Will it be baristas who change the coffee industry?

Dark Green coffee trees planted along the hillside of Hacienda Illuminada in Puerto Rico. Source: Author

The sign on the Starbucks in Seattle’s Pike Place market bears the original brown logo of a naked siren holding each side of her scaly parted tail. The siren and the name “Starbuck” — plucked from Moby Dick by two teachers and a writer who founded the coffee shop in 1971 — were chosen to evoke the seafaring tradition of coffee merchants. They are symbols that might prompt someone to wonder: Where did this coffee come from, and how did it get here?

Pike Place is one of the oldest farmers’ markets in America and draws millions of visitors annually. But the market’s biggest crowds do not surround the fishmongers hurling salmon through the air, nor the grocers offering you a ripe peach slice on the edge of a knife, nor the heaping breadbowls of chowder. Instead, they are there for this Starbucks. A permanent rope is installed outside the store to contain the hours-long lines that tourists from around the world wait in every day to get coffee from the “original Starbucks.”

The truth is that this store is not the original Starbucks — it opened in 1976, and the actual first Starbucks is long gone. The Pike Place store is, however, the world’s oldest Starbucks, turning 50 this year. And this April, like hundreds of other Starbucks locations throughout the US, Pike Place baristas launched a petition to unionize.

The movement to organize Starbucks baristas began in 2021 at a store in Buffalo, New York. Five years later, Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) represents 14,980 employees across 691 stores, but Starbucks, which has the highest CEO to median worker pay disparity in the S&P 500, has yet to agree to a contract. So last November, Starbucks Workers United voted for its biggest move yet: an indefinite strike.

Ayse Avcular had worked at Starbucks for 5 years when she joined the 92% of unionized Starbucks baristas who voted for the indefinite strike. She started in Tacoma, Washington, then spent the next 4 years at the University Way location in Seattle while attending college, working her way up to a shift supervisor position. She was there when the store first voted to unionize in 2022.

At the time, Avcular and her coworkers had their regular hours cut, leaving the store understaffed. Avcular, still a full-time student, had to get a second job at a pizza restaurant, and others lost certain health care benefits after their hours were reduced. After a policy change, one of her coworkers had to demote back to a barista because shift supervisors were no longer guaranteed regular hours. Additionally, workers felt unsafe as the store needed extensive renovations, and Starbucks removed their security guard.

“We would have incidents like three times a day, and they could be to the point of someone threatening to kill me, people threatening us with weapons, we had to call biohazard for things like blood on the floor,” Ayse said, “it’s just not our job”.

The store had gone on strike multiple times since unionizing for a few days to a week at most — nothing like this. Ayse said when she voted to authorize the indefinite strike in November, she did it for her more vulnerable coworkers.

“I know it would help them more than it helps me,” Ayse said, “but it would benefit me too, in a way, that we would have stability at the store, safety would be addressed, wages would be addressed.”

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On “Red Cup Day,” which marks the beginning of the company’s lucrative holiday season, Starbucks baristas shut down 65 stores across the U.S. The strike spread to over 180 stores within a month, and at its peak, the strike grew to 4,500 baristas across over 130 cities, according to SBWU. Ahead of the strike, hundreds of lawmakers called for Starbucks to resume union negotiations, and baristas were joined at the picket line by venerated pro-labor politicians, including Seattle mayor Katie Wilson, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, legitimizing and amplifying the movement.

The barista job we know today was almost singlehandedly defined and proliferated by Starbucks. During the 1990s, the company underwent a rapid expansion under then-CEO Howard Schultz, which introduced espresso drinks to mainstream culture — creating the overwhelming ubiquity of coffee shops in the US today. When Starbucks first came to New York in 1996, the New York Times described the novel company as selling “drinks like latte (pronounced LAH-tay), a shot of espresso topped with hot milk but less foamy than cappuccino.” This was known as the second wave of coffee; the first wave being mass-produced grocery brands like Folgers, and the third wave being the hip specialty cafes which pioneered artisanal drinks and latte art.

