Introduction

“It fucks with my body.” “It’s stressful and exhausting.” “My feet hurt from standing too long.” “We don’t get to just sit down sometimes and are expected to always be moving,” as respondents to our survey reflected.¹ The circuits of capitalist accumulation also circulate through our bodies. This is even more true for those in the service sector and working in cafes. It is in these workplaces that we begin our inquiry.

Cafes provide us with our morning coffee as well as places to gather and work. But, for workers in the service sector there are real challenges: low wages and high turnover, bullying bosses, and difficult customers.² We worked through the pandemic and were called essential. We spend more time with customers and coworkers than we do with our friends and families. After our shifts, we talk with our coworkers about the good times, the hard times, and how we can improve our working lives.

Organising at your cafe is about wages, hours, and working conditions, and it’s about so much more, too. Cafe workers are organising to get a say in their workplaces; to address “the same, systemic problems: short staffing and unpredictable scheduling; low wages; unaffordable healthcare; harassment; broken equipment; unfair discipline” and create unions that have the “directly democratic input of rank-and-file workers.”³

Since the late 1970s, the service sector in the United States has grown exponentially, especially as manufacturing has declined, becoming a major force in the country’s economy. The service sector, “food services and drinking places,” and cafes are major employers. In 2024, 12.4 million workers were employed in the service sector, and 926,575 were employed in “coffee and snack shops” in the US.⁴ While cafes are often viewed as small business and cornerstones of local communities, Nestlé, Starbucks, and JAB Holding Company (which owns Peet’s Coffee and Tea, Caribou Coffee, and Stumptown Coffee Roasters along with Panera Bread, Einstein’s Bagels, and the UK-chain Pret-A-Manger) are three of the largest market actors in the coffee industry. Unionisation, from capitalism’s perspective, is the most significant threat to these industries. With such a low level of union density in these sectors and complex union wage differentials, considerable organising still needs to take place to build worker power and raise wages. The speed of the assembly line, along with scheduling (not enough shifts, too many shifts, little say in scheduling shifts, low staffing) and low wages are the three issues confronting workers in the café sector and are reflected in organising and union demands.

In Class Composition in the Cafe Sector we hope that by presenting workers’ narratives alongside our analysis of the sector, we can develop a framework for how workplaces in the sector are structured and what tensions exist within them that can aid organising for class struggle.

What is workers’ inquiry? What are we trying to accomplish?
Workers’ inquiry “is a process of discovery, not only of the conditions of work now but also how to fight them” utilised by workers and militants for two main functions. First, “for workers to inform themselves about their own class power in a particular struggle,” inciting reflection on how workplaces are organised and operated. Second, “to provide a model for workers to emulate in their own struggles elsewhere.”⁵

We are looking to understand the class composition—that is, workers power vis-à-vis capitalism in their workplace—in the café sector in the US to support workers to foster and further their own class consciousness, advance organizing efforts, read and circulate these struggles, and “to understand what the workers are thinking and doing while actually at work.”⁶

To illustrate class composition, a barista arrives at work to prepare for the day, has a set of prescribed tasks to do throughout the workday, and becomes an appendage of the espresso machine as orders come in. Other tasks include taking orders, providing a customer experience, and food prep in the back of house. Sometimes there are other cafe workers who take on these tasks, often baristas are front and back of house. The labour process divides workers from each other, and often from themselves. Supervisors, managers, and owners ensure that work is imposed and “increase of the work exacted in a given time,” and as we’ve seen, cafe workers’ days are compounded by the “increased speed of machinery.”⁷ Now, workers have leverage to reorganise some elements of production, to cut corners like not fully shaking a refresher, ‘counter-plan on the shop floor,’ and self-organise by coordinating with their coworkers to share tasks or make mocha or iced coffee during downtime to support the next shift.⁸ Capitalism must put workers to work and extract their labor-power in the course of the workday (technical composition), and how workers fight (class recomposition) for a sensible pace and organise themselves informally (counter-planning) and formally (unions and workers’ organisations) are key attributes of class composition.

