Earlier this year, the founder of Think Coffee sent out an email to his more than one hundred employees with the subject line “Opening a Dialog Between Us.” Workers at the ethically minded coffee chain had been organizing a union drive across its eleven New York City stores, and Jason Scherr wasn’t thrilled. “It has come to my attention that some of you may be considering whether to join a labor union,” he wrote, going on to add that “it pains me to learn that some of you feel that your problems and concerns are not being heard.”
These emails have become commonplace, according to his employees. “He’s very much seeing [unionization] as going against Think’s culture,” said cashier Hannah. “We’ve gotten at least ten of them,” added Halle, a baker. Workers say the emails, all sent over the past five months, attacked the union and suggested employees not join. In his initial email, Scherr claimed that the city’s shift to working from home because of COVID-19 had significantly cut into the chain’s profits.
In July, workers held an event at the chain’s flagship location on Mercer Street in Manhattan where customers were encouraged to sign a petition to “stop Think Coffee’s union busting!” It wasn’t the first public event, but this one specifically focused on what union organizers considered to be increasingly aggressive tactics. Employees handed out pamphlets with titles like “Union Busting Boils Over” and “How Jason Talks to his Workers.” The latter featured choice quotes from his emails, such as: “Please ask union supporters why they want to hurt our company.” Scherr confirmed that he did send this quote, saying “for reasons I cannot understand, some employees who support union membership have misleadingly intimated to customers that Think Coffee can somehow afford to provide more to its workers and yet chooses to be unfair to them.”
For Scherr, the main driving force behind his emails is that Think is not Starbucks. In an email response to questions, he noted that he hadn’t “been paid a dime” as a wage for running the company since 2022. “If I were operating an enormous, highly profitable company that wasn’t focused on a mission to help farmworkers, I might have a different view as to whether a union makes sense for our team, many of whom do not want to pay union dues and prefer the flexible, part-time schedules that we have always offered.”
Low hourly wages, unpredictable hours, and few benefits are considered par for the course in the service industry, which was hit especially hard by the pandemic. In a CDC study examining COVID-19 deaths in 2020, food service workers were among those with the highest death rates. Workers United galvanized those across the industry to fight for better conditions with their campaign to unionize Starbucks, which has since won union votes at nearly five hundred stores across the country. And now workers at independent coffee shops like Think are following their lead—but they face numerous hurdles. Riley, who left Think in June for a better-paying barista job, noted that “the cost of everything is going up right now and that’s what the boss always tells you.” He added: “Why is it that labor is the only thing that doesn’t go up with the times? Because we are also trying to pay for our things, our food, and it just seems a respectful thing.”
The workers at Think are hoping to hand over their petition for voluntary union recognition this fall.
Scherr’s initial email, sent on March 12, was well over two thousand words. In it, he described how he took out a “hefty” student loan to go to law school in the 1980s but subsequently ditched the profession to work in a business “where community could be created.” He lauded his business acumen, noting that the first Think, opened in 2006, was “immediately profitable,” but instead of “putting the profits in my pocket,” Scherr used the money to open a chain of shops across the city. He then went on to detail how deep-pocketed investors would flaunt tempting offers to buy him out, which he resisted, “even though it would have benefited my family and me financially.” Scherr also imparted the five “realities” of union membership, among them union dues, the possibility that nothing will change, and the potential for being fined if you don’t take part in a strike. The email, which was longer than this story, had an implicit undercurrent: I sacrificed so much for this company, so how dare you try to unionize?
From the start, a central part of Think Coffee’s mission—and brand—has been to offer fair wages to the people who grow the coffee beans: “Real relationships produce the most responsible coffee,” the company boasts. The chain claims to have personal relationships with their coffee growers, listing farmers in Nicaragua and Colombia on their website. In an industry that is notorious for its exploitation, this attracted a certain type of conscientious customer, including Halle, who has been a baker at Think for nearly a year. But that purported generosity, which the company talks about constantly, is limited when it comes to its employees in the city. “It’s really disheartening, both as somebody who was shopping here and somebody who now works here, to see that their values do not extend to the people working around them every day,” Halle told me. “I think it’s fantastic that they are taking on the coffee industry’s unsustainability and exploitation, but they can’t stop at that point. . . . Jason started out saying, I think unions are great, just not for this company, but as time has gone on it’s slowly become more and more overall anti-union.”
The union efforts at Think started around eighteen months ago, but things really got going this January, when the petition for voluntary recognition was created. “We just located people who were really committed, had time to give, and we started producing things beyond collective disappointment,” says Hannah, who recently left Think. Part of the delay in handing over the petition comes down to high staff turnover, a common problem in the service industry as people involved with union organizing decide to simply leave in search of better working conditions.
Halle was at the July sip-in, handing out flyers to customers. The shop was busy, with several customers working on laptops and a line of people ordering iced drinks since it was a hot summer day. At one point, a manager came over to tell Halle and their colleagues that the store had a policy of not handing out pamphlets in the building. The company was likely aware of the event, according to Halle, because Think Coffee liked and then unliked the union’s Instagram post advertising it. Riley told me the campaign will continue. “The point of this action is a little polite civil disobedience,” he said, referring to Scherr’s constant emails. “He has to relinquish some power, he’s gotta do some work, he’s gotta make changes, it will be work to get the demands done but they are worth it.”
