Delays and Belays: Touchstone Climbing Gym Management Stonewalls Workers

At first glance, Touchstone Climbing gyms look like a success story. From San Francisco to Los Angeles, their climbing walls are packed, their yoga classes booked, and their expansion seemingly endless, with 18 gyms across the state. Memberships cost over $100 a month, and climbers keep showing up.

But beneath the colorful climbing holds and chalk-coated climbing pads, tension has been building between the workers and management.

Touchstone’s rapid growth has made it the dominant name in California’s climbing scene. Yet many of the workers keeping these gyms running can’t even keep up with rent. Others have quietly left to work at competing gyms.

“[Jumping between teams and locations is] not a good situation for a creative individual to work in,” said one Touchstone routesetter from the Bay Area who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “We need consistency. We need psychological safety.”

“No one that’s just a member knows what it’s like dealing with upper management,” said Jordan Mueck, a front desk worker at Cliffs of Id in Culver City in Los Angeles and union member. “When we try to reach out, we’re always stonewalled.”

This disconnect between Touchstone’s growing profits and stagnant paychecks has fueled a wave of worker action. In Southern California, a potential shooter became the breaking point that turned quiet frustration into a full-blown labor fight.

Working in harm’s way

On October 2, 2023, an active shooter threat was made against Touchstone’s Southern California gyms. A gym member sent messages to an acquaintance saying that “god has spoken” to him, that he had “a kill order,” and that the recipient should “avoid the gym for a while.” Although the sender appeared to be referring to the Hollywood Boulders, a Touchstone gym in Los Angeles, he did not name the gym directly, according to Climbing.com. 

Workers at the gym had no idea the threats had been made until four days later, Hollywood Boulders’s staff wrote in an open letter. Management had made the decision not to inform them. 

“We all worked in harm’s way for four days,” the workers stated in an open letter. “As soon as we discovered the details of the threat on our own, all staff on site demanded to read the text messages ourselves. We were not given permission to read the texts, and immediately walked out of work.”

Workers say the company shrugged off the threat — no answers, no plan, no respect. Even as the FBI got involved — with at least one worker getting interviewed by an FBI agent — internal communication channels were shut down, and gyms continued operating without new safety protocols.

The company denied they had handled the situation badly, saying in a letter to Touchstone members that they’d reported the threat to the police, who had determined it was not credible.

“We spent countless hours understanding the facts, working with the police, and making use of the best legal options to ensure the safety of our staff and customers,” Mark Melvin, the CEO and founder of Touchstone, wrote to members.

It was a wake-up call for Jess Kim, a former desk staffer at Touchstone’s The Post in Pasadena who is now a union organizer. 

“Management had no intention of respecting workers,” she said. “So of course the workers unionized and quickly signed cards.”

In a matter of weeks, workers at five Southern California gyms signed union cards with Workers United. The response from Touchstone? Silence. Emails ignored. Meetings ducked. Then, the company hired the law firm Ogletree Deakins. 

The firm is notorious among labor organizers. John Logan, a labor historian at San Francisco State University, has studied Ogletree Deakins, and said they have run hundreds of anti-union campaigns.

“Labor organizers view Ogletree as a leading ‘union-busting’ law firm. Their sole goal in life is to destroy organized workers’ voices and to get rich doing it."

“Labor organizers view Ogletree as a leading ‘union-busting’ law firm,” Logan told Bay Area Current. “Their sole goal in life is to destroy organized workers’ voices and to get rich doing it. Ultimately, Ogletree will do what Touchstone asks it to do. If the company tells it to negotiate a first contract in good faith in a timely manner, this is what it will do. But hiring Ogletree should be a red flag for workers. It's like planting a flag saying, ‘unions not welcome here.’”

Despite this setback, the union held. Routesetters, desk staff, coaches, and janitors stood together.

Their demands seemed modest: fair pay, communication, safety, and respect. Their fight, however, has been anything but easy.

Slow-Walked and Stonewalled

Since September 2024, the union’s bargaining committee has met twelve times with Touchstone’s legal team. Half a year later, workers say the progress is glacial.

“In November, they hit us with a choice,” Mueck said. “Pay $75 more a month to keep the same health plan, or downgrade to a worse one. For folks living paycheck to paycheck, that $75 is not easy.”

For Mueck, the stakes were even higher. He was facing an expensive surgery, and without his Touchstone-sponsored health plan, he couldn’t afford it. “A week before I went into surgery,” he said, “the company announced the health insurance cut. I wouldn’t have been able to afford surgery.”

Worse still, an offhand comment from management suggested workers could “keep their healthcare” if they accepted a pay cut, a worker said. But Touchstone slow-walked talks by ignoring economic proposals until they stalled everything else, workers told Bay Area Current, a delay tactic that dragged out negotiations for four more months.

