Introduction

“Most of us believe we should be paid a living wage, that we do more work than management, and that we deserve dignity in the workplace,” shared a cafe worker. Most of us on the job, most of us in the cafe sector according to the Harvard SHIFT project, as “97% of service sector workers see themselves as working-class.”¹ Cloudy summers, cold winters, and terrible working conditions in Ithaca, New York spurred cafe workers at Gimmie Coffee to organize with Workers United in 2017. Then, workers at SPoT Coffee in neighboring Buffalo followed by Starbucks workers in the same city launched Starbucks Workers United amid the pandemic in 2021. What began in Upstate New York has circulated through cafes and workplaces across the US, and the planet. Cafe workers were on the move with the Blue Bottle Independent Union taking on Nestle, announcing their union in Boston in May 2024 and recently organizing the cafes in the Bay Area in June 2025. Last year cafe workers took direct action, launching eighty-five work stoppages involving nearly 26,000 workers in the US.

While tales of organizing victories, and some defeats, have circulated through the Left and Labor press, and workers have shared advice and strategies with other workers, day-to-day experiences of life in a cafe hadn’t circulated in the same way. That is what brought us to launch this inquiry as a political intervention—so that cafe workers could see themselves and their experiences reflected in the tales of others. Consequently, “Class Composition in the Cafe Sector” focuses on furthering class-consciousness and building political power through sharing these tales. And it focuses on a sector where the class is on the move, rather than one commentators or militants thought they could or should be. What began in Upstate New York and then spread to cafes across the US will have ramifications for the working-class as a whole in the years ahead. Using workers’ inquiry as a framework and in circulating these struggles, “Class Composition in the Cafe Sector seeks to expand working-class self-activity and knowledge as to further workers’ power vis-à-vis capitalism.

In Part 1 of “Class Composition in the Café Sector” we explored what cafe workers think and do while at work, and we carry this through to our exploration of how cafe workers are organizing at work in Part 2.

What are the challenges to emerging class-consciousness and organising in the cafe sector?

As reflected in our findings, emergent class-consciousness among service industry and café workers is complex and seemingly contradictory, creating challenges for organising. In this section, we will address some of the barriers to organising in the cafe sector, including relationships with direct supervisors and managers, engaging coworkers in conversations and involving them in organising efforts, and the fears they face.

Several respondents noted that they feel “close” to some of their direct supervisors and managers, while frustrated with the company over scheduling, working conditions, and wages. These direct supervisors and managers are often promoted after working as baristas for several years, work closely with rank-and-file workers, and share similar demographic characteristics to the workers themselves. Further organising campaigns will have to consider how to navigate this by targeting owners, bosses, and upper-level management who actually controls the work processes cafe workers toil under. And, finally, cafe workers will need to address the complexity of working for small businesses and owner-operator cafes, where they work closely with bosses and experience the same hyper-exploitation as the rest of the sector.

In stressed and exhausted workers, fast-paced work environments, conflicts can emerge between coworkers, as a barista and trainer in Boston explains:

Barista, full-time. Mostly opening shifts (5:30AM-1:00PM); restock in mornings, make drinks/ring/do midday prep + cleaning tasks when possible. Working conditions are relatively good, but a lack of clear communication leads to bottlenecks and frustrations between different crews (i.e. openers and closers). The vibes are usually positive, but big rushes with multiple callouts or understaffing leads to stress and exhaustion.

Organisers will need to take note of the possibility of said conflicts, and lay blame for the structural problems of the workplace on owners and bosses rather than coworkers. Moreover, arguing that the only solution to these structural problems is organising—unionisation with strong labour-management committees, workers’ control and work councils, and challenging management’s control over the working day.

Talking with coworkers about the “lack of clear communication,” “belligerent customers,” and “big rushes” is common among all service industry workers, especially after a long day over a fernet or drink and shift meal. But there is a difference between these common conversations and an organising conversation. When asked, “Have you ever talked to your co-workers about what you would like to see change at work?” a café worker from Boston answered:

“Yes, but nothing came of those conversations. We just talked about things we didn’t like as a way of coping with the workplace. Most of my past coworkers have been undocumented workers or migrant workers on visas—it’s hard to encourage people to act when there’s a risk of legal trouble.”

