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Annie Bond, 28, began working at Center Camp Café in 2012 and corroborated reports of gender discrimination. At first she was under contract by a vendor working at Burning Man, but she got poached by the Burning Man organization. She dated her manager,
who promoted her as his assistant, but after they broke up, she quickly realized where the organization's priorities lay: with her ex.

“Previously we had a great working relationship and it seemed really infallible and strong, and all of a sudden he was not talking to me; he would put me on hold on the radio and never come back, and he wouldn’t tell other departments I was his
assistant," she said.

Bond was told a position was waiting for her, after she decided to take a year off, but the following year she was told the organization didn't have a budget to rehire her. Bond said she agreed with a friend who said Burning Man culture was pervaded with
"toxic masculinity."

There was "manipulation through, you know, various forms of male-generated power of persuasion,” she explained.

While Romero was lucky to get a settlement, many Burning Man employees who were
fired unjustly or mistreated by the company weren’t so lucky.

“One of my friends who was really close with upper management, she was not invited to come back ... after she brought up how she thought it was morally wrong the way they were paying people and treating people,” Romero told Salon. “She described it
as upsetting the mafia,” Romero added, echoing sentiments Schaber expressed in 2007. “You're either in, you’re in the club and you're like one of the mafia, the earners or the bosses, and then there's like the little street earners or the rest of
us workers. If you upset the people high up, it's like all of them ostracize you and your best friends will turn their backs on you.”

According to the department’s official handbook, which can be found online, pay is determined by “Category and Tier.” “We have done our best to keep pay consistent across the pay tiers,” the handbook states. “It should be noted that some
people who have held their jobs for a while may be making more than their pay tier would indicate.”

The island of misfit toys

Two years after Schaber’s protest, he died. The official cause of death was suicide. It is one of many that have rocked Burning Man’s Department of Public Works over the last decade.

Deaths in the DPW are so common that the manual distributed to workers each year — which can be found online — includes a section dedicated to those who have died. There is also a memorial in the DPW saloon at Burning Man.

“It has over a dozen pictures of people who killed themselves or have tragically killed in a car accident . . . but the majority of them are suicide,” Arterburn explained.

Many of Schaber’s friends and co-workers believe that the way he was treated by Burning Man after challenging its labor practices was a contributing factor in his death.

“He just wanted to be paid a fair day’s wage, and he wanted the crews that he worked with to be paid the same,” said a DPW staffer who was afraid to give a name for fear of retribution. “He wanted it to resemble a community and a job at the same
time.”

“If I had to guess I’d say that, yes, being ostracized from DPW is very painful,” Arterburn corroborated, adding that Schaber was “troubled” before he died.

Arterburn explained to Salon that the unique conditions and experiences of working on the playa lead to unique personalities being attracted to the event — the kinds of people who, in Arterburn’s words, might not fit in elsewhere
in society. “If
one is in DPW, it’s my opinion that they’re in there for a reason,” she said. “Your average person who has a nine-to-five job and has watched their parents take two weeks off for holiday time a year probably wouldn’t be able to handle that
environment for the amount of time that DPW was there.”

Salon found that in the seven years between 2009 and 2015, there were seven DPW
worker suicides in the department.

That number is statistically significant enough to be alarming, according to Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas, a psychologist and the lead of the Workplace Task Force for the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention. “To give you a
benchmark, in a
community of 1,000 people we would expect one suicide death in one decade,” she explained. Spencer-Thomas noted that the construction industry in the U.S. does have an elevated suicide rate.

Romero worked at the DPW during a period in which many of his colleagues took their own lives. “In less than 12 months we had three suicides [from 2013 to 2014],” Romero told Salon. “It was high enough that only someone who doesn’t give a s**t in
management wouldn’t be doing something to address this.”

