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Exclusive: Burning Man, a utopia for guests, was hell for many workers Staggeringly high suicide rate among Burning Man’s seasonal workers is just one symptom of a toxic work environment
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Keith A. Spencer • Nicole Karlis
August 24, 2018 11:00pm (UTC)
Every summer at the end of August, thousands of people from around the world make their pilgrimage to Burning Man, the signal counterculture festival of our
epoch. Some come for a spiritual awakening, some merely to party and indulge, others to gawk at
the spectacle. What started as a small summer-solstice gathering on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986 has been refashioned as a major event drawing
more than 75,000 festival-goers to the Black Rock Desert, a remote plateau desert two hours north of
Reno, Nevada.
Describing Burning Man to someone who has never been is an exercise in superlatives. Given its freeform, anarchic nature, it is to some extent what you make of it, and it has a different meaning to different people. Some regard
it as the provenance of
obnoxious trust-funders and rich techies; others, as the terminus of 1960s-era hippiedom. At a minimum, Burning Man resembles a more libertine Coachella, a giant drug-driven wardrobe malfunction bursting with alternate theories of don’t-tread-on-me
hedonism and solipsistic schemes for freer living.
There is general agreement that Burning Man symbolizes and perhaps even carries
on the legacy of the socially libertarian spirit of the 1960s counterculture. Not surprisingly, attendees often describe the experience as transcendent; in recent years it
has become popular with well-heeled techies, who have been credited with shifting the festival’s demographic and culture.
Despite its transgressive spirit, the festival is expensive and increasingly off-limits to the underclass: Tickets run from $190 to $1,200 this year, while transportation to and fro and equipment add to the cost. Those who attend are expected to obey the
organization’s “10 Principles of Burning Man,” which includes “radical self-reliance” — meaning attendees have to provide their own food, water and shelter for the week-long party.
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Over the years, the festival has attracted its share of celebrity fans, some of
them unlikely: Grover Norquist, the anti-tax icon, attends regularly, as do many of Silicon Valley’s elite, including Elon Musk and much of the Google brass, along with
Amazon chief Jeff Bezos. Burning Man’s remote desert location allows for unique experiences that one couldn’t replicate in other settings — in particular, the ritualistic burning of a giant human-shaped effigy at the end of the festival, from which
it derives its name. It also means barbarous conditions for the seasonal workers who are tasked with constructing the grid upon which the festival operates.
Preparing an inhospitable desert landscape for the equally brief and boggling surge in population that temporarily creates what is known as Black Rock City requires a coordinated effort of labor, workers and volunteers who toil in harsh conditions,
often for low pay or no pay, for months on end: running electric lines, hauling
equipment, cleaning up the mess at the end of it all, and dealing with the logistics of bringing thousands of vehicles and structures to the playa. (Although that word means "
beach," it is universally used to describe the festival zone.)
Salon spoke to several former and current employees and volunteers for Burning Man, who painted a picture of a dangerous and stressful work environment and a toxic management culture that contributed to a number of suicides of seasonal employees, at a
rate far greater than the national average. Those who spoke exclusively to Salon recalled tales of labor abuse, unequal wages, on-the-job-injuries including permanent blindness and a management that manipulated workers who were hurt or who tried to fight
for improved conditions.
“They’re worse than Walmart at this point”
In February 2007, a small group of workers for Burning Man staged a protest in front of the company’s San Francisco headquarters, concerned about their labor conditions. A grainy YouTube video recording of the protest shows several
employees wearing
paper bags over their heads; one holds a sign reading “Burning Man = Walmart.”
The videographer soon homes in on the clear leader: Caleb Schaber, who goes by “Shooter” on the playa. (Many Burning Man employees and regulars have “playa names,” nicknames they use only at Burning Man). As the videographer
probes him with
questions, Schaber tells a sordid story of employer malfeasance.
“They don’t help out the workers that are injured, quite often, and they just try to get them to work for the most by giving them the least and then discard them,” Schaber tells the cameraman. “They seem to feel that it’s OK to exploit the
workers like they’re some kind of resource that’s just there to take and not help out,” he continues. “They’re a multi-million-dollar corporation that has franchises, and they’re not taking care of their workers.”
Wearing a dark-brown goatee and with long, curly hair tucked under a beanie, Schaber resembles a plain-spoken Che Guevara. The coastal breeze sends strands of hair dancing around his face as Schaber grimaces and explains that more people wanted to attend
his protest but were too afraid.
“We had a lot of people who wanted to come but they got scared . . . some people get grants from Burning Man and some people still work for Burning Man, and if they find out who you are they won’t hire you,” he told the cameraman.
Schaber was a full-time employee for Burning Man in 2003. Previously, he worked
as a war photojournalist in Iraq and Afghanistan. Schaber had quit his seasonal
job at Burning Man but continued to work as a volunteer and to fight for worker
rights in
Burning Man’s Department of Public Works — the internal name for the division of seasonal workers who build the bulk of the infrastructure that allows the desert festival to function. These workers — his friends — had been taken advantage of by
an organization that was meant to represent a rebellion against what “the man” represented, Schaber said.
“They’ve taken Guerilla art and turned it into a real corporation,” he said. “They’re worse than Walmart at this point.”
As the video continues, something strange happens: Rather than join in solidarity, people emerge from within the Burning Man headquarters to form a counterprotest. One man with his shirt off tries to hug Schaber, who quickly backs away and says, “Do
not hug me.”
“Are you afraid of a hug?” the other man asks. “Why are you here?”
Another person exits from Burning Man’s headquarters with a sign that reads, “My protest is better than yours.”
