South Park‘s Trey Parker and Matt Stone seem to have gotten more than they bargained for with Casa Bonita, but since they’re not giving the Casa Bonita performers what they’re bargaining for, the group is going on strike. The performers, who play characters like Black Bart, Captain Isabella, Amazon Ani, and the Sheriff (and, yeah, Manbearpig), unanimously voted to join the Actors’ Equity Association last year. Now after hitting a wall in contract negotiations, the performers announced picketing will begin on Thursday with the promise that “‘Casa Boo-nita’ will be dressed as an empty pink building for Halloween!”
“Casa Boo-nita” is actually at the heart of the performers’ dispute with management. Several of the actors were removed from the show in what the union argued was a retaliatory move timed to coincide with their first contract negotiation. Stone claimed they were only removed for the Halloween event. Whatever the motive, the actors who were removed had to deal with the strain of the sudden loss of income, and ultimately filed an Unfair Labor Practice with the National Labor Relations Board. “They broke the law when they did it,” one performer explained in Denver’s Westword. “The Casa Bonita Entertainment cast voted to have Actors’ Equity represent us as our union twice, both times unanimously. Management is required by federal law to bargain with Equity over making changes to working conditions during ongoing contract negotiations.”
Meanwhile, the union has been negotiating for better salary and protections in its contract. “Casa management came to the table today offering an additional 11 cents over their last unfair wage offer, and very little for future layoff protections. Despite that insult, the negotiating team responded with major compromises to try to get a deal. And then Casa Bonita walked away from the table without responding,” said lead negotiator Andrea Hoeschen, assistant executive director and general counsel for Actors’ Equity Association. “We know they can pay the wages we’re asking for because they already pay basically the same wages to the servers and bartenders. Their insistence on paying DOLLARS an hour less to the performers reflects a choice and a philosophy to devalue performers.”
Labor disputes have been part of the revamped Casa Bonita from the beginning, when management did away with tipping to the dismay of service staff (via Cracked). After staff backlash, wages on the service side were raised in an attempt to compensate for the lost income of tips. And that’s just one of the many ways Casa Bonita has been a financial fiasco for the South Park guys. (Pete Davidson and Colin Jost can relate.) Their journey with Casa Bonita was depicted in the recent documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, which doesn’t get into the labor disputes (though it does reportedly show the performers getting annoyed as Parker “continually overhauls the restaurant’s narrative infrastructure,” per Cracked.) Still, it’s easy to imagine that this strike is just another way the restaurant project has gone from childhood dream to nightmare for Parker and Stone. Luckily, they were recently awarded a $1.5 billion contract for their show, so they should be able to weather the financial strain a bit better than the performers getting pulled from the Casa Bonita floor.
