When did people first start thinking about unionizing?

Everything started about a year and a half ago, with very small efforts and only a couple of people. Since then, it has grown to almost everybody — like supermajority support. There have been a lot of ups and downs. [We ended up] wanting [an independent union] so that we could have full control over everything that was going on. We launched publicly in April. We walked out on April 8, then we had our election in May.

Leading up to the election, it was important for us to try and get all of the cafés involved. I think the Chestnut Hill and the Kendall locations have the most union supporters; I’m currently at the Harvard Square location, and it took toward the end [of the organizing process] to get us involved.

Some of the cafés are far from the others, so finding connections between baristas was a little challenging. We ultimately only talked to Seaport once before the election, I think; they were pretty distant from everyone else.

I became the point of contact at Harvard. Some of the organizing members at Kendall and Chestnut Hill reached out to me, and I was very excited about the idea of a union. So I tried to get all of my baristas at Harvard involved and kept them in the loop about what was happening and answered their questions. We had a lot of support in certain cafés leading up to the election. We tried to get all the baristas up to speed, feeling good, and feeling knowledgeable about what the union would mean and what the election would mean.

I wasn’t part of the initial organizing. But some of our founding members, like the folks who are now our union president and vice president, met at the picket line of the Boston Starbucks location that had unionized and that was on strike for two months [in 2022]. That’s where the idea to unionize at Blue Bottle came from, [though some efforts may have been] in the works a little before that.

What happened between the launch day and the election? Can you tell me about the walkout?

It happened kind of suddenly. There was a lot of organization, a lot of talking between cafés and different baristas, getting everyone’s input. Then it was launch day, and all the cafés read a letter that said, “We are unionizing; we have these issues; we think we have a majority. So we’d like to offer you the opportunity to voluntarily recognize the union and start bargaining with us. If you don’t, bye!”

We launched on [Wednesday, April 3], and they had until the next Monday [April 8] to voluntarily recognize us.

They did not. We were trying to get them to make a public statement, and they did not do that. They quietly posted a letter in our backrooms in the cafés that said, “We’ve never encountered baristas trying to unionize before, this is all new to us. So we choose not to voluntarily recognize you. We’d like you to go forward with the official election, and we hope that we can continue working with respect for each other,” and all that kind of corporate goodness.

So from there it was like, alright, we’re going to have an election. We wanted it to happen as soon as possible so that we could get into bargaining as soon as possible. Our main organizers went back and forth with Blue Bottle trying to figure out a date; it ended up being May 3, that Friday. It was an in-person-only vote, at a couple different times for different cafés. That was only two or three weeks after they said they wouldn’t voluntarily recognize us.

On April 1, we read our letter to management, and then we went back to work, business as usual. After they chose to not voluntarily recognize us, we did a march on the boss. We read out another letter saying, “You guys have chosen not to voluntarily recognize us. Because of this, we are going to take back our labor as a show of numbers,” so that Blue Bottle didn’t think that we were joking, essentially. We wanted them to understand that this was something that everybody believed in and that everybody was standing for.

That was when we marched to the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] to file for an election. The turnaround was insanely fast for our election, which we were grateful for. And then we won a vast majority.

It was 38-4.

And how many workers are in the bargaining unit?

It’s sixty-seven employees in the Boston region.

That covers baristas, shift leads, and assistant café leaders.

Blue Bottle has over a hundred locations globally. Do you have any idea why this campaign took off in Boston specifically?

Boston has a lot of unions and a lot of coffee. We looked to our comrades at Pavement [Coffeehouse], for example, or at the Circus Cooperative café, who have successfully unionized and created a better work environment. And I think that the political environment in Boston was one of the key factors. But the people in these cafés are very passionate about the union, and that was contagious to other workers. I think that’s why it started here, and if it went further, no one would be surprised.

In Boston, we’ve all seen and felt the rising cost of living. My rent has gone up hundreds of dollars over the past couple years, and our income hasn’t really [gone up that much]. I know most of us have a second job or second income and are feeling like our hours aren’t making ends meet, regardless of how much time we’re putting in.

Especially for Blue Bottle — it touts itself as specialty coffee, and we have a high emphasis on quality, and latte art is a big skill that we all perfect to work there. With the amount of skill and time and high-quality work that they’re expecting from us, I think we all feel like we deserve more compensation.

In 2017, Blue Bottle was acquired by Nestlé, a multinational corporation. Do you think this had any impact on your decision to organize or in your ability to get other baristas on board?

Yeah, absolutely.

I haven’t been at Blue Bottle since before Nestlé bought it, and nobody who I know has been either. But even having been here for about a year — and my coworkers have been here for maybe a couple years — we have seen the company become more corporate in the way that it’s run. We think a lot of that is due to its ownership by Nestlé.

We have seen changes to the workplace over the years that take away our autonomy or benefits that we had when we started working here. We are seeing a lot more penny-pinching with hours; a lot of my coworkers are scheduled until 11:30 or 11:45 instead of 12. I know there’s been push on café leaders to schedule based on how profitable the business is at certain hours of the day, which means we have to work a lot harder at times when we don’t have enough staff.

I think it also may be a motivating factor for myself and coworkers to know that Nestlé is behind a lot of decisions in this company — that Nestlé has a long history of exploitation and abuse of its own workers, and to know that Blue Bottle is a part of that makes me want to fight and stand up for our workers.