As specialty coffee became a subculture, the “barista” earned its own canon of associations, exaggerated by disparaging media portrayals. Baristas have dyed hair, piercings, perhaps a tiny beanie on their head, perhaps financial support from their parents, and a bachelor’s degree in the humanities. But 30 years into the proliferation of barista jobs, many baristas are older, work full-time, and have dependents. In other words, they look like any other service workers in a country with a service-dominated economy, and increasingly, they want to be treated like it.

Making espresso drinks is considered a skill, and even a craft, with many “specialty coffee” jobs asking applicants for upwards of 3 years of experience and photos of their latte art. But whether or not you can paint a swan with steamed milk, the job is still considered entry level. In the past five years, baristas have pushed to the forefront of the unionizing movement in the food service industry, which, at 1.6%, has the lowest unionization rate of any sector in the US, outside of white-collar industries like finance. SBWU represents baristas from the world’s largest coffeehouse chain, but it is not the only barista union. Dozens of other coffee chains, including Blank Street, Blue Bottle, Peet’s, and La Colombe, as well as individual local cafes, have successfully unionized in a chain reaction of ambitious campaigns — though fewer have received contracts.

As food service work has long been considered temporary and nonaspirational, there is more to this movement than wage campaigns. Over 40% of employed college graduates currently hold jobs that do not require college degrees, and while job opportunities are scarce, baristas have used unionizing as a way of finding meaning in food service work. Through organizing, baristas are conducting deeper investigations of their companies. Unionized baristas are starting to examine the larger coffee industry they work in, and other workers in the industry want their help.

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Coffee is a funny flashpoint for a food service labor movement. It is a product with virtually no nutritional value, but it has a demand that has withstood prices rising around 40% in 2025. 75% of Americans drink it every day, 3 cups of it on average. It is the most traded global agricultural commodity, although this agricultural work is so far removed from the US, Americans can and do almost forget that coffee is a crop.

Coffee beans are the seeds of a red cherry species, which grows on trees, mostly only in high-altitude tropical microclimates. They are then sold on a volatile futures market across a supply chain that’s difficult to trace and harder to understand. Coffee agriculture is the sixth biggest driver of deforestation in the world. It is fraught with human rights violations, from child labor to sexual abuse, and it has a history of labor movements dating back centuries.

6,000 miles away from Seattle, in São Paolo, Brazil, another protest broke out against Starbucks, but rather than baristas holding up signs, it was rural farmworkers asking the company to stop buying coffee from farms with conditions analogous to slavery.

The protest was organized by the Articulation of Rural Workers of Minas Gerais (ADERE-MG), which was founded in 2011 to address a crisis of modern slavery in Brazilian agricultural work. ADERE’s coordinator, Jorge Ferreira dos Santos Filho, said he had been a victim of agricultural slave labor three times, starting when he was just 14 years old.

“Look, I’m not acting against my country, far from it,” Santos Filho said, “but in any case, we have a Brazilian society founded on slavery.”

Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producer, supplying 35–40% of the world’s coffee annually. Like virtually every other coffee-growing country in Latin America, its coffee production was a project of European colonialism, in an era of legal slavery. While many countries were abolishing slavery throughout the 19th century, the practice expanded in Brazil specifically due to a sharp rise in coffee demand. In 1888, Brazil became the last country in the Americas to outlaw slavery, through a gradual process. However, slave-like conditions still exist illegally in Brazil, and today, coffee is the leading driver of this crisis.

The organization’s first action in 2011 was organizing almost 1,000 workers to occupy the Ministry of Labor, padlocking it and demanding labor inspections of the countryside. Since then, the group has conducted field work to rescue workers in illegal conditions, help them sue the companies that profited off their exploitation, and put the farms that broke labor laws on a “dirty list” — a public registry of employees found to have used slave labor.

“We have shown that large corporations — Nestlé, Starbucks, McDonald’s — profit greatly from slave labor, and they profit greatly from slave labor in the Brazilian coffee industry,” Santos Filho said. “They often talk and spend billions and billions of dollars, or euros, or reais, marketing themselves, saying they’re selling you a safe product, a sustainable product, a product that respects life. And we’re here — I think you in the United States know this — we’re here saying that all of that is a lie.”

Modern slavery can be hard to identify, as it often consists of debt bondage, failure to pay workers, and other forms of fraud. According to Santos Filho, farmers often have to pay for harvesting equipment out of their wages, work in poor sanitary conditions, and are unprotected from the decades of dangerous pesticides used on the farmland. 82% of victims of slave labor in Brazil are black.

