Hi friends. It’s been a moment—stick around til the end for a quick update on the show—but I want to get right into this conversation with Alex and Abbey, two members of the Blue Bottle Independent Union in Boston.
In May 2024, workers across six Blue Bottle locations in Boston voted to unionize. Blue Bottle, which began as an independent coffee shop and roastery in San Francisco in 2002, has since expanded to around 100 locations worldwide and Nestle purchased a majority stake in the business in 2017.
Blue Bottle presents an interesting case in the continued fight to organize coffee shops: Blue Bottle has been aggressively expanding, and yet still tries to hold onto this reputation of being a “specialty coffee shop,” serving coffee that necessitates a ton of skill and training, but seemingly being unwilling to acknowledge that in how they treat their workers.
Abbey and Alex are here to talk about why they chose to unionize, from both a practical standpoint—they both detail problems with stagnant wages, how upper management routinely tells them they don’t have funds to hire more workers—and from a theoretical standpoint—that workers deserve to have a voice in decision-making in their workplaces.
To learn more about the union, you can follow them on Instagram or TikTok, but here are Abbey and Alex to tell us more:
Ashley: I am so thrilled to have two members of the Blue Bottle Union with me today. I'm gonna have both of you start by introducing yourself. Let's start with Abbey.
Abbey: So my name's Abbey. I work here in Boston at Blue Bottle. I use they and she pronouns and I'm super excited to be here.
Ashley: What about you, Alex?
Alex: Hi, I'm Alex. I am the vice president of the Blue Bottle Independent Union and yeah, I'm very excited to be here.
Ashley: I was wondering if you folks could start by telling me kind of like the origin story of the union, Alex, I'll start with you on that.
Alex: Yeah. So I started working at Blue Bottle around the fall of 2022. At that point I'd been in coffee for, I think about three or four years.
At that particular moment in time when I was joining Blue Bottle, there was this kind of explosion of labor organizing in Boston, particularly around coffee where a Starbucks on Commonwealth Avenue had been on strike for 64 days over harassment and unfair labor practices by a manager and Pavement Coffee had just negotiated their contract.
So I was really inspired, especially when coming into Blue Bottle, by these other unions and realizing that there's actually so much more that we deserve and that we can win if we act collectively.
Ashley: What about you, Abbey? What was your first introduction to the union?
Abbey: Yeah, so I'm much newer to Blue Bottle and to coffee in general. I started this past October, and I was almost immediately introduced to the idea of, “Hey, we have a union campaign running and come to a couple meetings, meet some people, see what you think, see what it's like.” And it was immediately just so fun.
And it was such a really big learning experience for me. I'm still pretty young and I'm pretty new to unions and labor movements. So I feel like this has just been a really great experience to meet cool people and learn about all the things that jobs and corporations should be giving their employees and aren't.
I'm having a blast just learning like, from my peers and feeling empowered in my workplace.
Ashley: Abbey, you mentioned while we were off the air that you had like this idea of what labor unions kind of looked like. Can you talk a little bit about what your perception was versus what the reality has been for you?
Abbey: Yeah, I'd always been taught that a labor union is just a bunch of people in suits arguing, and I hate lawyers. So I was like, “Why would I ever be in a union? That's for like, construction workers.” That was my only preconceived notion of unions.
So coming into our union, which is completely independently run, and realizing that it's just me and all my favorite coworkers talking about all the things that we deserve in a workplace—it's been a crazy reframing of my mindset.
Ashley: There are a couple of big ideas I want to talk about. I want to talk about the idea of forming a union in one of the biggest coffee companies in the world. Blue Bottle is owned by Nestle, has been owned by Nestle, I believe, since 2017, so that has real implications for what your union looks like.
I also want to touch on that idea, like you said Abbey, about community building and being with your comrades and building something together.
Then also the idea of being in Boston and what it means to be in one of the nation's most expensive city. So let's start kind of at the beginning and kind of lay the foundation for what is Blue Bottle and why does it matter to form a union within such a big coffee chain.
Alex, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it means to unionize within like, such a large corporate structure.
