Vote-by-Mail Delays Result in Strippers’ Election on Forming Union in California

Strippers at a topless bar in North Hollywood, California, have to wait for results of an election to form a union because of a dispute Monday involving vote-by-mail ballots.

Several dancers at the Star Garden dive bar want to form a union within the Actors’ Equity Assn., but the management of the bar alleges that many of the ballots were submitted by people who have never worked at the establishment.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

The National Labor Relations Board said Monday that a majority of the ballots were challenged by the club, Star Garden, and the labor board couldn’t complete a tally.

…

The director of the board’s Region 31 Los Angeles office will need to determine whether the 16 challenged ballots should be opened and counted. One ballot cast in the mail-in vote wasn’t challenged and one ballot was voided.

…

An attorney representing Star Garden said the club argues that dancers who submitted ballots were not employed by the business and thus weren’t eligible to vote.

Star Garden originally tried to argue that it was not subject to union elections, because it had less than $500,000 in annual revenue, but the National Labor Relations Board disagreed, arguing that its future revenue projections would exceed that amount.

Democrats and “woke” companies have embraced vote-by-mail, but have sometimes balked at applying the same rules to union elections among their own employees. Their arguments echo those of Republican critics of vote-by-mail: namely, that vote-by-mail elections are subject to fraud and intimidation.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who owns a winery, resisted legislation for months that would allow for vote-by-mail in farm worker union elections.

Amazon, headed by left-wing billionaire Jeff Bezos, similarly resisted vote-by-mail in union elections.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.