{"id":36,"date":"2026-08-18T16:42:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T16:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shoeleathermagazine.com\/2026\/?p=36"},"modified":"2026-09-09T21:37:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T21:37:09","slug":"will-it-be-baristas-who-change-the-coffee-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shoeleathermagazine.com\/2026\/will-it-be-baristas-who-change-the-coffee-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"Will it be baristas who change the coffee industry?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dark Green coffee trees planted along the hillside of Hacienda Illuminada in Puerto Rico. Source: Author<\/p>\n

The sign on the Starbucks in Seattle\u2019s 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 \u201cStarbuck\u201d \u2014 plucked from\u00a0Moby Dick<\/em>\u00a0by two teachers and a writer who founded the coffee shop in 1971 \u2014 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?<\/p>\n

Pike Place is one of the oldest farmers\u2019 markets in America and draws millions of visitors annually. But the market\u2019s 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 \u201coriginal Starbucks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The truth is that this store is not the original Starbucks \u2014 it opened in 1976, and the actual first Starbucks is long gone. The Pike Place store is, however, the world\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The movement to organize Starbucks baristas began in\u00a02021<\/a>\u00a0at 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\u00a0pay disparity<\/a>\u00a0in 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d Ayse said, \u201cit\u2019s just not our job\u201d.<\/p>\n

The store had gone on strike multiple times since unionizing for a few days to a week at most \u2014 nothing like this. Ayse said when she voted to authorize the indefinite strike in November, she did it for her more vulnerable coworkers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know it would help them more than it helps me,\u201d Ayse said, \u201cbut it would benefit me too, in a way, that we would have stability at the store, safety would be addressed, wages would be addressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Photo: Protest outside the now closed Starbucks Reserve in Seattle. Source: Starbucks Workers United.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On \u201cRed Cup Day,\u201d which marks the beginning of the company\u2019s 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\u00a0SBWU<\/a>. Ahead of the strike, hundreds of\u00a0lawmakers<\/a>\u00a0called 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 creating the overwhelming ubiquity of coffee shops in the US today. When Starbucks first came to New York in 1996, the\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0described the novel company as selling \u201cdrinks like latte (pronounced LAH-tay), a shot of espresso topped with hot milk but less foamy than cappuccino.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

As specialty coffee became a subculture, the \u201cbarista\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Making espresso drinks is considered a skill, and even a craft, with many \u201cspecialty coffee\u201d 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\u00a01.6%<\/a>, has the lowest unionization rate of any sector in the US, outside of white-collar industries like finance. SBWU represents baristas from the world\u2019s largest coffeehouse chain, but it is not the only barista union.\u00a0Dozens<\/a>\u00a0of other coffee chains, including Blank Street, Blue Bottle, Peet\u2019s, and La Colombe, as well as individual local cafes, have successfully unionized in a chain reaction of ambitious campaigns \u2014 though fewer have received contracts.<\/p>\n

As food service work has long been considered temporary and nonaspirational, there is more to this movement than wage campaigns. Over\u00a040%<\/a>\u00a0of 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.<\/p>\n

\u26fe\u26fe\u26fe<\/h2>\n

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\u00a040%<\/a>\u00a0in 2025. 75% of Americans drink it every day, 3 cups of it on average. It is the\u00a0most\u00a0<\/em>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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

6,000 miles away from Seattle, in S\u00e3o 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s coordinator, Jorge\u00a0<\/em>Ferreira dos Santos Filho, said he had been a victim of agricultural slave labor three times, starting when he was just 14 years old.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook, I\u2019m not acting against my country, far from it,\u201d Santos Filho said, \u201cbut in any case, we have a Brazilian society founded on slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brazil is the world\u2019s largest coffee producer, supplying 35\u201340% of the world\u2019s 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,\u00a0slave-like conditions<\/a>\u00a0still exist illegally in Brazil, and today, coffee is the leading driver of this crisis.<\/p>\n

The organization\u2019s 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 \u201cdirty list\u201d \u2014 a public registry of employees found to have used slave labor.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have shown that large corporations \u2014 Nestl\u00e9, Starbucks, McDonald\u2019s \u2014 profit greatly from slave labor, and they profit greatly from slave labor in the Brazilian coffee industry,\u201d Santos Filho said. \u201cThey often talk and spend billions and billions of dollars, or euros, or reais, marketing themselves, saying they\u2019re selling you a safe product, a sustainable product, a product that respects life. And we\u2019re here \u2014 I think you in the United States know this \u2014 we\u2019re here saying that all of that is a lie.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0by Report\u00e9r 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 Cooxup\u00e9, the biggest cooperative of arabica coffee farms in the world. Meanwhile, 81 victims of slave labor were\u00a0rescued<\/a>\u00a0from Cooxup\u00e9 farms in 2025, ranging from ages 12 to 72.<\/p>\n