Alex: Yeah. Blue Bottle is interesting because, despite the fact that Nestle has owned a majority stake in the company since 2017, the reality on the floor tends to be that managers constantly tell us that they can't afford things which is a real confused, like incongruous experience.
The value that Blue Bottle poses for Nestle, is I think the brand. Like, the vision—if they have one—is to expand rapidly into various markets, so that way they can, you know, then put a Blue Bottle logo on Nespresso pods or do almost kind of tech-like drop culture shit. Like, they did a sneaker collaboration with Nike last year, which was silly.
Blue Bottle for specialty coffee in particular is interesting because I think it's what people that aren't within the industry immediately think of what good quality coffee is.
And in spite of this also, since we're run basically as a venture capital scheme, the company continues to be run in a way that is like, antithetical to even that ethos.
We don't get transparency reports for what farmers are paid. We consistently are trying to add drinks that are not focused on the coffee, but like, that are super sugary or cold foam or whatever, not that those things are bad, but it's fascinating to see the direction that the industry is taking, you know?
Ashley: Yeah, it’s so interesting that you’re owned by this huge multinational corporation that has a ton of money—we know Nestle has money, and yet you're told things like, “We don't have enough money and we don't have more to pay you.” Like you were saying, it seems incongruous to like what the reality of being owned by such a big business is.
Abbey, do you have any thoughts on that?
Abbey: Yeah, I mean, it really doesn't take background in the industry to kind of put two and two together and be like, I'm being lied to right now. When the company is like, “Oh we can't afford to have an assistant cafe leader at your store,” I know I'm being lied to.
When the company is like, “Oh, well, we just don't have anybody in the company that we can promote to be your manager,” I know I'm being lied to. And it becomes really frustrating as a worker, as a barista, to look around me and be like, “I'm surrounded by all these amazing people, and all upper management wants to do is lie to us and put us down and put us in these positions where we feel powerless.”
Alex: I think some of that is a consequence of being run as a venture capital scheme where they're constantly trying to cut costs in ways that are unsafe and detrimental to our ability to work in our space because we're constantly understaffed, then baristas can't be adequately paid, can't be adequately trained to make drinks safely.
It's startling because if they're constantly cutting hours in this way we, we either, like, either they're, I don't know, I'm sorry, this isn't well organized as a thought—
Ashley: No, it’s making sense to me! I see what you’re saying.
It’s like…You're right. It's a venture capital scheme and it's operating like venture capital does where like the only thing that you're responsible for is shareholder value.
Alex: Right!
Ashley: So you have to consistently demonstrate, “Look, we're cutting costs, we're making money.” And it seems kind of bizarre that—there has to be people in like, C-suite positions who are making like money hand over fist, and yet here you are arguing over a dollar or two more an hour that you're not getting.
Alex: Yeah, exactly. And then we're being told that we can't have pre-closers. But that's—
Ashley: I want to talk a little bit about staffing because I have to imagine like, you folks are in Boston. You've mentioned that some of the cafes are more busy than others, but can you give me a sense of like what staffing looks like relative to how busy the cafes are? Maybe Abby, you can take this one.
Abbey: Yeah, I can definitely take this one. So, Boston is home to one of Blue Bottle's busiest stores at the Prudential Center, which is where a lot of different conventions take place. They do a crazy amount of profit in a day. And there's maybe four baristas in the back doing all that work.
Even at our cafe, we're not in as much of a busy area, but we're still one of the leading profiteers in Boston. It was just me and one other coworker for the first five hours of our shift. And the two of us were responsible for everything that was going on, taking orders, making orders, making sure those orders were up to quality and providing service to our customers who most of the time we actually like, and we want to do a good job for because who wants to drink a bad drink that they paid $9 for?
It gets really frustrating and as employees, we want to be able to do our jobs to the best of our ability and when we have to stay extra late because there wasn't a pre-closer or we have to unlock the doors despite having things not been done, it's really hard to feel confident in the work that you're doing and the drinks that you're putting out.
Ashley: Does Blue Bottle still do pour over for every one of their drip coffees?
Abbey: Oh yeah.
Ashley: My God, that's wild.