Since 2004, Starbucks has used its own auditing program called C.A.F.E. (Coffee and Farmer Equity) to verify that farms meet ethical and environmental standards. However, an October 2025 report by Reportér Brasil found that a major farm was able to maintain its C.A.F.E. certification, even after the federal government rescued 20 people from slave labor at the site. The report also states that Starbucks continues to buy coffee from Cooxupé, the biggest cooperative of arabica coffee farms in the world. Meanwhile, 81 victims of slave labor were rescued from Cooxupé farms in 2025, ranging from ages 12 to 72.

Starbucks responded to the report, saying it only buys coffee from an audited “small fraction” of Cooxupé’s over 19,000 farms, but the company does not disclose which farms it buys from.

Starbucks did not respond to a request for further comment.

To discern the reality, Santos Filho invites coffee-drinking Americans to go to Brazil and see coffee agriculture for themselves. “For those who don’t know about coffee farming, it’s about being in Brazil and experiencing how the harvest works, talking to the workers, seeing the working conditions,” Santos Filho said.

Santos Filho is not the only coffee farmer encouraging Americans to see coffee farms for themselves. Regardless of working conditions, farming coffee is enormously laborious, especially for the beans to qualify as “specialty,” which is the standard for most third-wave cafes. In recent years, multiple coffee farms around the world have started agro-tourism businesses in an attempt to teach consumers why their coffee is worth its price — and take in some extra cash.

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There are coffee farms that resemble mainland U.S. agriculture — vast rectangles of crops planted in neat rows — although, unlike the flat terrain of the great plains, these coffee plots are typically arched over hillsides high in the mountains. Many coffee farms lack these ordered plots completely, and coffee trees grow as just one plant in a lush forest. Hacienda Illuminada in Puerto Rico is such a farm.

Puerto Rico and Hawaii are the only places in the U.S. that can grow coffee, and combined, they produce less than 1% of the country’s demand. Coffee was introduced to Puerto Rico in 1736 and expanded rapidly in the 19th century. For a time, Puerto Rican coffee was considered to be the best in the world — it was even the choice of the Pope. But when the U.S. colonized Puerto Rico in 1898, U.S. investors only funded sugar plantations, and the island’s coffee industry was devastated.

Hacienda Illuminada was founded in 2014 by Brandon Ivan Peña and Sam Sepulveda, an entrepreneur and a Puerto Rican airline pilot who wanted to reinvigorate coffee in Puerto Rico. They acquired an abandoned coffee farm in Maricao, the poorest town in Puerto Rico, and planted 50,000 coffee trees. In 2017, they opened their first cafe in Maricao, and today, they have 30 shops across Puerto Rico, New York City, and Texas, all serving coffee grown at Hacienda Illuminada.

Their cafe chain is called 787 Coffee, and has become known for its rum-infused beans and iced coffee served in IV-like bags. Their prices, which can be over $10 for a single latte, are the subject of much grumbling, but 787 insists they are selling a premium product. According to 787, they are the only coffee company that ethically handles every step of the supply chain themselves, from seed to cup, all in the U.S.

For $45, you can take a tour of Hacienda Illuminada in the mountains of Maricao, a winding 2-hour drive and 3,000 feet of elevation from San Juan. The director of the farm, Angel, who preferred not to give his last name, leads the tours. His family has farmed coffee for generations, a difficult job which he says “young guys don’t want to do anymore.” He added, “You have to love it.”

Hacienda Illuminada started their agro-tourism business after Hurricane Maria destroyed 97% of the farm, forcing them to close two 787 locations in New York City because they didn’t have enough coffee to supply them. The farm also has chickens and goats, as well as rare white peacocks and brightly colored macaws — additions they hoped would draw more tourism.

“We wanted to take people here and show them what it takes to make good coffee,” Angel said.

Angel takes tour groups through the coffee harvest, encouraging guests to hold the beans at different stages of processing. Their coffee is grown under the shade of banana trees, which keeps it from drying out, protects farmers from sunburn, and maintains the biodiversity of the farm. The bananas themselves are made into banana bread. As he takes you through the farm, he’ll warn you to walk carefully down the hills, so as not to slip in the dark red volcanic mud which makes the land so fertile.