Such fears are common and can only be addressed through collective action, mutual aid, and trust built among those you work with.

A shift lead from Boston had a similar experience when prompted—“Do you talk to your coworkers? What do you agree on? What do you disagree on?” answered:

“Yes. We want better conditions, but many are much more willing to compromise with management or accept bad treatment.” Addressing the same prompt, a barista offered that, “We talk and we agree on most everything. But the kitchen staff believe the owners care […] and would listen if we all asked for raised wages, but I doubt that.”

Considerable organising in the cafe sector, while not yet economically or statistically significant, is politically noteworthy. Sharing organising lessons for recent campaigns; building relationships between workers across the service and café sectors; circulating struggles through a small café chain in Ithica, New York to Starbucks regionally then globally; then through other international chains and small coffee shops across the United States, is the stated goal of this inquiry and is the next step in the class-struggle for these workers. Moreover, consciousness raising through the circulation of struggles, inquiries and first-person narratives, allows for the development of class consciousness—of a collective understanding that allows workers to see their experiences reflected in those of others and see themselves as part of a large movement and struggle. What is more, this emerging class consciousness need not be ideological or directed by the official organisations of the Left or labour movement (political parties, nonprofit organisations, progressive religious groups, foundations, bureaucratic unions, etc.) but by the workers themselves. Cafe workers, in our assessment, already experience the limitations of delegating activity to outside actors, such as bosses and managers, in the labour process. Organising impulses among these workers, even when they lack formal organisational structures and resources provided by unions, express a desire for direct control over production and a say in how it impacts their lives. In, someways, every day and informally, cafe workers are already organized.

How are cafe workers organising at work?

After being called “essential” while being treated as disposable during the pandemic, café workers are organising, building power on the job, refusing work, marching on bosses, and demanding union recognition, as workers at Peet’s Coffee in the Bay Area and Portland, Oregon, Blank Street Coffee in Brooklyn, New York, and numerous independent shops have. In this section, we will begin with the everyday forms of resistance and self-activity workers are involved in, provide some insight into café worker organising and recent strike activity, and then conclude with cafe workers’ ultimate demand—workplace control and self-management.

“I have mentioned worker’s rights at every job I have had,” mentioned a production assistant from Western Massachusetts, when speaking about talking to coworkers, “and am usually silenced or let go before transformation can happen. There is strength in numbers.” To the same prompt, a barista from Upstate New York shared, “It’s slow here, barely any customers usually, so it’s a very ‘easy’ job. There’s a lot of inconsistency in inventory and getting our credit tips.” Inconsistent inventory, broken espresso machines, lack of dish soap, and swinging ladders are all simply problems that workers have little power to address individually.

Asking cafe workers to comment on what you agree and disagree with your coworkers about resulted in some interesting answers. “Mostly agree!” offered a barista from Brooklyn, “We agree that the café can improve, and management is a piece of shit” said another from the East Bay, with a third out of Boston commenting that, “we agree that the government sucks, and that we live in a system that exploits people. We disagree on some of the specifics.” A barista and trainer from Boston illustrated the challenges of workplace conversations when saying, “Yes [I talk with my coworkers]; that communication and staffing need to improve (agree); that things can change through collective power and participation in workplace actions (disagree).”

Although, creating a union culture or culture of workplace democracy in the “hidden abode of production,” is a “struggle” as a shift lead from Boston told us:

I’ve had a lot of conversations with coworkers about our conditions. It’s not too difficult to ask them what they like about the job, what they wish was different, etc. Usually, the conversations will happen in response to knowing something fucked up has occurred. While I’m glad that we’re able to have conversations about what they’d want to see change, I struggle to have conversations about how they wish workplace decisions were made. There seems to be some difference between how much full-timers feel decisions should be made democratically with everyone’s input, versus part-timers who might not feel the same ownership over the job.