Abbey: At places like the Prudential, they will do a batch brew, so it's a little bit easier because the volume that they do is quite literally unimaginable. I worked one shift at the Prudential and I had to walk home listening to white noise because it was so overwhelming.
Ashley: That's wild to me.
I—when I was thinking about this, I was like, that has to be something from when me, as an old person went to a Blue Bottle, you know? That has to be a relic. But no, it seems like it's very much intact.
Abbey: Yeah, it's something that Blue Bottle takes a lot of pride in. They really love their title of specialty coffee, but they really don't want to put the work in to make it specialty coffee that anybody else is proud of.
Ashley: I think too, what you were saying was really interesting about not having the tools to be successful at your job. And something that I think comes up in a lot of these like, union sort of conversations as a theme is that the people who are unionizing are actually like expressing a great amount of love for the company that they work for and the people that they serve.
They just want it to be better. They're seeing the failures, they're seeing the things that are not making it successful or viable for them. If you didn't love this work, you would just quit. I wonder Alex, if you could speak a little bit to that.
Alex: Yeah, I mean, it's not really rocket surgery how to run a cafe, you know? And something that I think is apparent after even a month working at any coffee shop, Blue Bottle in particular, is that if you and your coworkers all had an hour at the beginning or the end of the day to do all the things that a manager does you could probably do a better job than your manager.
I think that you're absolutely right that the thing that we're fighting for here isn't just a slightly better wage or benefits—although I would love those—it's also for democratic control of the place that we work and to be able to have ownership over the work that we do.
Ashley: Let's talk a little bit about wages because, Boston is one of the most expensive cities in the nation. We were talking about the MIT living wage calculator and the living wage in Boston is $30 an hour. Can you talk a little bit about what you folks are getting paid and how people talk about tips to you?
Abbey, I'll have you start that
Abbey: Yeah, so there's a pretty standardized way that Blue Bottle pays us. So it's by your rank, I guess. So base baristas get $18 an hour, shift leads get $19, and it kind of goes up by there. So, as a barista, I make $18 an hour, and our tips, we're marketed to get $6-8 an hour. With tips, my location probably makes closer to $6.
And it's definitely rough trying to live on that. And I'm a full time university student. I'm financially independent from my parents. So trying to figure out rent and student loans and health care and all of those like big, scary adult things is really hard. And even from like just the most basic perspective, at the end of the day, like I want to go home and I want to eat and that should be something that I'm allowed and able to do, especially when you're working full time.
It's just one of those things where as the cost of living goes up and up, our wages should definitely be reflected in that rise.
Ashley: And something too that I saw reflected in an interview that some of the union folks did was how regimented hours are. So like, instead of being scheduled till 12, people are scheduled to 11;45. And something that's important about the MIT living wage calculator and apologies if this is repetitive, but the MIT Living Wage Calculator assumes that you work 40 hours a week.
Are you all getting scheduled 40 hours? Are you getting scheduled like, 32.5 or anything to make sure that you folks aren't getting overtime? Alex, I wonder if you could maybe talk about like that in terms of scheduling.
Alex: I mean, they're absolutely allergic to even the phrase over time. So I, myself, I think average 33 hours a week. Full time, defined by Blue Bottle, is 28 hours a week. And then there's no guaranteed minimum amount of hours for part time workers. So it can be pretty brutal trying to make ends meet, especially when they're constantly doing those cost cutting measures like you mentioned of scheduling people on the quarter hour so that way they might not have to take a break or something like that.
Yeah, it’s very nickel and dime.
Ashley: So you said you get like about 33 hours a week. Does that change? Can that change from week to week?
How often I'm personally scheduled, I think is consistent because I'm the only full time shift lead at my cafe, which also means that I am doing the work of what should be like two or three shift leads or leads of the day in a shift. The part timers—and Abbey, correct me if I'm wrong—tend to have the most inconsistency with their hours.
Abbey: Yeah, I can definitely speak on inconsistencies.
At the beginning of this year, I had to go home for winter break because my university wasn't giving us free housing and I had to find somewhere to sleep. When I got back, I was like, “Hey, as per my availability that I gave you, I'm back, I'm here, please schedule me.”
