When the girls of Sugared + Bronzed — a salon chain specializing in spray tanning and sugaring hair removal — first heard about labor unions, we didn’t expect that workers like us could have a union of our own. Unions were for people who had dangerous jobs, ones that were physically demanding with chemical exposures, or for workers in the entertainment industry who put on a show for hours and hours every day. Our jobs weren’t anything like that!

For the most part, we kept our heads down and did our jobs. But as we began to form relationships — talking to each other, learning our co-workers’ struggles and their joys, their opinions and thoughts, their lives — we started to think more about our working conditions, too. We thought about the tanning solution we are exposed to every day and how we were expected to emotionally perform with clients while maintaining professionalism. We realized that workers like us deserve a voice on the job like anyone else, so we did something about it: On August 5, we voted to form the first salon chain union in the country. Here are some lessons we learned through the process.

One of the main lessons I’ve learned from organizing is the importance of relationships and community. The workplace can often feel like a place that is devoid of these values, and it usually is. Companies value the bottom line above all else and in a client-based workplace, this can fuel unnecessary competition and strife between employees. This is clearly a result of capitalistic values which emphasize individuality above all else, but many of us have accepted it as the status quo. We’re taught to leave work at work and view it as something completely separate from the rest of our lives: don’t talk about pay, don’t talk about conditions, don’t talk about anything negative. In the beauty industry, this can be a bit harder to put into practice due to the intimate nature of services that we’re providing. When our team really started talking to each other and hearing each other’s thoughts and feelings about our workplace, the organizing began.

We didn’t set out to form a union from the get go. Our organizing efforts began with a simple email to management meant to address some of our concerns regarding pay and workplace safety. The company response to this was to hold individual meetings with the workers. These weren’t meetings that made us feel heard and valued: We felt that the point was to say, “Don’t bring this up again.” Their immediate response to employees banding together to express real concerns was dismissal and intimidation, which only inspired us to come together even more. Two of our stewards, Alex Walsh and Allie Rooney, got the ball rolling by reaching out to the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a recommendation that came from a co-worker who was in SAG-AFTRA, a union that represents actors, recording artists, and other media professionals.