EUSA Exposed: The Darker Side of Edinburgh Fringe
A female student from the University of Edinburgh gives a chilling account of the conscious mismanagement and neglect of sexual harassment by EUSA at the VIP Loft Bar during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Edinburgh Fringe 2016, via Aesthetica Magazine
Edinburgh Fringe Festival is the largest arts festival in the world, attracting tourists and lovers of the arts from across the globe. It is a wild, month-long celebration of everything to do with culture, art, music, theatre, literature, comedy, and almost anything else you can think of. The streets are bursting with tourists (almost to an unbearable extent), and every formerly empty street corner is filled with a pop-up cafe or bar.
So naturally, as a student at Edinburgh University, I was desperate to come up to work during the Fringe for a booze-filled month of partying and watching shows.
The most common job for university students to get during Fringe is with EUSA, the Edinburgh University Students Association, as almost all of their premises become venues or bars for the month. A few of my friends had already worked for EUSA and enjoyed it, so I confidently applied, knowing my previous experience working on bars would probably be enough to get me in the door. And I was right. Not only did I get a job, but I was chosen to work on the Gilded Balloon VIP bar, located in the Loft Bar of Teviot Row House.
Gilded Balloon is a Scottish entertainment company and one of the foremost venues for some of the top shows of the Fringe. During the festival, Teviot Row House is transformed into a giant, pink Gilded Balloon hub; Teviot’s many bars become Gilded Balloon venues, and front of house staff donning pink t-shirts flood the building. Although I am hazy on the exact details of the relationship between EUSA and Gilded Balloon, from my month of working for them I grasped that Gilded Balloon oversees the operations, and it is EUSA who recruit and train the bar staff, the security and venue operations teams. In short, it is EUSA who are responsible for the wellbeing of their staff, even in Gilded Balloon bars.
The first few weeks of my employment with EUSA went relatively well. Most of it was filled with generic bar training, much of which I had already undertaken at my previous bar jobs, so I was pretty confident I knew how to pull a pint.
I was allocated my shift which would remain the same for the entire month, bar my one day off a week: 22:00pm-05:00am. I came to terms with the fact that I would be nocturnal for the entire festival. Not ideal, but I needed the money.
In a EUSA-organised staff social, I met the people I would be spending the next four weeks with. I am acutely aware that this will sound obnoxious, but it needs to be said: all the staff working the VIP bar were young, relatively attractive women, with the exception of one young, tall, also attractive man. While we were supposedly chosen for this exclusive bar because of our experience as bartenders, two girls admitted to me that they had never even worked on a bar before. I wondered what EUSA valued more, our appearance or our competence, but I swiftly cast this thought from my mind, assuring myself that the students’ union would not be so superficial.
“I wondered what EUSA valued more, our appearance or our competence, but I swiftly cast this thought from my mind, assuring myself that the students’ union would not be so superficial. ”
A few days before the festival started, the whole Teviot staff was brought together for some serious safety training. We received talks on fire safety, potential hazards in the bars, drug and alcohol awareness, and sexual harassment – specifically, what to do if you or a customer were being harassed. We were told how to call security, how to use the radios and what codes to use for certain sensitive scenarios. The basic message was “if you feel unsafe, call security.”
This did not apply, however, to the staff on Loft Bar.
After the safety training, the seven or so bar staff of the VIP bar were called up to meet with a couple of the EUSA duty managers. What we were told was outrageously manipulative and downright unethical.
We were told to forget everything we had been taught in the safety training.
We were told that as Loft Bar was an exclusive bar, the protocol would be different; VIPs expected a certain standard of service.
We were told that things would happen on this bar that EUSA would not normally let slide on other bars.
We were told that if we were sexually harassed, shouted at, sworn at, we should try to brush it off.
We were told to never call security. If there was a problem, we should only tell the Gilded Balloon bouncer on the door.
We were told to keep pouring drinks for prominent customers, even if we knew they were over the limit.
We were given a uniform inconsistent with the comfortable and work-appropriate EUSA t-shirts that the staff on other bars were allowed. Our uniform was a black, unnecessarily low-cut woman’s shirt: the first button on the shirt was approximately in line with the bottom of my sternum. Upon complaining about the indecency of the uniform, no alternative was provided – I was told to simply hoist up an apron to cover my cleavage if I felt uncomfortable.
When we protested that VIPs should not get a free pass to harass the staff simply by their virtue of being “VIPs,” all we heard was “of course, your safety comes first…. but…. this is a VIP bar…”
While I was unnerved by the attitude of the EUSA management, I continued on in their employment nonetheless, convincing myself that the VIPs who frequented the bar wouldn’t treat the staff as poorly as EUSA anticipated.
I was wrong.
I did have to brush off many inappropriate, sexual comments, the worst of which came from a man who claimed he was going to give every barmaid chlamydia before the night was out. On another occasion, I was pursued around the bar at 5:30 in the morning by a man trying to corner me and feel me up; his drunken logic being that this would convince me to go for a drink with him. We were shouted at, sworn at, insulted, and harassed. Yet we were told not to call security.
