which require contractors bidding on the work to pay area-standard wages and fringe benefits. That frees up union contractors to offer bids based on quality and safety, rather than the lowest labor costs, and ensures laborers are covered by workers compensation.

But there is no comparable arrangement covering event-related contracting at publicly funded stadiums.

Meanwhile, union stagehands will be back at Target Field for the Pink show next month, working as loaders, production technicians, electricians, stage runners and more. That show’s promoter, Live Nation, has shown a preference for union stagehands in this market, Bell said.

“There is zero difference, no good reason why we aren’t out there this weekend in any kind of capacity,” Bell said. “It’s extreme, and that’s why we’re responding publicly.”

Filed Under: Community, Politics Tagged With: , , , , ,

Stagehands’ youth movement pays off with organizing win at Varsity Theater

March 20, 2015 by

bbb75503272695698ad09fe38448f85e_400x400After an organizing drive fueled by young activists and backed by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, workers at the Varsity Theater in Dinkytown have a union.

It’s the first successful organizing campaign for IATSE Local 13 in “many years,” according to Michael Abramson, co-chair of the Twin Cities-based union’s Young Worker Committee.

The National Labor Relations Board conducted the election earlier this month. Contract negotiations with the Varsity are set to begin soon, with employees seeking higher wages, benefit contributions from their employer and better working conditions.

“There are a lot of safety risks doing this work,” Abramson, who does lighting work at the Guthrie Theater, said. “So protecting the ability for someone to speak up about things they see – to say, ‘these conditions are deplorable’ – is really critical.”

[Learn more about young worker groups and how they are energizing unions across the state on the Minnesota Young Workers Facebook page.]

To start, the new unit includes just four permanent light and sound technicians employed by the theater. But the victory gives Local 13 a toehold inside the facility, where stagehands often are hired as independent contractors, and could expand in the future.

Local 13 actually collected 35 signed cards requesting union representation during the organizing drive, which began last November. Abramson, fellow committee co-chair Robert Barnwell, Local 13 representative Matt Rice and an organizer from the international union attempted to track down every stagehand who had worked in the Varsity over the previous year.

“It took a couple months,” Abramson said. “We were finding people on Facebook, guessing at the spelling of their names, whatever we could do.”

By the time they were finished, the union had a more comprehensive roster of people who had worked at the Varsity than the theater did.

Although the unit was restricted to employees who had averaged four hours of work per week over the last three months, the outreach effort raised awareness of the union among stagehands – and could set the stage for organizing drives at other small venues across the metro.

“One guy who did (independent contractor) work at the Varsity but works predominantly at another venue, he signed the card,” Abramson remembered, “then he said, ‘So when are you guys coming over here?’”

The organizing drive is just one way Local 13’s Young Worker Committee is attempting to rebrand the union and enhance its image in the Twin Cities events and entertainment scene. The committee just wrapped up a t-shirt drive, collecting the free shirts given to stagehands by touring acts – “Fleetwood Mac Local Crew,” for example – and donating them to charity.

“We all have closets full of t-shirts we never wear,” Abramson. “So we set up collection sites around town and worked with the AFL-CIO Community Services program to make sure the shirts go to good use.

“Hopefully we’re shedding some of the images of what the union is – the crusty old guy, or the old man’s club. We’re trying to make a younger presence known.”

Abramson welcomes inquiries from workers in the industry looking to improve safety, wages, benefits and working conditions at their shops. Email him at michael_abramson@iatse13.org.

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