Hacienda Illuminada’s neighbors are also coffee farms, most of which are owned by a subsidiary of Coca-Cola. They were found to owe $68,000 in back wages during the most recent investigation of the company in 2015. Angel is proud to tell tour groups that the starting rate for farmers at Hacienda Illuminada is $10 an hour, which he says is double the typical wage for coffee farmers in Puerto Rico. 787 is, as they claim, an exception among cafes. The problem is, most Americans want a cup of coffee to be $3, and most cafes do not build their business around supporting a farm.

“It is easy to say a bag of coffee is too expensive, but all of my coworkers started at a fair wage,” Angel said.

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Coffee is grown in over 70 countries, at farms with great variation in structure and conditions. It is hard to make any generalizations about the industry, but the reality for the majority of coffee farmers is extreme poverty. About 95% of the world’s coffee farms are “small holders,” meaning they are less than five hectares, and according to Fairtrade International, 70 to 80% of the world’s smallholder coffee farmers live on less than $2 per day.

In 2024, environmental lawyer Etelle Higonnet founded Coffee Watch, a nonprofit watchdog organization aimed at addressing environmental and human rights issues in the coffee industry. Increasing pay for farmers is one of the NGO’s plethora of goals.

“The farm workers are almost all extremely poor and not earning anything even close to poverty income,” Higgonnet said. “That’s why you end up with all the bonded labor, the slave labor and the human trafficking.”

Higgonnet explains that a barrier to raising wages is that in many coffee-growing countries, labor organizing is extremely difficult and often illegal. “They’re locked into poverty by the industry, making it so dangerous and hard to have unions,” Higgonnet said. “You get killed, you get threatened, you get fired.”

Santos Filhos experienced this himself while working for a union in Brazil prior to forming ADERE. “In 2008, in the city of Três Corações, they tried to kill me inside the union,” Santos Filhos recounted. “I had a gun pointed at me, they pulled the trigger, it misfired three times.”

Santos Filhos is aware of the growing barista movement. “I see the mobilization and strikes in the United States around coffee shop workers, like Starbucks, in a positive light,” Santos Filhos said, “but I also see a very individualistic way in which this group doesn’t include other issues of other victims throughout this chain.”

He drew a comparison between baristas’ struggle for better wages and that of coffee farmers. “I would like, for example, a worker here in Brazil to receive $7 per hour of work,” Santos Filhos said. “Today, a worker in Brazil receives around $7 for almost a full day’s work.”

With coffee companies unlikely to voluntarily increase wages for farmers or baristas, Etelle Higonnet believes that barista unions could be a powerful mechanism for change on both sides of the industry.

“[Unions] have this immense power to uplift workers in the same supply chain, but it’s extremely rare for that to happen,” Higgonnet said. “You need to be able to have factories shut down, cafes shut down, ports shut down, and warehouses in the producer countries shut down.”

There is some precedent for collaboration between baristas and farmers. In 2004, the International Workers of the World (IWW) launched an early unionizing campaign at Starbucks, in a time when labor organizing at fast food chains was unheard of. The Nation called the campaign “so quixotic it seemed more like performance art designed to comment on the labor movement itself than an earnest attempt to organize shops.”

Though it gained only modest traction, the IWW Starbucks Union was an important precursor for SBWU, and one of their key initiatives was a farmer outreach campaign called “Justice From Bean to Cup.”

In February of 2007, a delegation of IWW-affiliated Starbucks baristas from Manhattan went to Sidamo, Ethiopia, to meet and interview farmers who were in a dispute with Starbucks because the farmers tried to trademark their coffee so they could make more money from it. The delegation created a two-part video where farmers explained in their own words how Starbucks had underpaid them.

“What the farmer expected to get, he did not get,” Tadesse, a farmer in the video, said. “The farmers worked hard, labored hard, but did not get their sweat’s worth.”

IWW Starbucks workers in 2011 also staged a week of action in New York City in support of a Starbucks barista union in Chile, which, at the time, was the only country with a sizable Starbucks union.