Our operating definition of class composition is provided by the Zerowork collective, from the introduction to their first issue:

By political recomposition we mean the level of unity and homogeneity that the working-class reaches during a cycle of struggle in the process of going from one political composition to another. Essentially, it involves the overthrow of capitalist divisions, the creation of new unities between different sectors of the class, and an expansion of the boundaries of what the ‘working-class’ comes to include.⁹

As with our counterparts in Notes from Below, we see class composition as a “framework” to understand the political recomposition of the working-class as it confronts capitalism in the workplace, in and across industries, and builds collective power.¹⁰

As an ad-hoc collective made up of café worker organizers and militants, we began by workshopping questions drawing on class composition analysis and a dedication to “overthrow[ing] of capitalist divisions” in the working-class.¹¹

Then we circulated our questionnaire from June to September 2024 utilising our own networks and with the aid of café worker unions, including Blue Bottle Independent Union (BBIU). Thirty-five café workers completed our extensive questionnaire using a Google form via our website WorkersInquiry.Work. Initial findings were circulated as a zine titled UNFILTERED Bitter Thoughts on Cafe Work! via print copies circulated at events in the Northeast and online.

Those who completed the survey work across the United States, but our results skew toward the northeast, where BBIU and our militants with Workers Inquiry Dot Work (WIDW) are located. Demographically, these workers reflect the industry at large. However, we asked more detailed questions on gender identity, whereas 45.7% or 16 respondents self-identified as non-binary, 22.9% or 8 as Genderqueer or Genderfluid, 17.1% or 6 as Transgender, 40% or 14 as women and 22.9% or 8 as men; sexuality identity was even more diverse. Moreover, 45.7 of respondents self-identified as “a person with a disability and/or chronic illness.”

Survey respondents provided detailed, substantive answers about their wages, hours, and working conditions and their experiences with organising, as well as what they think and do while at work.

What do cafe workers think and do while at work?

What do cafe workers think? What do we want? And how do we share those conversations that take place in walk-ins or while walking to the bus after our shifts, so as to amplify our voices? These are just some of the questions that brought us to launch an inquiry to understand class composition in the café sector. In this section, we will explore workers’ experiences with the consistency (or lack thereof) of shifts and hours, along with their experience of the working day, including what they like most about working as a barista, and the challenges they face in the cafe sector.

As part of our survey, we asked café workers about their working day, prompting them to reflect on: “what do you do all day, how was the work divided up, what are working conditions like, and what is going to work every day like for you?” With chronic short staffing, a fast-paced work environment, and the comments reflected at the onset, one of the core problems with the industry is the intensity of the working day and often the lack of time to complete work tasks, much less fill out a survey. One barista from Brooklyn, NY shared that they “need to clock back in so I can’t give detail rn.” “rn,” or right now, is the norm in quick-service restaurants and cafés.

“Usual Coffee Shop Stuff”

“I’m a closer,” a barista in Boston offered, talking about the structure of their shift and workday, “I work my ass off so things can run smoothly in the morning. My day is divided into two-hour segments with ten-minute breaks in between.” And they conclude, “Going to work is usually fine, and not too difficult.” Such mixed remarks were shared by another café worker in Philadelphia, who said, “I work in a relatively busy cafe for the area. Service is done by two baristas, and we can handle things easily with minimal issues. The day usually involves making 100+ lattes while prepping syrups, iced coffee, parfaits, and all the usual coffee shop stuff.”

“Worn Out and Frustrated”

In the high-paced environment, many of our survey respondents enjoy the busyness, as well as interactions with customers and coworkers. “I enjoy seeing our regular customers and chatting with my coworkers, but I almost always go home worn out and frustrated,” as a shift lead offered. Which is complemented by a barista who shared, “The café is also part of the roastery so it’s a very bustling environment which I enjoy!” These are sentiments that make the consciousness of cafe workers an emergent subjectivity, as part of the working-class, complex.

