How the Death & Co union drive collapsed
A Fingers special report on what went wrong on mixology's most prominent organizing effort
In early November, workers at Death & Co’s flagship location in Manhattan’s East Village went public with a drive to organize the iconic cocktail bar as Death & Co Workers United (D&CWU). The world-renowned bar, birthplace of now-iconic cocktails like the Naked and Famous and the Oaxaca old fashioned, was going union. “With 100% of workers signing union authorization cards, we are confident that we will soon be able to build a workplace that works for EVERYONE,” the fledgling union posted on Instagram on November 3rd, 2023.
The comments filled with messages of support from fellow bartenders, former Death & Co employees, and pro-labor posters. Managers at Gin & Luck, the storied bar’s parent company, declined to voluntarily recognize the union, forcing an election with the National Labor Relations Board instead. Workers felt confident they had the votes. As one worker predicted to Fingers shortly after the drive went public: “The margin is gonna be ridiculous.”
When the ballots were tallied up roughly five weeks later, on December 14th, a slim majority of Death & Co’s workers had voted against the union that a totality of them had previously signed on to bargain with. D&CWU lost the election 10-8, a staggering swing. Ridiculous, even. How did this drive—one of the most promising the rarified, mostly non-union world of high-end mixology has ever seen, and at one of its most prestigious and prominent firms—go from unanimous support to majority opposition?
To hear Death & Co’s bosses tell it, the reversal in D&CWU’s budding fortunes was simply democracy in action. “Death and Co is proud that all of its employees exercised their legal right to participate in a fair and free election,” David Kaplan, the founder and co-owner of Death & Co and the chief executive of Gin & Luck, told Fingers in an emailed statement sent via his publicist. (He declined to be interviewed, also via his publicist.) “Regardless of the outcome, we appreciate and value each and every employee.”
“It’s baffling to me, one thousand percent,”
The current and former Death & Co employees that Fingers interviewed in the aftermath of the election paint a much more complicated picture of the drive’s collapse.