Union's Bid to Block Film Workers' Membership Suit Mostly Fails, but Retaliation Claim Dismissed

The plaintiffs — electric technicians Alexander Wilson and Ronald Bishop, and set dressing and property worker Gable Schneider — sued International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 52, the largest New York local of IATSE and the bargaining unit for seven crafts in the New York City film and television production industry. At the heart of the case is article 7, section 21, of the IATSE Constitution, which provides that any person who has achieved vested status in a Local or national defined benefit pension plan shall immediately be taken into membership without a vote. The plaintiffs allege Local 52 ignored that provision for years, costing them membership benefits, pension accrual, and work opportunities available only to full members.

The court held that the breach-of-contract claim under LMRA § 301 — the federal statute that gives district courts jurisdiction over suits alleging violations of labor contracts — survives dismissal. That ruling rejected Local 52's argument that the case was really a representational dispute belonging exclusively before the National Labor Relations Board under the Garmon preemption doctrine, which ordinarily requires courts to defer to the NLRB over conduct arguably covered by the National Labor Relations Act. The decision turned on the distinction between representational questions and contractual ones: because resolving the claim requires interpreting article 7, section 21, of the IATSE Constitution, the court retained jurisdiction. The court also held that Bishop's claim is timely because the specific version of the IATSE Constitution at issue was only adopted by Local 52 on July 29, 2021 — meaning the contract could not have been breached before that date, and Bishop filed suit on May 27, 2025, approximately four years later.

The ERISA § 510 interference claim — which prohibits any person from discharging, fining, suspending, expelling, disciplining, or discriminating against a plan participant for exercising benefit rights or for the purpose of interfering with the attainment of any right to which such participant may become entitled — also survived. Local 52 argued it is not an employer and therefore cannot be liable under the statute, but the court pointed to ERISA's definition of covered persons, which includes employee organizations and is not limited to employers. The plaintiffs plausibly alleged specific intent to interfere: they contend Local 52 deliberately excluded vested applicants and permits from the Local 52 Plan while collecting their 2.5% gross wage deductions, mathematically benefiting full members at non-members' expense. One remedy, however, was cut: the request for the value of lost future employment benefits under ERISA § 502(a)(3) — the provision authorizing equitable relief for ERISA violations — was dismissed because that provision does not permit compensatory money damages of that kind, and the plaintiffs had not asserted a claim under ERISA § 502(a)(1)(B), the proper vehicle for recovering withheld benefits.

Schneider's retaliation claim under the New York State Human Rights Law fared worse. Schneider alleges Local 52 blocked his membership because he sued the union in 2019 for race discrimination, a case that was dismissed in October 2020. The court held that the portion of the retaliation claim tied to Schneider's vested-status membership invitation — which, like Bishop and Wilson, he was allegedly due to receive in April 2024 but did not — is preempted by LMRA § 301 because resolving it requires interpreting the same constitutional provision at issue in the contract claim. The surviving allegations — that Local 52 denied Schneider the chance to sit for membership exams and placed him on a do-not-hire list — failed on causation: the complaint did not specify when those actions occurred, making it impossible to assess temporal proximity to the 2019 lawsuit, and even assuming the relevant window ran from October 2020 through April 2024, that multi-year gap is too attenuated to support a plausible inference of retaliation without additional evidence of retaliatory animus.

The class allegations were left intact. The court declined to strike them at the pleading stage, noting that motions to strike class claims are disfavored in this circuit because they ask a court to terminate class litigation before discovery on certification questions has occurred.