Since the broader barista union movement grew in recent years, international initiatives have emerged. At the 2025 Workers United convention in Ohio, SBWU met with unions from Chile and Brazil who discussed Starbucks’ labor abuses in Latin America, including the reports of slave labor in Brazil. Yet SBWU rarely includes these other worker struggles in its messaging.

One barista union that has taken a larger leap towards addressing labor issues in the Global South is the Blue Bottle Independent Union (BBIU), which was started in 2024. Last summer, two BBIU baristas travelled to Bugalagrande, Colombia, to meet with fellow workers and organizers from their parent company, Nestlé.

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Blue Bottle is a premium coffee chain with over 100 locations worldwide. It started as a farmers market roaster in 2002 and, with the help of $120 million in venture capital investments, became a revered staple of specialty cafes. In 2017, Nestlé, the largest publicly held food company in the world, acquired the controlling shares of Blue Bottle.

Blue Bottle baristas first unionized in Boston, Massachusetts, and four locations in California joined the union in 2025. According to Alex Pyne, the president of Blue Bottle Independent Union, the decision to unionize was made over grievances with management, sexual harassment issues, and wages. Blue Bottle in turn hired Ogletree Deakins, a well known “union avoidance” firm, and has yet to agree to a contract. Unlike Starbucks baristas, who are part of the international union Workers’ United, Blue Bottle Baristas unionized independently.

“Initially, we were shopping around for different unions,” Pyne said. “When our former president, Rocky, and I sat down with the staffers to ask, ‘Can we control our own finances? Can we control our own strike fund? Can we call for a boycott and strike on our own?’ — simple things that you would think would not be that difficult of a lift — the staffers told us no, that we’d have to get approval for everything from their leadership, and we should be so grateful, because how else are we going to take on Nestlé?”

Pyne was one of the baristas who travelled to Colombia this summer, along with Abbey Sadow, the communications director of BBIU. Sadow is an undergrad Public Relations student who worked at Blue Bottle until November, when she says she was fired “for wearing green pants” — a dress code violation which, she believes, was retaliation for union involvement. She now works at Pavement Coffee, another unionized cafe chain in Boston, but continues supporting BBIU.

“I willingly admit that the number one thing that I miss about Blue Bottle is my friends,” Sadow said. “And when you are so involved in people’s lives, you care about them, and you care about how work affects them.”

Sadow said that since the beginning of the campaign, BBIU felt it was important to connect with other unionized Nestlé workers. “We were really invested in the idea of creating solidarity across the supply chain,” Sadow said. They reached out to the union in Nestlé’s home country of Switzerland, as well as SINALTRAINAL, the National Union of Food Industry Workers, which represents 1,800 Nestlé workers in Colombia.

From there, they began corresponding regularly with SINALTRAINAL officials over WhatsApp.

“Setting up a meeting to figure out what we can actually do to support each other was difficult,” Sadow said, “Instead, they had expressed interest in hosting us and showing us around and talking about the labor dispute, and we thought that was probably the best way to facilitate a real relationship.”

Though neither Sadow nor Pyne speaks Spanish, they took the trip and “fought through the language barrier,” so that they could get to know their hosts.

SINALTRAINAL has been in an ongoing struggle with Nestlé since 2024, when the multinational company revoked its union recognition and barred SINALTRAINAL members from entering Nestlé plants. Nestlé instead began bargaining with a new pro-management union, which they claimed represented their workers, despite SINALTRAINAL representing them for decades.

In response, SINALTRAINAL has held a year-long encampment outside the Nestlé plant. Sadow and Pyne saw the encampment during their visit and met with Carlos Alberto Hernández Zuñiga, the regional secretary for SINALTRAINAL in Bugalagrande.

“They visited us, learned the full scope of the conflict, and have been giving us moral support,” said Hernández Zuñiga. “We hosted them as best we could, we explained the conflict, they spent time with us in the resistance tent, and they learned about the different social projects SINALTRAINAL has — that we’re not just a union.”

In Bugalagrande, SINALTRAINAL has built a pharmacy with more affordable medication, as well as schools, a fitness center, and a dignified funeral home through union dues and funds. They also run sports and arts programs for children, as well as support programs for differently abled children, and a low-cost technical school which provides training in electrical work, IT, finance, and English. These resources are available to everyone in Bugalagrande, not just union members.