Starbucks responded to the report, saying it only buys coffee from an audited \u201csmall fraction\u201d of Cooxup\u00e9\u2019s over 19,000 farms, but the company does not disclose which farms it buys from.<\/p>\n

Starbucks did not respond to a request for further comment.<\/p>\n

To discern the reality, Santos Filho invites coffee-drinking Americans to go to Brazil and see coffee agriculture for themselves. \u201cFor those who don\u2019t know about coffee farming, it\u2019s about being in Brazil and experiencing how the harvest works, talking to the workers, seeing the working conditions,\u201d Santos Filho said.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cspecialty,\u201d 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 \u2014 and take in some extra cash.<\/p>\n

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A tour group at Hacienda Illuminada in Puerto Rico. Source: Author<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are coffee farms that resemble mainland U.S. agriculture \u2014 vast rectangles of crops planted in neat rows \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s demand. Coffee was\u00a0introduced<\/a>\u00a0to 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 \u2014 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\u2019s coffee industry was devastated.<\/p>\n

Hacienda Illuminada was founded in 2014 by Brandon Ivan Pe\u00f1a 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cyoung guys don\u2019t want to do anymore.\u201d He added, \u201cYou have to love it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t have enough coffee to supply them. The farm also has chickens and goats, as well as rare white peacocks and brightly colored macaws \u2014 additions they hoped would draw more tourism.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to take people here and show them what it takes to make good coffee,\u201d Angel said.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

Hacienda Illuminada\u2019s 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\u00a0investigation<\/a>\u00a0of 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is easy to say a bag of coffee is too expensive, but all of my coworkers started at a fair wage,\u201d Angel said.<\/p>\n

\u26fe\u26fe\u26fe<\/p>\n

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\u2019s coffee farms are \u201csmall holders,\u201d meaning they are less than five hectares, and according to Fairtrade International, 70 to 80% of the world\u2019s smallholder coffee farmers live on less than $2 per day.<\/p>\n

In 2024, environmental lawyer Etelle Higonnet founded\u00a0Coffee Watch<\/a>, 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\u2019s plethora of goals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe farm workers are almost all extremely poor and not earning anything even close to poverty income,\u201d Higgonnet said. \u201cThat\u2019s why you end up with all the bonded labor, the slave labor and the human trafficking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Higgonnet explains that a barrier to raising wages is that in many coffee-growing countries, labor organizing is extremely difficult and often illegal. \u201cThey\u2019re locked into poverty by the industry, making it so dangerous and hard to have unions,\u201d Higgonnet said. \u201cYou get killed, you get threatened, you get fired.\u201d<\/p>\n

Santos Filhos experienced this himself while working for a union in Brazil prior to forming ADERE. \u201cIn 2008, in the city of Tr\u00eas Cora\u00e7\u00f5es, they tried to kill me inside the union,\u201d Santos Filhos recounted. \u201cI had a gun pointed at me, they pulled the trigger, it misfired three times.\u201d<\/p>\n

Santos Filhos is aware of the growing barista movement. \u201cI see the mobilization and strikes in the United States around coffee shop workers, like Starbucks, in a positive light,\u201d Santos Filhos said, \u201cbut I also see a very individualistic way in which this group doesn\u2019t include other issues of other victims throughout this chain.\u201d<\/p>\n

He drew a comparison between baristas\u2019 struggle for better wages and that of coffee farmers. \u201cI would like, for example, a worker here in Brazil to receive $7 per hour of work,\u201d Santos Filhos said. \u201cToday, a worker in Brazil receives around $7 for almost a full day\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Unions] have this immense power to uplift workers in the same supply chain, but it\u2019s extremely rare for that to happen,\u201d Higgonnet said. \u201cYou need to be able to have factories shut down, cafes shut down, ports shut down, and warehouses in the producer countries shut down.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0The Nation<\/a>\u00a0called the campaign \u201cso quixotic it seemed more like performance art designed to comment on the labor movement itself than an earnest attempt to organize shops.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cJustice From Bean to Cup.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0where farmers explained in their own words how Starbucks had underpaid them.<\/p>\n

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