Short Staffing

However, as reflected in the appropriately titled Harvard SHIFT project, the challenges brought by the pace of work are compounded by staffing. As a barista, who self-identified as working in the “Front of House” from Northeastern Pennsylvania, revealed:

I am the sole barista at the café. I cannot take days off without being guilted due to the café having to close when I can’t be there. To be clear I’m not in a managerial position or paid for one. I manage calls, take orders, bring food and drinks out, bus tables, make drinks, create drink menus, and clean the whole of the front of house. By myself. […] I am allowed on my phone or to sit in free time, but I am not given breaks, paid or unpaid, where I can be guaranteed to be away from the customers. We are given two unpaid vacations a year, one week in the winter and one in the summer but we can’t choose when, it is decided by the boss’s holiday.

Front and Back of House

Even when barista’s take on additional tasks beyond job specialization on the café assembly line, divisions of labor between front and back of house, spatial arrangements, and “the labor model” create challenges for café workers, as one shift lead from Upstate New York surmised:

Where I work, the shift leader for any given shift is responsible for the tasks getting done up front while also doing food prep in the back kitchen, as well as handling customer service issues as they come up. It’s difficult to be able to manage both front and back of house because of the labor model and the fact that most prep is done in the back, along with the design of the store that makes going back and forth cumbersome.

Workers Control

With little to no input into the labor process, labor model, job tasks and distribution, divisions of labor, integration and communication between “front” and “back” of house operations, shifts and scheduling, and spatial arrangements in the café itself, it’s no wonder that café workers report that their employers are not “open and honest with workers about decisions affecting them.” After all, from capitalism’s perspective, management has the prerogative and “power […] to make decisions about how to hire, fire, control the work process, and what to produce—without any input by workers or their unions.”¹²

As part of our survey, we asked café workers to agree or disagree with a series of statements, all thirty-five respondents participated in this exercise. Beyond management restricting access to information or downright dishonesty “about decisions affecting them,” café workers have no information “about company finances” and little influence over “company decisions, regardless of company size. In our surveys, an underlying theme of worker control emerges. Whereas any long-term organising strategy or “reconstructive” vision will need to place workers self-organisation and self-management of production at the forefront.

As noted in the interviews as well, the ability to “decide” how one does their job without constant monitoring by employers is key (as inquiry participants responded to our “My employer monitors my work very closely” question). A barista trainer from Arlington, VA, is troubled by the “hyper surveillance and blatant disrespect from management.” Since café work often provides a sense of autonomy along with craft, “camaraderie,” and “community,” workers in the industry are irritated if not incensed when management violates this unspoken social contract.

What is clear is that café workers view their useful labour and the use-values they produce as part of social reproduction and the social fabric, and at times refuse or reorganize capitalist labour processes to maintain the relationships embedded in the commodities they produce. In fact, this is a fight over the imposition of work, between use-value and exchange-value, the class conflict inherent in commodity production, and this has implications for wider social production. As having some semblance of control over one’s own physical and affective capacities is vital for all workers, especially those in sectors where capitalism extracts one’s labour-power from both reservoirs.

Camaraderie with Coworkers

When asked what they like “most about working in the cafe sector” café workers offered “people” and “camaraderie with coworkers and friendly customers” as shift leads in Boston and Upstate New York said respectfully. “I genuinely love brewing coffee and being a staple presence for people within the community,” added a barista from Philadelphia. As with the care industry, house- and domestic work, and the service industry in general, café work requires the affective capacities of workers themselves to create the “customer experience.” Café workers create a sense of “community” in these third spaces, at times it’s genuine, at other times they “fake it” to get through the working day.