Sadow said seeing these projects made her think about what BBIU could do outside of the shop floor. “I think that there’s so much inspiration to be drawn from organizers elsewhere who are organizing in different conditions and in different landscapes from us and with different labor laws,” Sadow said. “If I could build a pharmacy right now with union dues for my coworkers so they wouldn’t have to go through hellish insurance, I would do that in a heartbeat.”

Hernández Zuñiga said workers at the Nestlé plant — where products like Nescafe are made — are currently facing an assault on their rights. Workers with occupational-related illnesses are fired without cause, sexual harassment is rampant with no accountability, and workers are being forced to work on weekends and holidays, violating labor laws and making it difficult for workers to see their families.

“When I get my day off, my wife is working and my children are studying, so there is no contact,” Hernández Zuñiga said.

When talking to SINALTRAINAL about this issue, Sadow shared her own experience of a manager at Blue Bottle trying to force her to work on Yom Kippur, which she observes strictly. “Bonding over that experience I found to be very fulfilling,” Sadow said.

Sadow noted that when they drove around with the president of SINALTRAINAL, it was in an armored car with an armed guard.

Colombia is considered the most dangerous country for trade unionists. According to the Colombian Ministry of Labor, well over 3,000 unionists have been killed by right-wing paramilitaries since 1970.

“We have comrades who have been murdered in the context of these conflicts, and our greatest fear is precisely that — to be silenced for defending workers’ labor rights nationwide,” Hernández Zuñiga said.

Nestlé has long faced accusations for involvement in violence in Colombia where at least 12 unionized Nestlé workers have been killed since 1985, including the 2005 murder of Luciano Romero, who was preparing to testify over alleged links between paramilitary groups and Nestlé’s Colombian subsidiary, Cicolac.

In 2012, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights filed a criminal complaint against Nestlé in Switzerland over Romero’s murder, arguing the company was aware that the investigation posed a serious threat to his life, but Swiss authorities dismissed the case on statute of limitations grounds and a later appeal before the European Court of Human Rights was also unsuccessful.

Nestlé staunchly denied the allegations, writing, “we condemn any form of violence and reject any accusations that attempt to link Nestlé to violent acts.”

Hernández Zuñiga said there has been an increase in paramilitary violence since the encampment began. “Throughout history it’s been shown that every time there’s a conflict, these kinds of actions appear,” Hernández Zuñiga said. “They’ve gotten to the point of someone getting off a motorcycle, pointing a gun at you, and saying: ‘Stop doing what you’re doing with Nestlé,’ with obscene, offensive words.”

For Pyne and Sadow, the difficulty SINALTRAINAL went through while representing Nestlé workers is all the more reason to push back hard against Blue Bottle back home.

“In organizing conversations, it’s been really helpful to talk about SINALTRAINAL and how paramilitaries have murdered or disappeared people,” Pyne said, “Because then you can say, if labor laws were just slightly different here, or they thought they could get away with it here — don’t you think they would do that to you and me?”

International support has effectively helped SINALTRAINAL in the past. Hernández Zuñiga said that a visit from the Canadian Union of Public Employees had been instrumental in stopping the government from dismantling the encampment.

“Coincidentally, the day they came to visit us, we had a hearing with government bodies — the Prosecutor’s Office, the Mayor’s Office — to remove the tent,” Hernández Zuñiga said. “Since CUPE comrades were there — and they’re also international human‑rights defenders — they served as guarantors that everything in the hearing would be handled properly.” With CUPE representatives present, the government ruled that the tent could stay.

Hernández Zuñiga said it would be ideal to achieve more connections at the international level. “If in the United States there are four, five, six organizations related to coffee that want to create this link, this international alliance, and if they want us at SINALTRAINAL to be part of it, it’s simply a matter of setting a date and talking,” Hernández Zuñiga said.

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After three months of striking, unionized Starbucks stores across the US quietly reopened.

Back in Seattle, baristas at the University Way Starbucks went back to work on February 14, and although SBWU is still calling for a boycott, college students quickly flooded back into the store.