One of the girls on the bar quit within a week.
I know what you’re thinking: Why didn’t you just call security anyway? The explanation is that we did – once – and we were deterred from ever doing so again.
There was one night, not long into the festival, when a man came up to the bar at 4am requesting four double gin and tonics. We obligingly poured him his drinks, not quite realising how plastered he was. Upon hearing the total price of the four drinks, the customer started shouting, outraged that the drinks were so expensive. After swearing at us profusely, we convinced him to pay for the drinks and sit back down. Staggering past the bar, he then stumbled, dropping two of the drinks on the floor. Looking at the mess of broken glass on the floor, he laughed, and then promptly, deliberately threw the other two gin and tonics on the floor.
At this point, we called security while the customer demanded we pour him fresh drinks, swearing at us when we declined to serve him. We waited for security to arrive, which took far longer than it should have considering it was an urgent call. When security did finally arrive, they took one look at the enraged drunken man and the mess on the floor, LAUGHED, and walked away.
The three of us girls who were on the bar that night were left to deal with a burly, angry, intoxicated man who had no qualms hurling abuse at us. After at least an hour, our duty manager for the night came up to the bar. We explained to him what had happened, hoping he would permanently ban the man from Teviot, or at the very least kick him out of the bar.
Instead, the duty manager apologised to the customer and wrote him a receipt for four more double gin and tonics which he came back to claim the next day.
That is why we didn’t feel comfortable calling security: we knew that security, as well as the managers, wouldn’t have our backs when we needed them to. Apparently, customer satisfaction was more important than the safety of the staff.
It is worth noting at this point that this attitude was not present in the other Teviot bars. A couple of staff from one of the bars downstairs – Library Bar – once came up to Loft Bar to help us during a particularly busy evening. They were shocked at how such outrageous behaviour was so easily brushed under the carpet. One girl commented that in Library Bar, if a customer was even a little sarcastic to a member of staff, then security would remove them from the building, no questions asked.
Unfortunately, we did not receive the same assurances of safety from the VIP bar.
What infuriated me the most, however, was that plastered in every toilet in the entire building were posters with the catchphrase “Zero tolerance.” EUSA actively promoted, and was proud of, its “zero tolerance” policy towards sexual harassment, so much so that they put posters protesting sexual harassment and abuse in every toilet cubicle. The irony that I once burst into a toilet cubicle in floods of tears because a male customer had shouted abuse at me because I didn’t want to flirt with him, only to be faced by one of EUSA’s “zero tolerance” posters, is almost comical. It seems EUSA was willing to forgo its principals in order to appease the VIPs.
However, potentially the most ridiculous part of this absurdity is that the supposed “VIP” bar (which was so exclusive that the safety and comfort of the staff was a small price to pay) was not even that exclusive.
During Fringe, as well as working a full-time job, I also played in the pit band in a couple of amateur musicals. It just so happened that these shows were sponsored by Gilded Balloon, and as I was technically a Gilded Balloon performer, I received a Gilded Balloon VIP pass. A broke, insignificant university student was classified as a VIP and granted access to the Gilded Balloon VIP bar. Not only was EUSA selling its soul and sacrificing its staff for the sake of the precious VIPs, but the very VIPs who were deemed more important than the mental and physical health of the bar staff consisted of literally anyone with a vague connection to a Gilded Balloon show.
To this day, I still cannot comprehend why the Edinburgh University Students’ Association would throw its own students under the bus in an attempt to curate a sufficiently “exclusive” atmosphere for a VIP bar filled with yet more students.
I am very aware that the mistreatment of staff in the hospitality industry is a systemic and deep-rooted problem. While I do take issue with the individual EUSA staff members who turned a blind eye to sexual harassment in their own bars, I know that their behaviour was likely a result of a fundamental problem in the relationship between EUSA and Gilded Balloon, and more generally the failures of the industry itself. I do not know the pressure EUSA was under to please the owner of Gilded Balloon (who frequented Loft Bar often), but I imagine it was considerable and almost definitely contributed to the poor treatment of the staff.
The point of this article is threefold. Firstly, for selfish purposes, after a year of carrying around my anger towards EUSA, I thought writing some sort of exposé would be cathartic if nothing else.
Secondly, I wish to raise awareness of the all too common mistreatment and abuse of staff in hospitality. I could write a thousand more articles in a similar vein about every other bar I have worked in, and I have heard countless similar stories from almost all of my friends who have worked behind a bar or in a restaurant.
Thirdly, I want to encourage Edinburgh University students to hold their students’ association accountable. It is up to the students, especially the President of EUSA and the Sabbatical Officers, to ensure that fellow students never have to experience this type of treatment, in or outside of university grounds. The sole purpose of a students’ association should be to support and look after its students. So far, I have witnessed only the opposite from EUSA.
I can only hope this will change.
C.N. is a fourth year student at the University of Edinburgh studying History and Politics.