When singers like Bey­on­cé take the stage, thou­sands of eyes are glued to her and her alone. But behind the singer at every con­cert is an army of work­ers han­dling every­thing from light­ing to explod­ing con­fet­ti can­nons. And while those per­for­mances net enter­tain­ers and con­cert venues mas­sive amounts of mon­ey, the back­stage work­ers like the ones who made Beyoncé’s live per­for­mance July 15 in Atlanta pos­si­ble can’t say the same. Those employ­ees are now attempt­ing to orga­nize a union, hop­ing to reverse the trend of erod­ed wages and ben­e­fits for the stage­hands and oth­ers who make these per­for­mances so profitable.

Anger over the mis­treat­ment of enter­tain­ment work­ers in the Atlanta area has been brew­ing for years, accord­ing to Daniel Di Tol­la, an orga­niz­er with the Inter­na­tion­al Alliance of The­atri­cal Stage Employ­ees (IATSE). Enter­tain­ment com­pa­nies have embraced the use of tem­po­rary labor con­trac­tors for hir­ing stage­hands, elec­tri­cians, audio tech­ni­cians, and rig­gers for the short-term jobs at their con­certs, often seek­ing out the low­est-cost anti-union con­trac­tors available.

Some angered work­ers call these con­trac­tors ​“labor pimps,” Di Tol­la says, because they hoard the prof­its from the lucra­tive con­certs while many employ­ees are paid wages that are some­times half that of a union­ized stage­hand crew. The work­ers are now engaged in a fight to union­ize what work­ers say is one of the prime offend­ers of this busi­ness mod­el, a com­pa­ny called Crew One Pro­duc­tions.

Billing itself as ​“the largest tech staffing source in the South­east,” Crew One has grown into a major force in the music indus­try in the region and is under­min­ing IATSE’s tra­di­tion­al mem­ber­ship base, Di Tol­la says. The union has a long­stand­ing pres­ence in Atlanta — IATSE Local 927 cur­rent­ly rep­re­sents stage work­ers at the Atlanta Civic Cen­ter, the Fox The­ater and else­where — but non-union staffing agen­cies have come to dom­i­nate the pop music con­certs sec­tor in Atlanta.

Owing to the tem­po­rary nature of stage work, union­ized IATSE mem­bers reg­u­lar­ly cross over into non-union work for Crew One; such work­ers ​“are amazed by the dif­fer­ence” in com­pen­sa­tion, he says. Where­as a stage­hand under a union con­tract can expect $21 to $24 an hour plus ben­e­fits for a big per­for­mance, Crew One pays as lit­tle as $10 with no ben­e­fits at all. (Crew One did not respond to mul­ti­ple requests for comment.)

IATSE launched an orga­niz­ing dri­ve at Crew One last year, col­lect­ing autho­riza­tion cards for a union elec­tion to be over­seen by the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board (NLRB), accord­ing to Di Tol­la. The com­pa­ny adopt­ed a legal strat­e­gy to defeat the union, first insist­ing that the work­ers were inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors and there­fore inel­i­gi­ble to form a union. But the IATSE pre­vailed in the NLRB argu­ment over inde­pen­dent con­trac­tor sta­tus. An elec­tion was final­ly ordered in April 2014; after delays from addi­tion­al legal chal­lenges by Crew One, when the results were cer­ti­fied this fall, the union was over­whelm­ing­ly vot­ed in, with 116 work­ers vot­ing in favor of the union while only 60 opposed.

NLRB elec­tions are dif­fi­cult for any union, but Crew One pre­sent­ed some spe­cial prob­lems for IATSE. ​“This is free­lance work in some respects, and the turnover is almost con­stant, so you real­ly don’t know who is work­ing there from one week to the next,” Di Tol­la explains. ​“They like it that way because it dis­cour­ages union­iza­tion.” Crew One and IATSE agreed to a list of eli­gi­ble vot­ers that totaled 407, but ​“I doubt half of them will ever work for Crew One again,” he says. The 176 employ­ees who vot­ed in the elec­tion actu­al­ly rep­re­sent a high per­cent­age of the company’s work­force, and the final tal­ly was an espe­cial­ly good result for the union, accord­ing to Di Tolla.

As in many union orga­niz­ing dri­ves, the issues are about far more than wages. ​“It was atro­cious they way I was treat­ed,” says Chris Stew­art, a for­mer Crew One employ­ee who is active in the orga­niz­ing cam­paign. Stew­art says he has worked for numer­ous oth­er staffing com­pa­nies over the last six years, but ​“nobody treats you like Crew One does.”

Accord­ing to the union, errat­ic sched­ul­ing, favoritism in job assign­ments and lax safe­ty prac­tices are com­mon com­plaints among the work­ers. Stew­art says Crew One also sub­jects it employ­ees to pet­ty indig­ni­ties such as fail­ing to pro­vide drink­ing water for the stage­hands and enforc­ing rules that the work­ers must not speak to the performers.

Jamie Mal­loy, a Crew One rig­ger and union activist, says that he is con­cerned about safe­ty and ​“the degra­da­tion of my trade.” An enter­tain­ment rig­ger is a ​“dan­ger­ous job,” he says, and the com­pa­ny often does not pro­vide the need­ed safe­ty equipment.

Di Tol­la fears the fight with Crew One may stretch out far into the future, despite the work­ers’ elec­tion vic­to­ry. Since the NLRB cer­ti­fied the elec­tion results, the com­pa­ny is refus­ing to bar­gain a first con­tract. Union lawyers were informed by Crew One that the com­pa­ny want­ed to exer­cise its legal right to appeal the NLRB deci­sion on inde­pen­dent con­trac­tor sta­tus to a fed­er­al appeals court.

“Some­thing like that typ­i­cal­ly takes 12 to 18 months to work itself out. The whole process is geared to mak­ing the work­ers jump through hoops to get union rep­re­sen­ta­tion,” Di Tol­la says.

While the com­pa­ny appeals to the NLRB, the union plans to ramp up a pub­lic cam­paign on alleged labor abus­es in Atlanta’s con­cert busi­ness, attempt­ing to reverse the erod­ing work stan­dards for stage­hands through­out the country.