Ryan Brown, 40, whose playa name was “Cave Man,” died in 2014, He was a friend of Romero, who was involved in the events that led up to his suicide. At
2014 Burning Man, Romero said there were fears that Brown would become violent with his wife,
though Romero stressed there was no apparent history of domestic abuse in their
relationship. “He progressively got more and more distressed, and he felt like nobody was communicating with him honestly,” he said. Salon reached out to Brown’s widow
for comment, but she declined to comment.

Romero encouraged Brown to leave the playa on his own terms when matters escalated. Romero says a dramatic removal during Burning Man is sometimes warranted — if someone is attacked or sexually assaulted, for example — but
in Brown’s case, Romero
believes his firing was handled poorly. Management asked Brown to leave, according to Romero, and the events that followed led to his tragic death: Brown reportedly went on a drug and alcohol bender and was arrested on suspicion of reckless driving and
possession and use of cocaine (He drove a car through the lobby of a hotel). A few days later, he was found dead in his hotel room. The coroner ruled the death a suicide.

This was not the first time Romero had witnessed upper management remove someone from the playa in a way that could affect the person’s mental health.

“In years past, I had friends kicked off of playa or the worksite, and you can kind of tell when managers involved in this process are looking very stern,
serious and looking over,” he said. “What they do is basically just toss you off the site.
They give you no compensation, and they basically tell you you’re on your own
. . . a lot of times they are people who aren’t getting paid or they are getting paid very little.” Romero called it “a very traumatic situation.”

Because of the unique and tight-knit nature of the Burning Man worker community, getting fired can be particularly devastating, as many workers have never felt that level community or camaraderie in any other aspect of their lives. According to Romero,
the experience creates potentially dangerous highs and lows.

"There are high rates of depression because you do have the effects of institutionalization out there,” Romero said. “It is a remote location. It can be a long season. It's mentally and physically stressful and you’ve got a
lot of camaraderie and
it's a place where you feel important.”

On Facebook in 2014, Brown posted a photo of himself with a certificate from an
outpatient addiction program. His friends attest that working on the playa was a form of healing for him, and Romero asserts that management knew that they had a mini-
epidemic of suicide among their workers. “At [the] point [that Brown died], suicide was a problem," he said. It can be "a traumatic experience for people just to leave there on their own will after their contract is over," he continued, "let alone to
be fired and separated from a million people who you feel accept you — and also maybe your spouse – all in one day.” Romero said he doesn’t blame Burning Man management for Brown’s death, but is still upset that nothing was
done to mitigate a
dangerous and escalating situation or to handle it more carefully.

“I think, in a sense, every suicide that has happened is related to the work,” he said. “They may not all be exactly caused by it, but it’s all related.”

Eric Close, whose playa name was “Myster E.,” was “one of those people that was trying to get out of pain," according to Schaber's friend, a DPW member who would not give a name for fear of recrimination. Close worked at the
DPW until spring 2004,
and worked “very closely with upper management” to provide employees with housing at a trailer park in Gerlach, Nevada, the nearest permanent town. Close
may have had an opioid problem, a DPW member recalled, but was also under stress at work.

“I wasn’t sure when the problem developed, but I remember him being stressed out working for [Burning Man], saying that he didn’t feel like he was earning money to do what he [wanted to be] doing because he was always working,” she said.

Close and Schaber were good friends, and they reportedly had more in common than Burning Man: a desire for community.

“I think both [Close and Schaber] have the same trait, in that they went out there with the best of intentions, didn’t get all of their needs met,” she told Salon. “I have experienced some of this as well — you know, just feeling like you are
being dumped by the community for whatever reason, or maybe there is a conflict
and people decide that they are going to quit . . . [The job] is so heavily tied in with the social.”

READ MORE: Behind the latest Catholic sex abuse scandal: The church's problem is male dominance

She also stressed the same subject Romero did, the intense experience of working on the playa: “You see people in situations [where] you would probably not see them in most other lines of work, or even just socially, if you had never gone out there
together. It produces incredible highs and lows. I think it’s a bit like other industries, certain aspects of the military for instance, where there is a lot of camaraderie and people have to work together and they have to rely on each other.”