I got maybe, maybe 10 hours a week for a couple of weeks. And that's brutal. When you're coming back from not working for a couple of weeks because you had to not be in the city that you're trying to live in. It's really rough. And I kind of had to sit down and be like, “Hey, like, I know I'm a part timer. I know that I don't have the same rights, I guess, as my coworkers,”—which is a crazy conversation to have in the first place—”but like, please schedule me.”
Then I finally got my regular 15 to 20 hours. And then now in the summer, I'm feeling the exact opposite of that where, legally by the company, I'm still a part time employee, but I'm also averaging, you know, about 30 hours a week right now.
It's very interesting. I've felt a really big fluctuation in my schedule, especially our cafe in this past year has gone through multiple managers, so it kind of seems like I'm getting different treatment based on who's in the position of power, which is just an awful feeling.
Ashley: Yeah, and I have to imagine that some of that turnover is like a symptom, a symptom of all of this, a symptom of inconsistency in schedules or lack of accountability and management. When we create systems that are unstable, like we're going to see these patterns play out over and over.
Abbey: Absolutely.
Ashley: You folks are in kind of an interesting place right now where you won your union vote because Blue Bottle failed to voluntarily recognize the union but then you won your vote and now you're kind of just waiting.
Where are we in the unionizing kind of conversation? Alex, if you could take this one.
Alex: Yeah, so right now we're trying to set up our first dates for bargaining. We're still going back and forth with management at this point to set on a date, but it's looking like it'll be maybe in the beginning of the fall.
And right now we're doing lots of organizing internally to make sure that we can develop strong proposals, that morale is high while also trying to make sure that we're looking for ways to still address issues that arise in the workplace as they're happening.
Within the past month at the Newbury location, there were three days in a row where they didn't have hot water. And the store was only shut down for a day after workers filed an OSHA complaint.
Ashley: Yeah.
Alex: And then they, crucially, have not been paid for the day that Blue Bottle had to keep the store closed. They tried to ask people to use paid time off, but, with such an abysmal, sick pay and PTO accrual rate, that's not feasible for most people.
And then at the Kendall Square location one of the grease traps hadn't been cleaned for over two years because it’s like hidden under the lockers where people put their stuff.
When somebody came into the store. Last month to clean it, it essentially like, set off a stink bomb in the whole cafe that made quite a few people nauseous. You could still smell the grease trap from like the very front of house. And it stayed that way for a few days. And then we had to file another OSHA complaint over that.
So we're still trying to address issues in the workplace as they come up. And the kind of lax time between winning our election and bargaining the contract allows for that, I guess?
Ashley: I want to talk about some things that you texted me, Alex, before we started talking. This happens in every, like, union kind of back and forth, but there's always rhetoric that the company uses or things that they try to get out as quote unquote facts or things like that.
So I want to talk a little bit about Blue Bottle's strategy because something that you folks pointed out to me before we started talking is that Blue Bottle's strategy has seemed to be doing nothing. So, Abbey, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
Abbey: It's been super interesting. Blue Bottle has refused to make any public statements. After we had filed, we had asked them to make a public statement asking for voluntary recognition, and they chose not to, and instead just posted a flyer in our back of house for everybody to see.
Which was really disheartening. I feel like they kind of understand the rhetoric around unions these days, where every time a union is launched in a cafe, there's an overwhelming, overwhelmingly positive reaction towards the union. And especially with some of the things that we've dealt with as Blue Bottle employees, it's kind of obvious who's on the right side here. [laughs]
Ashley: Yeah.
Abbey: Not to be cheeky, but it’s disheartening to see as an employee that they're basically just trying to sweep us under the rug.
They know that if they decide to put out a statement, it will give us more opportunities to reach a wider audience. And it's almost like they're trying to hide it from their customers that there's unions forming and there's a reason that these unions are forming. It's because the workplace has awful conditions.
Ashley: Yeah, James Freeman is not like doing tours, visiting all the shops trying to deter people from unionizing. That hasn't happened yet?
