In Seward Park in Lower Manhattan on April 4, workers from renowned cocktail bar Attaboy gathered, drifting into a loose semicircle as an ice cream truck jingle played in the background and families enjoying the sunny afternoon looked on. The bartenders and their supporters — many of them service workers at nearby establishments — greeted each other, hugged, and high-fived.
They were there to announce that they are forming a union — Attaboy Local 134, a reference to the bar’s Eldridge Street address — and seeking voluntary recognition from management. If successful, the effort would make Attaboy the first independently owned cocktail bar in New York City to unionize.
“This is fucking terrifying,” Attaboy bartender Samaiyah Patrick told the crowd. “It’s really difficult, but this is work that needs to be done.”
Patrick emphasized that the effort was not meant as a confrontation. “I don’t think of this as an adversarial thing,” she said. “I think of this as workers coming together and sharing their voices, because multiple voices are louder and stronger than one voice.” She added that the goal was voluntary recognition and a contract, not a fight: “It’s not wrong or bad to want to come together and share our grievances and our ideas for how to make the workplace and the industry better.”
Among those gathered were workers from She Wolf Bakery, where employees won a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election in 2024, joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union; they are currently bargaining a first contract. Others in the crowd hailed from Death & Co., an East Village cocktail bar where a 2023 union drive collapsed after management declined to recognize the union, and workers alleged union busting during a drawn-out campaign.
Attaboy occupies a particular place in the modern bar economy. Opened in 2013 as the successor to Milk & Honey — the influential speakeasy founded by Sasha Petraske — it helped define the…
Auteur: Alex N. Press