When the company finally made a pay proposal in March, it set base wages below what many workers were already making. “There was no talk of even grandfathering people in,” said Ryan Barkauskas, a front desk worker at The Post, one of Touchstone’s unionized climbing gyms. “It felt like a slap in the face.”

Touchstone declined to comment on these issues, instead pointing us to a Union FAQ posted on their corporate website. “We have not made any changes to pay, benefits, privileges, or working conditions at union gyms that we haven’t also made at non-union gyms,” the company says on its site. “All changes over the past year have been part of our normal business operations."

They also deny hiring union-busting lawyers, writing that “just like the union hired an attorney well-versed with the protocols of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), so did we.” 

Mark Melvin, along with other senior leadership, is “closely involved in the process” of bargaining with the union, the company writes on their site. But in private, Melvin has expressed skepticism about the union. In an April 2nd post to Touchstone’s internal Slack channel that was shared with Bay Area Current, Melvin addressed union staff directly. 

“I know the negotiation process can create tension, and I won’t pretend we’re always aligned,” Melvin wrote, “I’ll be candid — I believe unionization will change aspects of how we operate, and some of the spontaneity and enjoyment that make Touchstone unique may shift.”

At the end of March, fed up with the delays and rollbacks, the routesetters voted to authorize the first-ever routesetter strike in the United States.

The timing was key. LA Boulders and Verdigo Boulders, two of Southern California’s most well-known climbing gyms, were just days away from hosting the Touchstone Climbing Series, their biggest event of the year. By striking the week before, routesetters wielded enormous leverage.

Their demands were simple: safer workloads and working conditions that wouldn’t leave them injured or burned out. And they won. The strike brought Touchstone’s management back to the bargaining table, secured reduced workloads for routesetters, and proved that customers and the climbing community stood with the workers.

Thanks, But Don’t Boycott Us

In early 2025, the public got involved — sort of. A viral petition launched by Morgan McGehee, a former Touchstone routesetter, called on climbers to boycott Touchstone entirely until they “negotiate[d] a fair contract with the So Cal Union and give all their employees a fair wage." It spread fast. Thousands signed. Supporters called for mass cancellations of memberships.

Morgan McGehee left his job as a routesetter in 2019 in search of a living wage. “The director of routesetting told the routesetters directly that routesetting is not a career,” McGehee said. “If you don’t like the fact we’re not giving you raises,” he recalled being told, “you can leave and go somewhere else. Any 20-something-year-old college student would be happy to take your place.”

After seeing Touchstone open new gyms without providing workers a living wage, McGehee made the petition. “This was on the back of people asking for raises and bonuses, putting on really gnarly competitions, hearing about my friends with overuse injuries,” McGehee said.

But there was one problem: the union hadn’t asked for it.

“We appreciate the intention,” Kim said. “But that’s not what workers are asking for.”

“If they had the best interest for the employees at heart, then they would listen to us and work with us,” Mueck said.

Instead of canceling memberships, the union is urging climbers to take targeted action: show up at rallies, wear union pins, talk to workers, share their posts, donate to the strike fund, and most importantly, email the CEO.

“We don’t hate Touchstone,” Barkauskas said. “We want members to keep paying for membership. We love this community so much, and all of our passion comes from wanting to sustain ourselves to sustain our gyms.”

“We don’t hate Touchstone. We want members to keep paying for membership. We love this community so much, and all of our passion comes from wanting to sustain ourselves to sustain our gyms.”

The union’s core proposals reflect what most workers want in any job: predictable pay scales, consistent safety policies, and real accountability for harassment or discrimination. Some of their demands are as basic as creating a private space for lactation. Others seek structural change, like forming a joint labor-management committee or establishing clear steps for addressing misconduct.

Yet management has met that demand with delay after delay, workers told Bay Area Current. In the meantime, staff are left with unpredictable schedules, worsening healthcare, and a cost of living that outpaces their wages.

The Fight for the Soul of Climbing

Touchstone’s struggle isn’t happening in isolation. The climbing gym business is a booming $1.23 billion industry in North America, according to Grand View Research. In the last decade, the number of gyms in the country has jumped from 400 to nearly 700, the Climbing Business Journal reported. More gyms are expanding, consolidating, and attracting investor interest. But the workers who make it all run, from coaching youth teams to designing the routes that keep climbers coming back, are barely scraping by month-to-month.

“There’s so much opportunity in this industry,” said the anonymous routesetter. “But we need to build it differently. If Touchstone won’t lead that, someone else will.”

“What we want is to be treated like this is a respectable career, and something we want to invest in,” Barkauskas said. “We need better protections and better wages.”

Back in the gym, the routes keep changing. Walls reset. The community climbs on.

But behind the scenes, a different kind of hold is being tested: one that will determine whether the future of climbing is built for short-term profit, or built with gym staff and the community.