Barista Blues

Baristas discover that unionizing doesn't work for them:

The Café Cerés workers wanted things like more concrete scheduling, something that works against a business during lull times. But more than that you see examples of the attempt at enforcing leverage that does not exist. The staff organized with Unite Here Local 17, and the shop plied workers with the pitch to lobby for full-time hours, career paths, and to demand a say in the decision-making of the business. This saw the excitable staffers endure about six months of negotiations with no headway made, and culminating in the lowest of wages – $0.00 per zero hours. While they pushed these union platforms beyond the usual, the front of house workers at Cerés were earning, with tips, roughly $25-30 hourly, and health insurance that covered 80 percent of their premiums. But this was unacceptable. They also were commanding to be involved in the operations, with demands that defied common business practices. They also increasingly want a role in managing the business. That means input on decisions like where Cerés sources milk (a coffee shop’s largest or second-largest raw material expense) and whether pro-Palestine pins can be worn at work. Imagine operating a restaurant with notoriously thin margins, and your scone-slingers start requiring you to source your dairy from organically approved ranches, and the eggs had to derive from free range hand-picked boutique farms – all while repelling a segment of your customer base with political insignia during breakfast. Your biscuit sandwiches will start to be competitively priced with a grade-A 24oz. Porterhouse, and profits will evaporate faster than the vape clouds seen behind the shop during break times. These self-absorbed unionizers never look ahead at the effects they are provoking. When facing lowered-to-zero profits, while the staff is becoming increasingly belligerent and activist in nature, closing is the viable option at that stage; saving money and silencing the bleating is the preferred option, every time. And the whining from the liberated workforce never carries with it introspection.

They never think about how they're screwing themselves...