It’s not Iggy who’s the problem. Union members say it’s billionaire Paul Allen and his company First & Goal, which operates Qwest Field. Several years ago, after the union picketed the stadium, the company signed an agreement that gives the union preference for stadium concerts and requires all concert producers to pay union scale.

Stagehand union member Al Crawshaw says he was not given routine breaks while working as a non-union stagehand at Qwest Field. Stadium operators First & Goal had an agreement calling for union labor for concert setup. Photo by Ken Dean.

The hitch is it’s the concert producers who hire stagehand crews, not First & Goal.

“It’s up to the promoters to decide who they want to use. It’s not First & Goal’s choice,” says John Morrison, president of Event Resource Management (ERM), a Mercer Island company that gets a number of the jobs at Qwest Field and the 5,000-seat WaMu Theater created last year at the stadium’s event center.

The union says First & Goal is responsible: It contracted with promoter AEG to open the new theater and shouldn’t be using low-wage outfits like ERM that provide no benefits, fail to give breaks, and don’t pay workers for time spent filling out W-2 forms and timesheets — something union members say they have seen firsthand.

Last fall, after learning that ERM hadn’t paid union scale for a concert at the stadium, Local 15 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stagehand Employees asked members to sign up with ERM and get on the crew that set up and loaded out the Rolling Stones concert at Qwest Field.

“It was a little scary because of the inexperience of the people I was working with,” says Nick Shellman, a Local 15 member. At one point, he says, a worker turned to hear what a crew chief was saying and nearly got hit by stage platforms being thrown down to him.

“You have to keep an eye on what you’re doing, on everything going on around you,” he says. “None of the people I was working with was hip to that.”

Shellman and fellow union member Al Crawshaw both say they worked four hours without the 10-minute break required by law, and both describe having to show up early and stay 20 to 30 minutes after their shift to sign out.

ERM paid the wage they would normally get on a union call, $21.63. But at non-stadium jobs, Crawshaw points out, ERM pays about $9.50 an hour and tacks on fees and charges that don’t go to the employees. “They’re a temp agency,” he says.

For someone just out of high school, it’s exciting to get a T-shirt and get paid to watch a concert, but “none of these guys are really thinking of it as a career,” Shellman says. “For those of us who do it for a living, it’s a skilled trade, a profession.”

That’s an idea ERM President John Morrison scoffs at.

“A career where you work part-time is not really a definition of a career to me,” he says. “Stagehands are paid hourly, and there’s no guarantee of work.”

Morrison, who is currently fighting the state Department of Labor & Industries over $140,000 that L&I says the company owes it for 2002, acknowledges that ERM doesn’t pay workers for filling out forms before or after a shift. But waiting to sign out at the end of a shift, he says, “takes five or 10 minutes. A half hour? No.”

The company hasn’t set up a benefits package because, to qualify, “you have to work 1,000 hours a year,” he says. “None of our people would qualify. Very few ever qualify, even at the union.”

That may be true, but Shellman says that’s not the point. “Public facilities,” he says, “shouldn’t be involved with employers who treat their employees poorly.”