The kind of people who are attracted to work in such an extreme and isolated environment may already be struggling, as Brown and Close were.

"The ethical part is that employers need to look in the mirror and ask, if you knew there was something you could do that could make a difference, why aren’t you doing it?” Spencer-Thomas of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention told
Salon.

Fighting for their lives

It was not until Romero and dozens of co-workers brought the suicides to upper management’s attention in 2014 that the organization took action. “Myself and some co-workers created a survey about the most pressing issues, work-related issues that DPW
was facing,” Romero explained. “It was in response to me bringing out a labor lawyer in 2014 and wanting to kind of negotiate how DPW is treated and represented in the company.”

Romero requested a meeting with upper management to discuss DPW issues, but they asked him to create a “survey” for the department instead. “Upper management was not happy with what happened next," he said. The survey was posted to internal DPW
online social media and then to a DPW Facebook page, and then it appeared on a public website.

After management reportedly got upset, Romero continued to tabulate grievances with his DPW colleagues, which included their concerns about mental health and the number of suicides in the department. More 70 DPW workers contributed to the survey,
according to the document shared with Salon, which eventually was shared with upper management:

There is a great deal of concern about the high frequency of depression and suicide among Black Rock City LLC (BRC) workers. While several factors contribute to depression and suicide, and correlation is not causation, the fact remains that 3 suicides (
in a year) is an astonishingly high rate for virtually any population so small,
and more so because, while these deaths are mourned, they are not entirely unexpected.

To put this in perspective, the US Army in 2011 reported a peak of 22.9 suicides per 100,000 soldiers, which was the highest rate seen in a decade. Per
100,000 appears to be a standard metric for this sort of thing. Assuming the combined numbers of Gate,
DPW and Rangers to be approximately 1,000 strong, that would mean a suicide rate of 300 per 100,000. Statistically speaking, Black Rock City’s staff are 13 times more likely to kill themselves in the off-season than veterans returning from active
combat duty. Even in a “slow year”, where only one BRC worker commits suicide, that is still 4 times the Army’s highest recorded suicide rate.

According to Romero, in 2015 the company responded to the survey with a document called “DPW Report Out.”

“They ended up adding EAP [employee assistance program] benefits,” Romero said. “It was on a page, the very last page of our contracts. It was after the point where you sign your contract, and so I didn't see it when I signed my
contract and one of
my co-workers did. I went to inquire about them and found out that [the benefits] were only available to us while we were on the playa.”

Given that cell phone service and internet access is generally unavailable on the playa, this benefit was largely useless. In 2016, Romero advocated to extend the EAP benefits, which included a work-based program designed to identify and assist employees
with personal problems.

“After I advocated that they extend them to the rest of the year -- I don't know if I caused that, but they then extended those benefits to one year from date of hire,” Romero said.

Jim Graham, Burning Man’s spokesperson, told Salon in an email when asked about the suicides and mental health of the workers that “worker safety is paramount to Burning Man and we are exceptionally proud of the extensive resources we provide to
staff.”

“Burning Man’s medical resources at the event also include a state-licensed
urgent care facility and six satellite first-aid stations, mental health support services, and on-site emergency air transport,” he said. “We also have our Black Rock
Rangers and People Operations teams on site to support staff in need of mental health resources.”

“Burning Man ruined her life”

While Romero observed co-workers commit suicide, other dangerous if non-fatal working conditions concern many DPW members. “There were times when people were injured and the insurance company had no idea how to communicate. People were kind of left out,
” said one DPW member. “I think they didn’t know what they were doing.”

Yet the most egregious instance of on-the-job injury came in 2014, when a Burning Man Ranger named Kelli Hoversten was permanently blinded by a laser, disabling her for life. Rangers, volunteers who help patrol and manage the playa during Burning Man,
are a crucial part of the festival's logistics. Rangers frequently intervene in
dangerous situations and prevent them from escalating to the point where a law enforcement agent might need to be involved, often assisting intoxicated guests
or providing
help to lost or confused Burners.


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