Abbey: I mean…
Alex: No, not yet. Funnily enough, we went public on April 3rd and then on April 4th they had an internal latte art competition that the COO was at. And to my amazement, they did not cancel the throw down. It was the epitome of eat their pizza and unionize anyways.
That's the only higher up that anybody's had the real chance to meet and kind of like Abbey was saying, it's just as disrespectful to be given the silent treatment as it is to be condescended to by having them fly somebody in so that way they can dissuade us.
Ashley: Right yeah, exactly. Both strategies are disrespectful and the fact that they haven't even acknowledged that this is happening seems to be in direct opposition to what has been playing out with Starbucks, like you said, Abbey.
I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that have been posted in your stores, because as I mentioned earlier, Alex, you sent me a couple of texts of different things that have been like posted in stores or things that you guys have found in like printers that maybe were not supposed to be distributed, however you kind of interpret that.
What are some of the ways that management has talked to you internally about the union? Alex, I'll have you start that
Alex: I—it's interesting, just nobody has said anything. I think that the only…
They seem to be aware that if they were to threaten us, interrogate us about our feelings towards the union or otherwise make promises in relation to our unionization that that could be an unfair labor practice.
So managers haven't said anything, but in the lead up to our election, they posted, I think, four or five various flyers, mostly written in Comic Sans, trying to dissuade us from voting by like writing “facts” about the union or our demands or anything like that.
It was very quite silly.
Ashley: I think my favorite one is all team members are eligible for a variety of benefits. Like, what does…
Alex: [laughs] That’s so nonspecific!
Ashley: Another one in one of the things that you sent me, it's like myths versus facts. And one of the facts is that “It 465 days to negotiate a first contract between a union and an employer,” and they're clearly presenting this as a deterrent.
And you have to go back on like, “Wait, that's a fact because companies routinely look for ways to delay implementation of a first contract, like that's not coming from you. Like, I'm sure if you folks wanted to negotiate tomorrow, you'd be like, “Yeah, let's do this. We know what we want.
Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, the interesting thing also abou why it takes so long is they're delaying so that way they could try and run a de-cert campaign. After the statute of limitations for that ends.
Ashley: Can you just say briefly what that means?
Alex: Yeah. So if I remember correctly: basically, an employer can't legally challenge or contest a union through a decertification campaign until a year after we've been certified, which is often one of the factors in why employers will try to delay beyond just beyond, you know, not wanting to pay workers. It’s so that way they can try and challenge the legitimacy of the union as it exists.
Ashley: Right. And there's also too this idea that coffee shop workers are temporary, like they're people who maybe will work somewhere for a couple of months and then go somewhere else or that they're young people who are maybe only looking for temporary jobs, which is absolutely not true.
Especially in the case of somebody like Blue Bottle where—I've lived in San Francisco. I've seen people who've worked for Blue Bottle for years and the amount of training and knowledge a barista needs to have in order to work at a Blue Bottle is highly extensive.
So it doesn’t match up with the reality of what it takes to be a barista in that setting? But also it seems, and you've mentioned this earlier, that Blue Bottle kind of banks on this idea of like, “We're a specialty coffee shop, look how trained our staff is,” but yet counts on them almost being like throwaways in the same breath.
Abbey, if you want to jump in on that one first.
Abbey: It's quite interesting. Cause we, the union, we have an Instagram account, and I feel like a lot of the hate comments we get have to be coming directly from some upper management person, cause it's this exact rhetoric of, “You're a barista, you are replaceable, you are expendable, you are unskilled, you are young, you don't know anything,” and it's just not true.
Blue Bottle has an issue with retention. It's a known issue. We got a raise recently to raise retention because nobody wants to stay in a company that sucks. But the truth is like, when people like their job, and they stay for a long time, then they are better at their job and they know more, and they can do more, and they can give better service to their customers.
So this like, idea of an unskilled barista is just kind of backwards, because a skilled barista is what everybody wants. You want to know the face that's taking your order behind the counter. You don't want this revolving door of teenagers.