Similarly, how subjects such as wages and workloads, as well as workplace democracy, are framed as part of common workplace and organising conversations is complex, as a shift lead from Boston shared:

I try to talk to my coworkers fairly often. I think that we agree on more things than not. Most of us believe we should be paid a living wage, that we do more work than management, and that we deserve dignity in the workplace. When at work, I try to avoid topics which I think will lead to significant disagreement. Both because significant debate while trying to get through a line isn’t great for morale, and also because I come across as ‘argumentative’ enough as it is. ‘Political’ questions (such as the Presidential race) tend to lead to some disagreement, and there’s some philosophical questions we disagree on (such as whether there’s anything essential to being a human). The things we disagree on don’t practically matter in our day-to-day working at the café though. Ironically, I don’t think all of my coworkers understand that the way that the workplace is organized is political or does have philosophical implications. When we agree that we should have democracy in the workplace, I think to them it comes across as an a-political practical decision of how to best run the café.

Remarkably, at least in this account, their coworkers agree about the “day-to-day” operations at the café and workplace democracy, as practical matters. Often, it takes encounters with power, both when you confront it and when you wield it, to see the political ramifications of organising and workplace democracy.

Working-Class Self-Activity and Self-Organising

A counter staff person in Boston is talking to their coworkers, “pretty much constantly. It has won us some improvements even without unionising.” As reflected in many of our survey responses, workplace conversations can lead to informal collective actions prior to or in lieu of unionising. Working-class self-activity—that is, activity emerging from the organic relations of the class itself without being directed by or delegated to outside organisations—and self-organisation—as an overt stage in this expressed activity, takes place across the café sector and any workplace in “societies where the capitalist mode of production prevails.” Future inquiries into this sector will need to identify ways in which café workers refuse work, reorganise production, and engage in everyday resistance to make their working days tolerable.

Since the onset of the pandemic, workers are organising in formal and informal ways at cafes across the service sector. With low-union density, in jobs that were thought to be unorganisable, the official organisations of the Left have sought to “improve working conditions” here through initiatives that decenter and in fact disempower workers—foundation rather than member-funded workers centers, minimal wage ordinances, vague advocacy initiatives such as the Restaurant Opportunities Center, and SEIU’s predictably ineffective Fight for $15 and Union campaign. Instead, workers organised themselves; and even when associated with legacy labour (UNITED HERE, UCFW, Workers United and SEIU, etc) it was the initiatives of the workers that pushed the union forward and not the other way around.

Worker-organizers continue to come up against the lack of resources and other challenges. Another Bostonian, a shift lead, shared, “I’ve helped organize two marches on the boss as well as a statewide walkout. To take more action, we need money. A lot of coworkers are nervous about striking if they can’t rely on the café as their source of income.” A barista across town reminisced, “I was a member of the Darwin’s United action committee and helped table outside of the storefronts around Cambridge, and currently participate in and help run monthly meetings at our café where we discuss issues and try to work democratically towards solutions.” “I was” is the key phrase here. During bargaining, the owners of Darwin’s shuttered the business, a tactic used at Little Dog Coffee Shop in Brunswick, Maine and by café bosses from moms-and-pops to Starbucks. And unfortunately, we’ve also seen unions pulling out of bargaining after initially supporting workers’ efforts.

Café workers are undeterred and are participating in actions “with other workers to improve working conditions or against injustice in the workplace,” then “[w]e walked out to force action in the bargaining room,” recalled a café worker in Boston:

“We need[ed] to have meetings to coordinate this action, communications between those bargaining and those on the floor (and those outside coming in to support), and reassurance and personal support for individuals who had not taken action before and needed extra steps to feel safe in doing so (having a paired person, walking through exactly what it will look like, risks and our wards against them.)”

Tried and true organising tactics have been gleaned from trainings with Labor Notes and Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, participation in Black Lives Matter and Palestinian Solidarity Movements, and union colleagues and workers’ own self-education. Organisationally, workers in this sector are still figuring out what works for them and their comrades, as one barista in Chicago offered: “We are literally all socialists and mostly disagree on issues relating to horizontality or verticality of organization.”

