Owners’ Rep Told Workers To ‘Burn in Hell’, UES Game Cafe Says

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Union employees at a popular board game cafe with Manhattan locations, including the Upper East Side, have reported experiencing incidents of verbally abusive and threatening behavior during bargaining sessions.

The situation reportedly escalated earlier this month when Andrew Hoffmann, the legal representative of Hex & Co. owners Jon Freedman and Greg May, directed inflammatory remarks toward union workers, including calling them "f*cking disgusting" and telling them to "burn in hell."

A union representative said that those comments were based on assumptions about the workers' unrelated political views, without relevance to negotiations or ongoing discussions.

The union for employees at Hex&Co., the Brooklyn Strategist, and the Uncommons, owned either jointly or solely by Freeman and May, collaborates with Workers United, which has organized over 350 Starbucks locations nationwide.

"At Hex & Co. we are always expected to uphold respect for ourselves, management, and the customer. Yet during our bargaining sessions our ownership has routinely arrived late, and put forth statements of such vitriol as to normally warrant a customer being kicked out of stores if used against a staff member," employee Gianluca Percovich said.

In the fall of 2023, employees at Hex & Co. disclosed their plans to form a union, later called Tabletop Workers United. Workers cited concerns about unfair compensation, insufficient job security and ineffective grievance procedures as their main reasons for organizing.

Their demands included a living wage of $22.50 an hour, a transparent path to promotions and adequate staffing to meet the workload.

However, instead of voluntarily recognizing the union, management decided to instead petition the National Labor Review Board to hold a union election, which the group won in a "landslide" vote in November 2023, Patch previously reported.

Since then, members of Tabletop Workers United have engaged in multiple meetings with the company to address their non-economic demands, Workers United said.

These proposals aim to advance equity and justice within the workplace, a representative from the union told Patch.

Workers United said that there have been six bargaining sessions to date, during which ownership has allegedly referred to workers as "disgusting, low-class morons" for organizing a community event in support of their union.

They also labeled contract demands concerning diversity and equity as "the insanity of the woke."

"It’s abysmal and shameful that ownership is paying one man more for an afternoon of name calling and personal attacks than many full-time employees make in a week," Percovich said.

Additionally, ownership has been reported to have canceled or arrived late to bargaining sessions, requested workers to relinquish vital standard protections in their counterproposals, and interjected their own unrelated political views, Workers United said.

In a statement to Patch, May and Freeman said that they did not make any of the comments recently attributed to them. They asserted that neither of them had made such statements or anything similar, contrary to allegations made by the Tabletop Workers United Instagram account.

"This sensationalized propaganda is one of many examples that demonstrate the Union isn't operating in good faith," the owners said in a statement.

Hex & Co. management, however, did not deny any of the comments that were made by their lawyer.

"Our legal team, some of whom are Jewish, were upset that Tabletop Worker members would want to financially support the Workers United PAC, who had supported Hamas in a social media post just hours after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023," the owners said. "The commentary by our lawyer was directed at the Worker’s United organizers (including their Political Director) who were in attendance."

Following the breakdown in negotiations, employees have sent a letter to ownership addressing the issue and have initiated a public petition to advocate for their demand for respect during the bargaining process.