Two weeks after they reopened, their manager called everyone to the back and told them the store would be permanently closing on April 5th, and all the baristas would be let go. It was one of five Seattle-area stores to be shut down, four of which were unionized and went on strike. The baristas were also told they were not allowed to transfer to another store.

“ If we went to another store, we’re still union supporters, and could encourage and influence other people to fight for their rights,” Ayse Avcular said. “It’s union-busting retaliation, and it also doesn’t make sense, because this store is one of the highest moneymakers.”

Another barista at the University Way location, Aidan Chauster, had voted against the strike out of concern for the high cost of living in Seattle, where he had moved a year ago from Chicago. When the strike began, he still picketed every day, living off delayed payments from an overwhelmed SBWU, and a food cabinet that was mostly canned beans.

“I wish we didn’t have to come to this, but I think it’s about time because we definitely do deserve better pay, especially living in such an expensive city,” Chauster said in November, “So, we were all kind of just like, you know what? It’s going to be fine because we’ve got each other.”

For Chauster, losing his job means he has to move back to Chicago, where, if he is rehired by Starbucks within 30 days, he can keep his seniority.

“I’ve definitely been trying to get out of Starbucks for such a long time, but it’s hard,” Chauster said. “It’s such a bad place to find a job, it’s everywhere, but Seattle for sure.”

At the Pike Place Starbucks, SBWU withdrew its union bid on May 4th, the day of the vote.

Lillian Mance, a barista at the Pike Place store who opposed unionizing, said a small group of baristas had started the petition without consulting most of the 60 baristas who work at that location, and SBWU jumped to publicize it.

“We are a store with global rapport, and if they want to get their message out, they should be using us to do that,” Mance said, “I just think that the tactics that they’re using and the way that they’re going about it is not respectful and not really acceptable.”

Mance said that baristas at her store had been taken out to dinners, which they didn’t realize were with union staffers, and felt socially pressured to sign union cards. She said the experience had hurt the store’s culture. “After all of this started happening, it became very obviously divisive,” Mance said.

After a turbulent four months, Starbucks resumed contract negotiations with SBWU on March 30, and talks have stretched into May. In mid April, SBWU filed an unfair labor practice charge against Starbucks for regressive bargaining, saying the company is going backwards on agreed upon issues.

The quality of the contract that emerges from these negotiation sessions will be a bellwether for the bargaining potential of food service unions against big chains. But as BBIU’s Alex Pyne says, “Even if the [union] density is low, or the leverage isn’t in a strategic choke point, the Starbucks strike does the very real thing of actually getting people to think about their own working conditions.”

Barista unions, still a fledgling movement, are learning how to support each other and exploit the high turnover and interconnectedness of the industry.

In 2024, a group of baristas founded the Coffee Worker Coalition (CWC) in response to a wave of union activity they observed across Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. Last fall, CWC launched a hardship grant for baristas in need. In total, they’ve dispersed over $15,000 in community-raised funds, much of which went to Starbucks workers who were terminated during anti-union retaliation, downsizing stores, and downsizing headcount.

One founder of CWC was Ian O’Hara, who has been working in food service and coffee on and off since he was 14, and got into labor organizing 6 years ago while working in retail.

“There’s just so much that workplace owners and business owners get away with by exploiting young, impressionable labor, and I don’t think we’re into it as working adults,” O’Hara said, adding that within the last few years, “there was a ripe air for people to reckon with the fact that they deserve better and they deserve more.”

At the time, the cafe industry had little precedent for organizing, and CWC started as a group chat to share knowledge between individual worker-organizers and union campaigns. He hopes that solidarity between barista unions can eventually improve conditions for everyone across the cafe sector, and possibly further.

“I would really love to imagine that we could at some point bridge relationships with coffee growers,” O’Hara said, “ I think as baristas get more familiar with organizing their workplaces, they then inevitably ask, well, ‘why are coffee products made this way?”

For Pyne and Sadow, who have already started this connection, the rewards were innate.

“I’ve gotten a lot of fulfillment from being able to talk to my co-workers about the working conditions that other Nestle workers in other countries have,” Pyne said, “I feel like it’s brought a kind of depth to the organizing conversations that I’m able to have with folks to put our own working conditions in the context of a larger multinational company, or capitalism, or whatever you want to call it.”