Employees at popular Williamsburg’s Vital Climbing Gym move to unionize

Employees at Williamsburg’s Vital Climbing Gym are working to unionize.

Photo by Varun Mehta

Over 100 employees at Brooklyn’s popular Vital Climbing Gym have begun the process of unionization to work to ensure that employees’ needs are being met.

Last month, employees went to Vital bosses to request the company to formally and voluntarily recognize the formation of a union — but the request was ultimately denied, forcing employees to take a vote instead.

Vital — which has locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn and in California — employs a large number of part-time workers who do not enjoy the same benefits or pay as full-time employees would, workers said. 

Therefore, many of the demands the employees hope to see met through unionization include improvements to pay to accommodate for high cost of living, more established boundaries when it comes to surveillance of employees and health and safety improvements like more places for workers to sit during shifts, and health insurance access.

“From the time that I started, there was kind of this idea that, you know this isn’t really that great of a job and it’s really fun when you start out but over time it kind of wears on you and there’s this sense that we’re not valued as much as we would like to be,” said Vital employee and unionization leader Aaron Vanek.“We’re in a position where we know that we want to make a change [and] we have the support to do it. This is a great time to do this kind of stuff and I think it’s important in the industry.”

Employees at Brooklyn’s Vital 45,000 square-foot location in Williamsburg decided to work towards unionization after workers at the Manhattan location successfully formed Climbers United with the aid of affiliation labor union Workers United, becoming one of the first climbing unions in the country.

Vital was first started in 2010 by founders David Sacher and Nam Phan who on Vital’s website pride themselves on doing “a…