Workers Fight to Unionize Sexuality Boutique
Grand Opening! is a woman-owned and women-run “sexuality boutique” here in Brookline, Massachusetts, right next to Boston. The owner, Kim Airs, began the business 10 years ago, and recently opened a second store in Los Angeles. She hires a generally young staff that sells sex-related books, videos, lotions, toys, and other paraphernalia to women and men in an easy-going, non-threatening atmosphere. The employees are now trying to unionize. Airs objects. A union election is apparently set for September 29th.
The controversy has reached the local town newspaper. More extensive is this current discussion on Boston Indymedia, with dozens of comments about unionizing, the nature of small business, capitalism, worker cooperatives, anarchism, and related topics (along with the usual occasional nastiness about one another’s motives). Most interesting to me are the observations of Nastya Lamb, self-identified as an anarchist-communist. Lamb places the specific conflict in a broader context, noting that even worker coops have to operate within a capitalist society and that this sort of conflict — between dissatisfied workers living in in a very expensive city and an apparently progressive business owner whose products and information resources directly help improve people’s lives — is inevitable unless we make more far-reaching societal changes.
My own sympathies are, typically, mixed. As a local resident and occasional customer, I appreciate Kim Airs’ strong public efforts to normalize sex talk in a society where the topic is more often either whispered about or juvenilized. As a lifelong union supporter and whenever-possible union member and activist, I’m neither surprised nor sorry to see workers demand more input. Although I know nothing yet of the conflict’s specifics, I already hope the short-term result is a relatively bureaucracy-free union that helps Grand Opening! retain good workers without taking the fun out of what Airs and at least most of her employees clearly enjoy doing. It would be even better if Grand Opening!’s success leads to the kinds of worker cooperatives and other less hierarchical workplaces, as suggested in the Indymedia discussion.
One more thought: I’d like to find out whether the worker dissatisfactions, whatever they are, increased when Airs opened the L.A. store, which I think was a couple of years ago. Perhaps the difficulty of maintaining such widely separated stores has made the boss less connected to her Brookline workers. That would support my hunch that small businesses begun for one or another useful purpose or with progressive labor policies often lose that politically interesting edge once they expand. Ben and Jerry’s comes to mind, as I’ve written about in the past.
UPDATE 9/23/2004: My Brookline TAB column on this issue.