I also think knowing that Nestlé, the billion-dollar corporation, now owns Blue Bottle makes me personally feel more justified asking for better compensation. It gets tricky when you get into small businesses, where it’s like, the business is only making so much money, I understand that you can only pay me this much — that’s kind of the sacrifice you have to make with small businesses.

But Blue Bottle is still trying to act like a small business, and I think Nestlé buying it helped us kind of call its bluff on the whole small-business thing. They would say, “We can only pay you this much,” that type of rhetoric.

Can you tell me more about the working conditions at Blue Bottle?

I know other campuses have experiences being short staffed. I work at the Prudential Center, which is the busiest, highest-volume Boston café, and I think the second-highest on the East Coast. So we get a lot of foot traffic; we have to make a lot of drinks in a short amount of time and try to keep the wait time under ten minutes for all the drinks.

When a coworker calls out, sometimes if it’s a closing shift, the store will make an adjustment so that we close a little bit earlier. But a lot of times you just have to work harder, and that other person isn’t here, so you’re basically doing an extra person’s work without being compensated for it. That happens pretty frequently, and that’s something that has been a topic of conversation among workers at my café — something that we might want to consider in bargaining, because the expectations are very high.

I very much support the high quality that Blue Bottle insists upon for coffee, like Remy said — the latte art, the hospitality. I agree with those values and am excited to work for a place that supports those values for our guests. But we’re being run into the ground at times and not getting the support we need from the company in terms of the number of workers on the floor for what we’re expected to do.

Blue Bottle likes to staff the bare minimum of people that you need to run the café. There have been some days I work where there are two openers and two closers and no mid. You have maybe three people on the floor at one time, but usually just two, and so that runs into issues with breaks.

If you’re working an eight-hour shift, you’re supposed to have an unpaid thirty-minute break. The two paid ten-minute breaks [that we’re supposed to have] often just go by the wayside — a lot of us don’t take those on these shifts when it gets busy, when we don’t have a third person on the floor.

I am a shift lead, so I have a little more responsibility. There have been times when I’ve clocked out for my thirty-minute break, but I’ve sat on the floor just in case things get busy and my baristas need me to hop on. So there are a lot of questionable things happening with scheduling and breaks.

I’m also a shift leader. If I have to decide between, am I going to get my ten-minute break or is my coworker going to get a ten-minute break? I’ll make sure that they get it, and I try to be really good on the shift to make sure myself and everyone gets their breaks. But sometimes, if it’s a closing shift and it’s down to, do I take a ten-minute break or am I going to be out of here late? I’ll skip it.

I have a personal story about working conditions at Chestnut Hill. When I first got hired in October, I was hired on by a manager who was retiring, and we have had two managers since. One of those replacement managers was really inappropriate toward the baristas. He’s since been fired for other reasons, but we had essentially zero support during that time. He was an interim manager managing another location as well as our location, so his time was split. We essentially didn’t have a manager, but just a guy who would come in, boss us around, creep us out, and then leave.

We’ve since hired another manager who’s much better, but my store has had a history of harassment from management. Basically every manager or assistant café leader we’ve had has mistreated the workers. That’s why in our original statement [we noted that] one of the things [we wanted to] bargain for is protection from harassment — from management, from other workers, and from customers, because we deal with a lot every day.

What are your demands going into the negotiations? You mentioned protection from harassment and a livable wage.

We have three core demands. Those are two of them, and the third one is more democratic control of the workplace. That looks like empowering baristas and the shift leaders to make more decisions about how the workplace is run.

As it stands right now: the other day, somebody came in to fix the bean grinder, and it was completely impossible to grind beans right next to them in order to continue making the coffee. So I was like, we need to shut down this type of espresso right now, but I couldn’t make that decision. It had to go to the café leader. We’d asked the area leader to get approval, but I’m here on the floor right now. You guys aren’t here. You don’t know what’s happening. I should be empowered to make a decision like that.

These are some of the things we’re looking for. The dress code is very strict right now, so we’re looking for more freedom of expression around that. These are some of the big things, but the democratic control of the workplace can encompass a lot of different things.

Do you think the unionization effort will spread to other Blue Bottle locations?

I recently went to the semifinals of the Blue Bottle latte art competition, which was in New York. It was baristas from DC, Chicago, New York, and Boston, and one of the other organizers and I both got into the semifinals. So we were giving out union pins and handing out flyers. We were definitely trying to empower the other cities to unionize as well.

We were talking to a couple baristas who seemed really interested. New York is also a very expensive city, so we were talking to them too about how a lot of them also need second jobs and are barely making rent. And those cafés are a lot busier than the ones in Boston, so I’m sure that they feel that pressure just as much as we do.

Anything else?

I started at Blue Bottle in October. [The unionization effort] has been such an overwhelmingly positive experience. I’ve gotten so much closer to my coworkers — all of us as baristas have become so much closer as people to each other because of the union.

It’s been great to connect and meet with people from other stores that I would never have gotten to get to know as much. We had a potluck a couple weeks ago to celebrate the union victory; I think we’re trying to do more social events, because when you’re friends with the people that you’re organizing with it makes your coalition a lot stronger. As someone who is relatively new to the union, getting to know the main organizers of the unit and hearing about all their values and their experiences with organizing, I feel a lot of trust in what they’ve been doing and excitement to jump on with them.