As many cafe workers reported “camaraderie” and “community” as what they liked most, just as many and at times the same workers reported that these were reasons for “what’s the most challenging thing about working in the café sector,” as our survey question revealed. “Rampant exploitation and horrible customers” shared one barista from Brooklyn, NY, “Customers, wages, repetitive movements” said a barista from Chicago, then “management, customer service” added a shift lead from Boston and “Tip theft, shitty middle managers, precarity, low pay” a barista from Rhode Island submitted.

The complexity of these interactions and experiences, which workers find enjoyable as well as challenging, ought to be on the minds of workers organising in this and neighbouring sectors. Agitating around challenges, while not forgetting that enjoyments need to be part of envisioning a future that only worker control can offer.

“Work Like a Machine”

Physical and mental challenges of working in the industry are linked, as a barista from the East Bay in California wrote, “Serving snobbish rich people, my feet hurt from standing too long.” This was completed by the experiences of a barista across the country in Boston: “People (customers) rush you and expect you to work like a machine to meet their demands. Also, when they don’t treat you as human and solely see you as a servant. The fact we don’t get to just sit down sometimes and are expected to always be moving,” with another saying, “It fucks with my body. Alot. I experience regular leg pain as a result of it. The stresses of work also make my mental illness worse, and getting up early enough for shifts is often a problem, meaning I often don’t get enough sleep.”

Poverty Wages

Beyond just being “stressful and exhausting,” qualified a worker in Boston, “I’m tired of working constantly, making just enough to survive, and feeling like there’s no way forward from here. No healthcare, no living wages. It feels like treading water.” “Not having a say in the job that we do,” is compounded by “not being paid enough to pay my bills” a barista in Midwest Illinois told us.

A Boston shift lead surmised that, “In general, I would say that when working in a café you’re expected to not exercise much self-worth. Arguing with a manager who shouts or is disrespectful can result in being written up for ‘insubordination,’ and generally one isn’t allowed to kick out customers who are harassing coworkers. Our labor isn’t valued!” With café owners, bosses, and middle managers treating workers as expendable and replaceable in a high turnover, low wage environ expectations are set low culturally as well as on the shop floor. But exercising self-worth and demanding the full value of your labor requires collective action.

Safety at Work

As reflected in this last account, one of the areas where café workers were lengthy in their answers and most concerned is that of workplace safety. Department of Health violations seem common and made worse “because the area manager doesn’t want to continue buying dish soap,” a shift lead Upstate New York recalled. One worker in Boston had “been in a workplace where ladders were swinging open with people on them, and management was very slow to repair things. Injuries occurred.” And, from a Midwest Illinois barista, “our store drains back up and floods our store with several inches of water. We have yet to get them permanently fixed.” Numerous café workers reported “a severe lack of emergency response and safety protocol, when things break down/something happens, responsibility falls to baristas on shift. No one usually comes in from management,” a barista trainer in Arlington Virginia told us.

In addition to workplace health and safety, workers are made unsafe by “customer threats” and “interactions,” as nearly half of our respondents noted, including baristas from Chicago, Boston, and Northeastern Pennsylvania. While another counter staff person from Boston noted that “management has dealt with as best we/they could”, most reported that management refused or was unable to deal with “belligerent customers” or provide any “de-escalation resources,” as a barista in Brooklyn suggested.

“Belligerent Customers” and Safety at Work Continued

Another disturbing trend café workers identified, and it’s important to remind readers that this survey was conducted in the leadup to the 2024 election, that “belligerent customers” and “customers who misgender me very frequently, can be an issue. I can think of a few instances where this has resulted in customers yelling at me,” as a Boston worker reported. Sexual harassment, sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia by customers and coworkers cause baristas to feel “unsafe.” With a barista from Toledo, Ohio telling of an incident where a “coworker [who] is a cis white gay man, who once said ‘maybe if I had a vagina I wouldn’t have to work alone’ in response to a female coworker asking not to be alone when opening the café in the morning. […] Now I feel extremely uncomfortable around this coworker who made that sexist remark.”