These demands include establishing a baseline wage of $25.65 for all workers, transparency around menu changes, a better scheduling system, and legal assistance for those with fragile visa status. All of this is outlined in issue one of a bilingual zine that the workers created and handed out at the July sip-in. It also features organizer contact info, a section on worker rights, a union-busting bingo game, and an illustration of the various “hats of Think coffee,” which includes beanies, caps and visors. Its front page has a drawing of a coffee packet: “Union. Juicy & well-rounded tasting notes. Solidarity. Agency. Better working conditions. Medium Roast.”
It’s not just Think Coffee that has been tackling a union drive in the past year. The Starbucks wave is still going strong, with workers from an additional twenty-one stores across the country filing for union recognition in February, adding to the nearly five hundred stores that have voted to unionize since the drive began in earnest in late 2021.
But Workers United, which is the parent union of Starbucks Workers United, has set its sights on organizing the entire industry: in the past two years, they have partnered with coffee shops such as The Daily Press in Brooklyn, and Compass Coffee in Washington, D.C., which has eighteen stores, seven of which voted to unionize last month (votes are currently tied up in challenges with the NLRB). In Philadelphia, BlueStone Lane coffee voted to unionize three months ago in partnership with Local 80, Philadelphia Joint Board, Workers United. Additionally, labor union UFCW Local 1500 has worked with Partners Coffee and private-equity-backed Blank Street coffee, the latter of which successfully introduced a union contract including regular raises, and standardized working hours. Partners Coffee is currently still in negotiations with management for their union contract, after winning their union vote in April.
While there have been good outcomes, including at Salt City coffee in Syracuse, whose owner voluntarily recognized a union drive with support from Workers United in May, there have also been setbacks. The Little Dog coffee shop in Maine was abruptly sold after its workers led a successful union drive and held a two-week strike. Meanwhile, Starbucks Workers United and Starbucks are involved in ongoing discussions about a framework to achieve collective bargaining agreements. As a sign of good faith, in April Starbucks agreed to provide workers represented by Workers United with credit card tipping and benefits that were announced for non-unionizing stores back in May 2022.
A shop that did manage to unionize, get a contract, and continue operating is Daily Press, a small coffee house and bar in Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill. In 2022, following the challenges of pandemic-induced shutdowns, the shop’s owner lost a significant amount of money and said he would have to fire two employees. “This was all given with I think about four days’ notice,” said employee Gabe. “It was going to happen over a weekend, and this was at the end of the month; we wouldn’t be able to pay rent; this is people’s jobs, people’s livelihoods.” In response, employees reached out to Workers United while a former bar manager finagled a behind-the-scenes buyout. Once the sale was complete, the new owner immediately voluntarily recognized the union, which stipulated a collective operation. This meant wages, operating hours and anything involving expenses more than $5,000 would be handled by staff collectively in monthly meetings. Pay is now equal across the board—$16 plus tips—and there is a profit-sharing mechanism written into the union contract. “When we make them [profits], we share them,” Gabe told me.
“We’ve been able to maintain that structure for a full year-and-a-half,” he went on. “We’ve also developed that contract even more as it’s editable, through amendments . . . [and] through that we make a lot of the larger operating decisions and, honestly, it’s been a pretty incredible change.” The flip side, he cautioned, is that one of the conditions of the sale was inheriting the liability, or debts, of the business. “The wildest part about this is that we’ve still been able to make it this long, we haven’t fired anyone, if anything we’ve actually grown in terms of our staffing . . . we are lot more committed to each other as people, as human beings, as friends, in ways that we weren’t before.”
While it can be hard work to organize a union, the benefits once you have that contract ratified outweigh the negatives, he said. “There’s one thing that’s really important: It’s that you can put anything you want in a contract. Insofar as people sort of limit the thinking of unionization to things like health insurance . . . we are really talking about an agreement between the labor of the space and the capital that manages it.” It is possible to demand a better quality of life, he says. “There’s absolutely nothing to lose by wanting to work in conditions that are not demeaning, not demoralizing, not dehumanizing.”
A Workers United rep said that in all cases in New York it had been staff approaching them for help forming a union, rather than the other way around. “The workers unionizing the coffee industry are setting a precedent for food service workers everywhere,” a spokesperson told me, “and they are doing it conversation by conversation, worker by worker, organizing the sector from the bottom up.” This has knock-on effects across the industry: workers at Think say that staff from other, smaller New York institutions such as Nitehawk Cinema and Partners Coffee have kept in touch, offering organizing tips. It’s possible that just as the proliferation of Starbucks unions after the initial Buffalo store inspired workers at smaller coffee shops, the desire to unionize will extend to the wider service industry. If it makes more sense to get a job at a unionized coffee shop, where you can be paid a livable wage, the stores that don’t follow suit might be forced to up their employment standards. Makes you think.
Reprinted with permission from The Baffler
