Peet’s Coffee Workers Are Following Starbucks Workers’ Lead in Organizing Unions
A Peet's Coffee and Tea shop in Los Altos, California, July 12, 2017. (Paul Chinn / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Workers at Peet’s Coffee & Tea in California have announced that they’re filing for a union election. They’re not just inspired by their peers at Starbucks — they’ve been organizing with and learning directly from them.
In late November, after a landmark year in food service organizing invigorated by the efforts of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), workers at two Davis, California locations of Peet’s Coffee & Tea announced that they were filing for union election. They made their campaign public after months of organizing in close collaboration with Tyler Keeling, a Starbucks worker who helped lead a successful union drive at his location, which is now represented by SBWU.
The Davis Peet’s campaign brought together organizers working at the two leaders of first-wave coffee culture in the United States, Peet’s and Starbucks. It also intersects with another exciting recent development in the labor movement: worker organizing in the University of California (UC) system. Peet’s workers Schroedter Kinman, Molly Smith, and Trinity Salazar told Jacobin that they are excited to be a part of the larger coffee organizing movement, and to have the support of graduate workers and postdocs at UC Davis, who entered the winter quarter hot off the largest academic strike in United States history.
During the six-week-long cross-unit academic worker strike, UC Davis picketers often chanted, “Get up, get down, Davis is a union town.” Smith said that announcing their campaign amid the strike at UC Davis made Peet’s workers “feel less alone.” Smith, Salazar, and Kinman joined the picket line, where they got on the microphone to share their effort with an enthusiastic audience. Salazar, a student, remarked that “to hear that grad students, who grade my papers, are there for me is just community and solidarity.”
Coffee industry worker-organizers and university worker-organizers have fed off each other’s energy — especially in Davis where, according to Kinman, baristas “have a symbiotic relationship with grad students and undergrads.” Academic workers’ support has meant a great deal to Peet’s workers, according to Smith, who told Jacobin, “Feeling like you have support makes anyone more confident in their actions.” Kinman observed that Peet’s workers’ organizing efforts were buoyed by the general “pro-union” sentiment and “support for the strike” in Davis surrounding the UC strike.
Low wages, shift-lead pay discrepancies, scheduling issues, and problems with the mobile order system were animating issues for workers like Kinman and Alyx Land. Foregrounding these issues, they began talking to coworkers about a union three months before going public. Kinman notes that initially they had their eye on the International Workers of the World, whose stickers around campus had caught their attention. Though the IWW was an appealing option, the unparalleled success of SEIU’s Workers United in organizing coffee workers and the opportunity to work closely and constantly with SBWU ultimately won out. They’ve now begun to organize as Peet’s Workers United (PWU), the Peet’s counterpart to SBWU.
Like many other baristas and service workers, Peet’s employees are challenged by schedules that are delivered on short notice, unreliable hours, lean staffing, and difficulty securing coverage. As a result, café positions have high rates of turnover. But members of PWU are invested in making the job more sustainable for themselves and more tenable for those who come next.
In Davis, Peet’s workers report that they are often scheduled for shifts that are deliberately shortened so that they are not afforded breaks. Meanwhile mobile orders exacerbate understaffing issues: the company does not place restrictions on mobile orders, which often leads to a torrent of tickets, not all of which are picked up, and delays of drinks ordered by customers who arrive in person. The current practice around mobile orders exhausts baristas and contributes to frustration of customers, who sometimes direct that frustration toward staff.