PARK SLOPE — A sex toy shop that was the first unionized adult store in the country is getting spanked over allegations it fired an employee for being pro-union.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union filed a complaint Tuesday with the National Labor Relations Board over Babeland's Oct. 25 firing of an employee who mentioned the workers' union to a reporter.
"Our issue with this particular situation wasn't just that the firing was unfair, but that it showed a clear anti-union animus," said RWDSU spokesman Phil Andrews.
The RWDSU wants the fired Babeland employee, Kamryn Wolf, to be re-employed there or receive lost wages.
The store says Wolf, was let go because Wolf violated a longstanding policy that staff must forward press inquiries to a company spokeswoman, and also violated a rule that staffers are not allowed to advocate for personal causes while they're on the job, said Babeland co-founder Claire Cavanah.
Cavanah opened the first Babeland store in Seattle in 1993 and came to New York City in 1998 with a store on the Lower East Side. A SoHo location followed and the Park Slope outpost, at 462 Bergen St. (between Flatbush and Fifth avenues) opened in 2008.
In May of this year, Babeland's New York workers voted to join the RWDSU, the same union that organized the Vegas Auto Spa car wash workers in the South Slope. Babeland workers decided to unionize in part to get higher wages and better benefits and scheduling, Andrews said.
Cavanah said the workers' decision to unionize was at first a "real shock," but she's worked with them since to meet their demands.
So far negotiations have centered mostly on employees' safety concerns, Cavanah said. The company met workers' demands by hosting a de-escalation training so employees are better equipped to deal with customers who act inappropriately in the store, and the phone system was outfitted with an automated answering system to shield workers from prank phone calls, she said.
Cavanagh said negotiations have been going well and the two sides were supposed to enter talks about the financial aspects of workers' demands next week.
"We really want to get back on track and get to the economic side of the contract as soon as we can," Cavanah said. "This [complaint] is just kind of a distraction."
But union reps say Babeland has resisted employees' attempts to organize by handing out anti-union literature at mandatory meetings. "We have definitely gotten the sense that while the company has accepted the fact of the union, they still very much do not like it and they let the employees know that," Andrews said.
"It was very unfair that they fired me," Wolf said in a statement. "They never asked me for my side of the story. Other workers have done the same thing and they haven’t been fired. They went after me because I was active in the union."
The employee had already given notice when the firing happened and was due to leave the company in two weeks when management and the employee arrived at a mutual decision to part ways due to the conversation with the reporter, Cavanah claimed.
"It's not like we're anti-union," Cavanah said, adding that she wants to work toward a contract that will create a "better functioning workplace." Cavanah said she used to honk in support of the Vegas Auto Spa workers every time she drove past their picket line on the way to her children's school.
The RWDSU spokesman said Babeland customers seem to like the fact that the store is now unionized, and that it could ultimately lead to more revenue for the shop.
"We think their customers are happy the workers have unionized," Andrews said. "We think when we reach a contract and we announce it to the world, their customers will be very excited and their sales will increase."
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