A friend of Schaber’s, an unidentified female seasonal employee of the Department of Public Works who asked to remain anonymous for fear of recrimination, was particularly alarmed by the company’s reaction to the protest in 2007. “The people that
were working in the building just had the most smug response to it,” she said, adding that the events that led to the protest showed the “first real sign of disconnect” between upper management and its employees and volunteers. “It was very
strange,” she said.
“If you upset the people high up, it's like all of them ostracize you”
Ricardo Romero, 35, began working with the DPW in 2008. He had originally volunteered with Burners Without Borders, assisting disaster relief in Pisco, Peru after the 2007 earthquake, where he met a DPW manager who offered him a position on the playa.
Romero told Salon he was a volunteer at first. “I never asked for much money,
kept my head down, kept my mouth shut, respected the authority,” he explained. Still, what he saw happening troubled him. “Over the years I just kept on seeing so many of
my co-workers getting fired for complaining about worker treatment,” he explained. Romero says he heard from others that if they compared pay — which
varied wildly, depending on management’s whims — they could get fired. “I’d hear things like,
‘That person got fired because they stuck up for someone or called out some abuse that they witnessed,’” he added.
Romero noted that management seemed to hold grudges. “I had enough of it,” Romero told Salon, “and then in 2014 I contacted a labor lawyer.”
Romero had been talking to workers about possibly organizing a union, in an effort to fight back against their treatment and get more transparency about wages and wage differentials. In April 2017, he received a call: He was “uninvited” to return to
Burning Man. It would have been his ninth year.
Burning Man denied firing Romero in a statement, claiming instead that “his temporary employment expired.”
“The only reason I got fired was because I talked back to management and brought up issues related to how workers were treated, how we were informed and
how the company supported us and cared about us,” Romero said. “As a laborer, I was in good
standing.”
“When Burning Man did not offer him a position the following year, Romero complained to the National Labor Relations Board,” Jim Graham, Burning Man spokesperson, told Salon in an email. “The complaint made no mention about unionizing.” (Both
Romero and Romero’s lawyer, Kevin Brunner, dispute the company’s claim that
he was not fired for trying to organize)
“Burning Man decided to settle the charge rather than go through the time-consuming process of litigating it. There was never any finding of wrongdoing,” Graham added. “As part of the settlement, Burning Man provided
NLRB's standard notice language
to its employees. Burning Man ensures all employees are aware of their rights under federal labor law and does nothing to stand in the way of their exercise of those rights.”
Romero said the organization’s response is “part of a campaign to discredit
me and diminish the importance of the NLRB case.”
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Right before he was "uninvited,” Romero suggested that some of his colleagues
refrain from signing their contracts to protest mistreatment. If that's why he was fired, that would likely violate national labor laws. Romero added he believes that Burning
Man’s claim they did not want to go through the “time-consuming process of litigating it” is contradicted by management's decision to hire two large law
firms. One is Jackson Lewis, which has a reputation for union busting.
Romero was represented by Kevin Brunner of the law firm of Siegel, Yee and Brunner, an Oakland firm whose attorneys have a long legacy of civil rights and
labor law. It is illegal to fire someone for trying to organize, Brunner told Salon, saying that in
his judgment Romero’s case was cut-and-dried.
“Employees have the right to band together and organize for better working conditions, even short of joining the union,” Brunner explained. “You have the right to get together with other co-workers and organize for more money or shorter hours or
whatever it may be. And that's what they retaliated against him for doing — he was organizing people to get better pay and better working conditions, and because of that they decided they were going to not hire him, and that was a violation of the
National Labor Relations Act.”
The NLRB agreed with Romero, and the Burning Man organization was forced to issue a statement. Romero, ultimately, got a settlement that both he and his lawyer were happy with. “Part of the settlement was they had to rehire him and then post those
notices and pay him back pay,” Brunner told Salon. The company was also obliged to make an official apology and post a notice to its employees, which Salon obtained.
Romero’s victory does not mean that the labor woes of Burning Man are over. For one thing, there is still no union on the playa.
“It seems suspect that Burning Man is complying with all of their obligations
in terms of overtime, pay, minimum wage pay, those kinds of things and the way they set up their systems,” Brunner said. “They seemed to be, certainly, taking advantage
of their employees.”
Burning Man as a festival and a nonprofit prides itself on its "10 Principles" and promotes them rigorously — a set of values that include “radical inclusion,” gifting, decommodification and civic responsibility, which could factor into the blurred
lines within the organization. Yet there is a steep differential between the salaries for the workers who make the festival run and the upper management: Romero told Salon he was offered $15 per hour to work this season. According to
2016 tax filings,
salaried managers earn between $150,000 to $200,000, more than four and a half times Romero’s wage.
“Burning Man is outside the mainstream,” Brunner added. “Like, people are
lucky to be part of it, they're lucky to work there. It's part of the fun. It's
sort of like a community building this event for everybody. The reality is that
a lot of money
is made off of it and a lot of people seemed to be well-paid to run it. They do
rely on this sort of communal aspect and the communal ethos that they have to get people to work for less money.”
One DPW member who would not give a name for fear of retaliation says the remote location of Burning Man makes the wage situation more problematic. “You’re stuck out there,” she said, “two hours from banks, from ATM.”
Women who worked at Burning Man spoke of observing gender inequities in wages. Ridge Arterburn was a Burning Man volunteer working for the DPW from 2007 to 2014 (with the exception of 2012). “In ’15 I was asked to not return,” she told Salon.
Arterburn said that there was a gender gap where her paycheck was concerned.
“Yes, women are treated differently there,” Arterburn said. “Many times ... qualified women are overlooked for positions . . . Then have to fight and say, look, in the real world here’s my certifications.”
“Women are paid less than men,” Arterburn continued. “I know this from hearing what people make.”
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