Ashley: Let's talk a little bit about some of the other initiatives that the union has been taking on. So Alex, you mentioned to me that the union is working on kind of a bigger project to collect stories of workers all over the northeast. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, one of the things that, like Abby mentioned, that I think deters some people that haven't been in the industry for as long is this idea that coffee's just a temporary job before I am able to put myself through grad school or, you know, I graduate college or I get into Q grading or whatever.
Which might be true for some people, but I don't think is true for a vast majority of people that work in this industry. And so along with Anastasia Wilson and Kevin Van Meter and some few other people, we beginning to put together a workers inquiry survey to gather the narratives and experiences of baristas across the East coast.
And what the idea is here is that we can begin collecting people's stories of their experiences on the shop floor, of issues with management, if they've tried to organize before, or have had to fight bureaucrats within their business union—things of that nature.
I'm really excited to be putting this together.
Ashley: Yeah, I was thinking about this and maybe this is a little bit like too conceptual, but I was talking to a friend of mine about what we see on television and where like, most sitcoms or dramas take place. They take place in hospitals or, like, we have 700 procedural dramas. We have, like, all this stuff about the police and we don't really see the work that service workers do reflected in the media that we consume. [SIDE NOTE: I also wrote about this idea, kind of, in this piece about the show “Superstore”]
So we don't often know what those experiences look like. So I think what Abby was saying, it's really easy for people to kind of jump onto Instagram and say like, “You're this or you're that.”
And it's like, you actually really don't know because there's not a lot of portrayals of what this life is actually like, even though you might interact with a barista every single day and never think about what the reality of their lives look like. So I think it's really cool that you're thinking about ways to make that message clearer by letting people tell their stories.
Alex: Yeah, exactly. And this can be a way to kind of change the consciousness of baristas and hopefully inspire them to organize in their own workplaces as well.
Ashley: Is there anything that's surprising that you've discovered about yourself or the work that you do that unionizing has kind of brought up for you or something that maybe no one's asked you about that you actually would really like to talk about more? Abbey, I'll start with you on that one.
Abbey: Yeah, so my favorite thing that I like to tell people about our independent union is how overwhelmingly positive of a community it is. It's insane. Like, how close you can get to your co workers when you're just talking about your work environment, we're all kind of doing the same things and we're all fighting for the same cause and I found the work that we do extremely fulfilling.
I came into Blue Bottle looking for a job, looking for a way to make rent and pay loans and I have found myself in a position of having a community and gaining all this extra knowledge and gaining all this work experience—like I'm helping out with a real, labor union and that's cool and crazy.
It's just one of those things where if anybody needs friends just go unionize your workplace. It's probably the best way to do it. So, yeah.
Ashley: What about you, Alex?
Alex: If you are a barista, you already do control your workplace. One of the things that we're demanding is democratic control of the workplace within our contract. And I think that it's important for anybody that works as a barista, works in coffee to begin thinking about the relationship to who controls production and who controls or runs the top floor.
And it's us as the rank and file workers of the cafe. There have been times when we've had no manager. There have been times—there was one moment, a two month period last summer where we had three managers for six stores in Boston, and the cafes still ran.
I think that can’t be stressed enough: that the power that baristas hold is amongst each other and themselves. There’s a lot to win by organizing together to exert that control.
Yeah, this is very long winded. I'm sorry for that, but think reframing how we think about our relationship to work and to production is something that I would love to see happen on a broader scale within this industry.
Ashley: Yeah, the stores can operate without managers, but without the workers they can't operate.
Alex: Hell yeah.
Ashley: Abbey, Alex, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. If people want to follow what's going on with you folks, where can they go?
Abbey: So, we have an Instagram, a X, formerly known as Twitter, and a TikTok. X and Instagram are @bbiunion, and then TikTok is @bbiu so definitely follow us.
Alex: And if any barista listens to this or reads this and wants to get in touch with us we have a Linktree with a link to a Google form. And that'll have a zine that we produced as a union. It’ll link to a survey if you want to get in touch with us along with a link to our GoFundMe if in the event that you also want to give us money.
Ashley: Thank you so much for joining me.
Alex: Yeah. Thank you so much. This is lovely.
Blue Bottle Independent Union Takes On One of the World’s Largest Specialty Coffee Chains