Union Organising and Recent Strikes

Across the service sector new worker-led initiatives seem to be emerging daily, often circulating from one shop to another, from region to region. “Immediately, workers across the country were inspired to begin their own union campaigns,” Starbucks Workers United declares as part of their story was “realizing their workplace issues were happening everywhere.”²

In 2017, workers at Gimme Coffee in Ithaca, New York, organised only to be followed by SPoT Coffee in neighbouring Buffalo, and in this hotbed of activity Starbucks Workers United launched in this region known more for its colleges and rusted factories than recent collective action among service industry workers. Colectivo, a regional chain with shops in Illinois and Wisconsin, White Electric Coffee in Rhode Island, Blank Street Coffee Union in New York, Blue Bottle in Boston, Compass Coffee in the national capital, and Peet’s Coffee out of the west coast are just a few of many notable examples of shops that have gone union.

While there has been considerable organising in this sector, as noted in our “What is the Café Sector in the US?” section, it’s important to place our enthusiasm in context: considerable organising is ahead and even with an impressive number of cafes going union, the number of workers affected is still quite small. “Although unions have won an impressive number of representation elections in the 2020s, in most cases the number of workers involved has been modest,” noted Ruth Milkman and Joseph van der Naald, in a recent study. “At Starbucks, for example, the typical bargaining unit is only about 20 workers. Indeed […] a total of only 3,472 workers nationally were unionised by Starbucks Workers United in 2023-24.”³ Scaling up organising and organising industrially across the sector and neighbouring sectors will need to be considered in the next phase of the class struggle.

With this said, café workers are not simply organising around “wages, hours, and working conditions” but using their efforts to defend queer and trans coworkers, support workers across the supply chain, and fight against company politics that seek to police and exclude the public from these “third” spaces, especially in light of Starbuck’s decision to roll back its “open door policy.”⁴ Moreover, Starbucks workers in the United States actively supported the recent strike of their Chilean counterparts and Blue Bottle Independent Union are taking on Nestle through international solidarity. Previously Starbucks Workers United rolled out the union in a strike wave just before the Christmas holidays, and the strike weapon has returned to this sector.

According to the Cornell ILR Labor Action Tracker report for 2024, “accommodation and food services” accounted for 23.6% of the overall strike activity for the year. In 2023, they had the highest frequency of strikes but with the lowest number of workers participating for the least duration compared to all other industries. This was similarly reflected in the 2022 and 2021 reports as well. In 2024, there were 85 stoppages, involving 25,930 workers, for 368,953.5; 2023 there were 157 stoppages, involving 34,070 workers, for 271,198 total strike days; 2022 had 144 stoppages, involving 6,971 workers, for 22,648 total strike days; 2021 had 25 stoppages, involving 644 workers, for 4,620 total strike days.⁵ While strike action in this sector is trending upward, it is too early to tell if this is a momentary blip or a new worker offensive.

What is more, as struggles and strikes circulate, so do demands for increased control over the workplace, as reflected in the recent Bay Area BBIU union drive for consistent scheduling and SBWU’s fight against the company’s unnecessary dress. Union organising efforts will have to confront the very real limitation of management rights clauses in their contracts as well as the underlying assumption of “management prerogative” to run a business that is built upon the extraction of workers’ own capacities and the accumulation of capital that is only the result of their labour.

From Management’s Prerogative to Workplace Democracy and Self-Management

As part of our survey, we asked cafe workers “If you ran the café, what would you change?” Beyond those who already work at worker-owned cooperative cafés, their answers were profound.

As the dominant life activity under capitalism, work seeps into every aspect of our lives and it’s even worse when we have little control over our schedules. A shift lead from Boston shares a common refrain among service industry workers when they offered:

If I could change one thing it would be to regularize schedules. It’s impossible to schedule much of anything outside of work if I don’t know what my work schedule will be until a couple weeks beforehand. The demand that workers have ‘open availability’ is essentially akin to the company laying claim on all of our time. Why should I have to be able to open AND close? The idea that ‘flexibility’ within scheduling is good for workers is incredibly misleading since it doesn’t go both ways. My boss can lay claim to my time with only a couple weeks advanced notice, but I can’t ask them for the same flexibility in changing my schedule unless I request time off with at least a month’s notice.