Sexual harassment is compounded by outright stalking, with a shift lead in Boston sharing with us their account:

At a previous café I worked at, a man would come in on days he knew that I was working to ask what I was doing after work each time. Coworkers told me that on a few different occasions he would come in to ask if I was working. Usually, I’d just make up a story about having exams to worry about so that way he wouldn’t keep pressing. The only thing that stopped him pestering me was switching to another location.

Working in a tips-based, consumer-facing industry has historically meant workers encountered racism, sexism, and the expectation that customers “see you as a servant.” Unionisation and workers’ control of the cafe sector will have to address safety issues in this “third space,” with both demands being placed on owners and managers via collective bargaining agreements as well as self-organised networks and direct action.

Relationships with Bosses

Unresponsive owners, bosses, and senior managers mean that crises and problems fall on middle managers and staff. To our question, “is [there] a good relationship between senior managers and staff?” We received mixed results. What is important to note is that middle managers are often promoted from baristas, share similar demographic characteristics to baristas, do not have hire / fire power, and often have little say in how the café operates. Moreover, employees, at least among those surveyed, aren’t experiencing constant and close monitoring by their employers; however, such findings require additional investigation. Interestingly, survey respondents reported that they “are treated with respect” but are not “paid fairly for the work they do.” Being paid unfairly would seemingly correlate with a lack of respect, but with these results, it’s important to consider the close relationship between the immediate representatives of the company and cafe and the senior management and owners who make decisions about compensation.

While low-wages and unfair compensation are key factors driving barista frustration, formal union campaigns and informal organising drives, cafe workers have visions that go well beyond wages, hours, and working condition to demand control over and the refusal of work—control over work as its imposed by bosses in during the working day and refusal of work as a dominant force in our lives. In seeking to answer what café workers are “thinking and doing” at work we have identified an emerging class-consciousness in this sector that corresponds to the survey results of 200,000 service sector employees who view themselves as “working-class.”¹³ .

Conclusion: Power and Political Stakes in the Cafe Sector

As noted throughout our survey results and conversations with cafe workers, they feel the circuits of capitalist accumulation and the expenditure of their labour-power in their very bodies. Sore feet, aching backs, numb fingers and tingling in one’s hands, are all common; and that’s when the workplace is safe and there aren’t swinging ladders. Cafe work is intense, and capitalism progressively requires an increasing intensity of work, further automation, and on-call workers with flexible schedules to increase profits. While low wages plague the industry, as expressed by cafe workers and workers’ organizations, having control over shifts is paramount. Hence, the fight between labour and capital in the sector is over “wages, hours, and working conditions” but it’s about more than that—it’s about control over the production process and the impact said process has on cafe workers’ lives outside of work. Current organizing and unionization efforts in particular cafes are circulating throughout the sector and spilling over to neighbouring sectors and the streets, especially when worker-organizers leave the sector for other work. While we are uncertain of new strategies that bosses will use to decompose the growing power of cafe workers at this moment, we are certain that the class recomposition that has and continues to take place is threatening the power of the bosses on the job and across the sector. What is beginning in cafes across the US will have ramifications for organising, unions, and the larger working-class.

In Part 2 of “Class Composition in the Cafe Sector” we continue our inquiry by exploring how cafe workers are organizing at work.

Are you a café worker?

As the next step in our inquiry, we are circulating “Class Composition in the Café Sector” for further comment, interviewing organizers, holding release events, and publishing our collected findings. Blue Bottle Independent Union and Workers Inquiry Dot Work invite café workers to respond to our findings at www.workersinquiry.work with the following prompts with 250-500 words by September 15, 2025.

1. What resonated and didn’t resonate with you?

2. How are you and your coworkers organized informally at work? How do you communicate, and show solidarity and mutual aid with each other?

3. What are your current organizing goals? What is the organizing plan like how will you make decisions?

Notes to Class Composition in the Cafe Sector