Stories about whether a workplace should unionize are usually boring. This one, I guarantee you, is not.

News: The performers and crew who bring live entertainment to the Casa Bonita dining and theme-park experience in Lakewood have called for a vote on whether to unionize, it was announced Wednesday. (Think of it as “a vote to vote” – and that vote will take place around Nov. 8.)

This would be an historic partnership, because the two involved unions have never worked together before on an effort like this one anywhere, ever.

One, called Actors’ Equity Association, represents a reported 51,000 actors and stage managers who work in the live theater. It would welcome about 60 cliff divers, roaming character actors, puppeteers and magicians. The other, called IATSE (say it like “Yahtzee”), represents 170,000 behind-the-scenes technicians who work on film, live theater and exhibitions. It would take in the restaurant’s 21 crew members.

Views: There are at least two contrasting ways of looking at this powder keg of an issue, and both can be true at the same time.

1. Casa Bonita’s entertainers need safety protections, full stop. But from Actors Equity, of all unions? That seems odd. “Somebody needs to step up and give these workers the safety protections they deserve, and Actors Equity is the one stepping up to do it,” said Erin Joy Swank, whose awkward title is the Geographically Based Community Co-Leader for the Denver Area of Actors Equity. (“Get me rewrite!”)

2. This is a cash grab for Actors Equity, a national union whose membership has been in something of an open rebellion in Colorado since before the pandemic – also full stop.

Both points have merit. First, in an explosive new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Casa Bonita “Diver Lead” Bethel Lindsley said it was safety concerns that sparked her team’s interest in unionizing.

She cited incidents involving unsafe carbon monoxide levels in a holding room, which she says were eventually addressed, but only after her divers refused to work until the problem was solved. She said another diver became hypothermic because her team is left intermittently wet for up to six hours at a time. And just this past Sunday, she said, two divers collided underwater, landing one in the hospital with a serious concussion. Lindsley said some of her proposed safety measures have been implemented, but only after pushback from management.

She wants protections enshrined in a contract.

“My team just wants to work and know that they’re going to be safe and that the people have the proper training and awareness of policies and procedures in place in case something goes wrong,” Lindsley told the newspaper.

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable position.

The restaurant’s official response? “Casa Bonita values all its employees and their safety and believes they are treated well and compensated fairly,” the company said in an uncredited statement. “We respect the rights of our employees and believe they should be entitled to vote on whether they are subject to a union.”

Where this gets wonky is Actors Equity’s place in all of this. You have to understand that for the past 100 years, the actors’ union has primarily represented stage actors at the highest level of their profession. In a place like New York, where every Broadway theater is contracted to work with Actors’ Equity, union membership is a practical necessity.

But out West, it’s more like the Wild West. In Colorado, we have about 85 active theater companies. But only a handful of them are “union” theaters that are fully obligated to abide by Actors’ Equity’s strict rules, which include hiring a minimum number of union actors for every show. The Denver Center Theatre Company, Arvada Center, Theatre Aspen and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center are among them.

Until recently, eligibility to join Actors’ Equity was a great achievement – the culmination of having successfully scored a minimum number of paid weeks working for preferred theaters. The reward is higher pay, access to working at the highest levels of local theater, eligibility for a pension and, the greatest prize – access to health insurance. The cost: Paying an $1,800 initiation fee (over three years), membership dues, and forfeited eligibility to perform at nonunion theaters (which in Colorado is almost all of them).

(Addition: On Friday, Lindsley told The Denver Gazette that Equity will waive the initiation fee for new Casa Bonita members.)

Another problem, over time, has been changing union rules that have made it progressively more difficult for members to hold on to that golden-egg health insurance. Thirty years ago, a member had to have worked at least 10 contracted weeks at a union theater over the previous year to qualify. Today, that number is 30. It’s not that our highest-caliber actors don’t want to work 30 weeks a year – it’s that it’s virtually impossible for any actor here to land 30 weeks of available employment at the few union theaters we have. Which is why virtually every actor in Denver, whether a union member or not, works multiple jobs to carve out a living – and pay their medical bills.

None of which, until recently, ever would have come into play in any conversation about adding Casa Bonita’s performers to Actors’ Equity’s membership ranks. They simply never would have fit within any previous definition of what constitutes a professional actor.

But in recent years, a century of protocol regarding membership in Actors’ Equity has gone over the cliff so to speak.

Unionization has become a major issue in the Colorado performing community this year. Two Live Nation venues (the Marquis Theatre and Summit Music Hall) are in negotiations with the National Labor Relations Board to join IATSE Local 7. Opera Colorado just had its own union election, and Meow Wolf has forged a deal with the Communications Workers of America.

There are lots of different unions. But if we are being honest, Actors’ Equity is probably in the weakest position of them all.

Coming out of COVID, Actors’ Equity strongly defended the health and safety of its returning union members by establishing return-to-work guidelines that some members say actually made it much more difficult – and more expensive – for theaters to reopen in a timely manner. Many members openly asserted that Actors’ Equity was more of a hindrance to employment than a help.

Meantime, Actors’ Equity has opened up all its borders so to speak. In 2022, it negotiated a deal with the dancers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in North Hollywood, becoming the only strippers in the U.S. to be represented by a union. In May, it added the 1,700 employees who perform as characters at Disneyland and Walt Disney World (or dance in their parades). And just last week, Actors’ Equity added the provocative all-male dancers known as The Chippendales.

One local union member told the Denver Gazette that local membership sees those changes as an act of existential desperation.

Actors’ Equity is now essentially open to all live entertainers, which is what puts that union in the middle of this whole Casa Bonita unionization effort. One that, if successful, will bring the same benefits and challenges to a mostly hourly workforce that will now also have to find the means to pay the union’s initiation fee and regular dues. No one knows how its fundamental rules that have applied to itinerant stage actors all this time might possibly now translate to an hourly, ongoing workforce that already has employer health insurance.

It’s a tradeoff, but one thing is sure: Whatever it once meant to achieve the privilege of membership in Actors’ Equity is now history. In fact, the union has adopted an “open access” policy that, put simply, means any stage manager or actor who has ever worked on a professional theater production anywhere in the United States is now eligible to join.

Several local Actors Equity members today expressed their ongoing surprise over the union’s expanding approach to membership. But then again, after having added the Chippendales dancers, one said, pretty much nothing surprises them.

They see the real motivating factor here to be broadening the union’s enrollment ranks as a way of maintaining its bargaining power – and growing its revenue stream. Because there is strength in numbers. And those numbers now happen to include strippers right alongside Broadway-caliber actors.

Everyone deserves protections and decent pay. It’s all just a little odd, considering what it once meant for a professional actor to attain membership in this celebrated national union.

Now, you just have to fill out a form and pay the fees.