Under neoliberal capitalism, bosses have demanded full, “open, availability” to workers’ time and “flexibility” in how to schedule that time, and few workplaces are as insidious as the café sector. Regularising and seizing control over schedules is part of a larger struggle that involves staffing, as a counter staff person, also out of Boston, shared:

I’d end the practice of solo shifts—we do this all week long and on weekend afternoons because there’s supposedly not enough traffic to justify it. but it also means leaving sometimes underage coworkers here on their own for their entire shifts, nobody staffing the counter when you need to use the bathroom, and so on. I’d also establish that shift lead position management has been talking about for the past year or so, because they basically treat the one full-timer (currently me) as a shift lead without any difference in pay. At the very least I’d like the title.

At this stage, reconstructive visions need not be all-encompassing. Rather, they will need to be constructed through class struggle, the development of working-class consciousness, and further inquiries among café workers. Often, having a say or control over the simple, everyday things can be important. As a Toledo, Ohio barista couldn’t “just list one change” as they are daily witness to several problems that they have little ability to solve:

Okay I can’t just list one change! There is so much wrong with the way my café runs. The café I work at lacks reasonable fridge space. The first thing I’d do is buy a big back up fridge. I would also move the small fridges we use to another location other than underneath the bar where our espresso machine is. Having to bend over to get milk out of that fridge, having my face at crotch level of the other barista who is at the bar is super uncomfortable for me. A big change I would make is buying a small cooler or fridge for the counter (something easy for you to grab cold items out of) just to store our silver pitchers and milks we use the most. This is so frustrating, but all of the baristas I work with store the silver pitchers ON TOP of the espresso machine, which is the hottest place in the café. We are expected to make cold foam, so it drives me crazy that they keep the pitchers in the hottest place! Traditionally I was always taught that silver pitchers should be chilled to aerate and steam milk properly. Another change I would make is I’d buy whole milk instead of 2% milks. For some reason the café owners are forcing us to use 2% milk, which drives me crazy! Whole milk is way easier to steam for a latte or a cappuccino. 2% milk produces a watery ‘Capp,’ and I feel bad even serving anyone a ‘Capp’ at my place of work. Lastly, I would implement a simpler menu that used only homemade syrups (like homemade vanilla, chocolate, and Carmel) and eliminate the use of Monin syrups.

The struggles of cafe workers point toward workplace democracy and self-management, where baristas, shift leads, trainers, counter staff and back of house collectively make decisions together. But cafe workers will need to begin from where they are—demanding higher wages, organising unions—and each step of this struggle will require workers to build power and solidarity across job classifications. “I would make sure employees get paid at least $20/hr before tips,” a barista stipulated, “The kitchen staff who make all our food items only get paid $18/hr and in Boston that doesn’t get you far.” What begins with the wage struggle and unionisation points toward a new horizon.

As we have seen, the refusal of work is already part of the strategic lexicon of working-class self-activity in the café and restaurant sector. Now, it is important to address the need for working-class self-management and workplace democracy, as well as the reconstruction of the cafe sector baristas are envisioning. A barista from Upstate New York avowed: “It would be a worker-owner cooperative that wants to become a food distro that wants to abolish work.” Here we see the reconstructive vision begin to emerge, from the refusal of work and working-class self-activity to the organising cafes toward more democratic workplaces and abolishing work through workers’ control of production and society.

Conclusion: Class Composition in the Cafe Sector

We conclude with a synopsis of the current class composition—that is, the power of the working-class vis-à-vis capitalism—in the cafe sector. The class is on the move, what began at Gimmie Coffee in Ithaca, New York, spread to Starbucks in Buffalo and then around the country. Starbucks Workers picked up the fight and brought it to their bosses in other cafe chains, including Peets Coffee, Blue Bottle, and Colectivo. New working-class self-activity, organising campaigns, and struggles are emerging in this sector all the time. With that said, union density in the sector is still quite low, and militants and the larger labour movement need to continue to develop a larger industrial strategy for the service sector as a whole. Salting and targeted organising campaigns, deploying training and resources for workers across the supply chain, will allow workers to amplify these struggles and take on bosses in their own workplaces. Decisively, cafe workers, who already see themselves as part of the working-class, should be aided as “they seize the power and begin their reconstruction of society.”⁶

Are you a cafe worker?

As the next step in our inquiry, we are circulating “Class Composition in the Cafe 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 organised informally at work? How do you communicate, and show solidarity and mutual aid with each other?

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

Notes to Class Composition in the Café Sector