The Next Step in the Coffee Union Wave? Building Global Solidarity

In 2017, Nestlé spent upwards of half a billion dollars to acquire a majority stake in Blue Bottle Coffee.

Founded by James Freeman in California’s Bay Area in 2002, Blue Bottle grew to become one of the most revered specialty coffee brands in the world, and ostensibly one of the industry’s biggest success stories. From humble origins—suitably for a Silicon Valley-adjacent brand, Freeman started out roasting coffee in a former potting shed and selling at farmers markets—his uncompromising drive and vision helped Blue Bottle expand at speed (the $120 million in venture capital investment didn’t hurt, of course). 

By the time of its purchase by Nestlé, Blue Bottle had more than 50 locations in the U.S. and internationally. Post-purchase, the chain has opened more stores, broadened its coffee offerings to include Nespresso pods and instant coffee, and contributed to the growing revenue of its parent company’s vast coffee empire.

However, all has not been well on the labour side. Seven years after Blue Bottle’s acquisition, workers at six Boston-area locations voted to unionise, joining a wave of coffee shop organising across Massachusetts and the United States. Just this week, staff at four Bay Area locations also announced that they would be joining the Blue Bottle Independent Union (BBIU).

Like many other coffee union drives, a combination of monetary and workplace issues motivated Blue Bottle workers to organise. “Blue Bottle operates in some of the most expensive cities in the U.S., and they don’t pay enough to actually live in those cities”, says BBIU president Alex Pyne. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the living wage for the Boston metro area is $30.74 per hour; Pyne says the starting wage for Blue Bottle baristas is $18. “A quarter of employees have a second job because they’re part-time; they don’t actually make enough to make ends meet in the city”.

Organisers asked Blue Bottle for voluntary recognition, but the company demurred, setting the stage for a successful union election in May 2024. To represent it, Blue Bottle hired one of the original and largest “union avoidance” law firms, the multinational Ogletree Deakins. Since the vote, BBIU organisers have been locked in negotiations with the company over a first contract.

The fact that the company and its lawyers have been relatively cautious in their strategy suggests that they are learning from Starbucks’ more heavy-handed anti-union approach. “I think, seeing how much of a PR storm the Starbucks campaign was able to create, they’ve been more cautious to turn up the temperature on us slowly over time, rather than do anything particularly egregious immediately”, Pyne says.

That being said, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. In September 2024, Blue Bottle fired a union leader. The union responded by going on strike, and has since filed 16 unfair labour practice complaints against the company. In 2025, workers have gone on strike several times to protest stalled negotiations.

‘A More Radical Union’

As its name suggests, BBIU is an independent union. While BBIU union members count former labour activists as mentors, they have largely raised money and organised on their own. “One of the reasons for being independent is we want to be a more radical union than I think the U.S. has seen in a while”, Pyne explains.

But as workers for a global multinational, BBIU organisers also benefit from an international network of unions linked to the same employer. Nestlé, Blue Bottle’s parent company, is the largest food and beverage company in the world, with $100.2 billion in sales last year. It operates 337 plants and factories in 75 countries, and employs a total of 277,000 people—over half of whom are unionised.

On its website, Nestlé states that, “We empower workers and employees by supporting their right to establish and join unions”, and reports that 51.3% of its global workforce was covered by a collective bargaining agreement in 2024. However, there have been dozens of allegations of anti-union activity by the conglomerate over the decades and around the world.

Since winning their election, BBIU organisers have been in touch with members of Colombia’s Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Industria de Alimentos (SINALTRAINAL), a union that represents 1,800 members working at four Nestlé plants in the country. 

Eventually, the idea of a visit came up. Pyne and Abbey Sadow, BBIU’s secretary treasurer, were excited to “foster a relationship and then bring it back to talk to [our] members about”, Pyne says. “They are a union with a vision; they’ve been able to accomplish so much”. Recently, the two visited Colombia to meet with SINALTRAINAL organisers and forge connections that they hope will benefit them in their future dealings with management.

Global Labour Citizens

Unions joining forces across borders is not a new phenomenon. Global union federations and international trade secretariats have existed for centuries, bringing together smaller related unions to coordinate and collaborate. Today, there are several large groups, such as the International Trade Union Confederation and the World Federation of Trade Unions, as well as dozens of smaller organisations with specific focuses.

In 1920, three international trade secretariats, comprising unions in the brewery, meat, and bakery industries, came together to create the International Union of Food and Allied Workers’ Associations. That federation eventually merged with additional unions to create what is today known as the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF). 

The IUF, which comprises more than 400 unions across 127 countries, represents some 10 million workers worldwide. The organisation has made a point of focusing on Nestlé, assisting workers in India, Malaysia, Nicaragua, and elsewhere in disputes with the company. At a conference in 2012, IUF affiliates raised money to help striking workers at a Nescafé factory in Indonesia. As the labour activist Eric Lee wrote at the time, “If Nestlé thought they could get away with quietly intimidating union members in a far away corner of the world, they were sorely mistaken”.

International labour cooperation is increasingly important in a globalised world where multinational companies operate across borders, says Dr. Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, Project Director at UCLA’s Labor Center. Corporations can sign transnational deals to extract resources and labour from countries while staying removed from the harms they cause, he explains. The difficulty for labour organisers is to counteract that with international solidarity.

“What would a global labour citizen look like, and how then can labour unions respond to that challenge, to develop also organising projects that cross borders?” Rivera-Salgado tells me. “I think one of the main challenges is not to reproduce the uneven, asymmetrical relationship between the North and the South, but to develop a new sense of horizontal organisation, and to look at especially workers who work for global corporations”.

Unionised workers forging relationships with colleagues in other countries is one way of building that solidarity. “A lot of times, workers in these global corporations, despite the fact that they’re working for the same company, sometimes they don’t know each other”, Rivera-Salgado says. “Therefore it has to be a deliberate effort on the part of workers to get to know their brothers and sisters who work for the same company”.

‘Life-Changing’

Colombia is an extremely dangerous place to organise—more than 3,000 trade unionists have been killed there since the 1970s. According to Amnesty International, since SINALTRAINAL’s founding in 1982, at least 20 of its members have been murdered by paramilitary groups, 13 of whom worked for Nestlé. The company has denied any link to these deaths. In a 2002 report, the NGO Corporate Watch decried Nestlé’s “appalling record when it comes to labour and human rights violations”, noting SINALTRAINAL’s “[battle] to form a union” amid “targeted, but unofficial, repression”.

Throughout all this, SINALTRAINAL has still managed to build solidarity with Nestlé unions around the world. Among other collaborations, organisers have worked with the British unions GMB and Unite, which represent Nestlé workers in the United Kingdom, to pressure the company to address accusations of anti-union activity in Colombia, specifically at a plant in Bugalagrande. 

That factory in Bugalagrande, a small town in the Valle del Cauca region of Colombia, manufactures Nescafé, alongside dairy and chocolate products. For more than a year, SINALTRAINAL members have been protesting outside over Nestlé’s refusal to bargain with the union.

Pyne and Sadow traveled to Bugalagrande to connect with SINALTRAINAL members, learn about their struggles, and build international solidarity. They also visited some of the infrastructure that the union has helped build in the town over the years, such as a school, pharmacy, sports centre, and even a funeral home. 

“The people that we met, and their attitudes towards organising, and their attitudes towards direct action, was life-changing for me”, Sadow says. “I strongly believe in direct action, I strongly believe in community organising, and to see it on a much larger scale—to the point where the entire town knows each other, and their major sites are administered by the union—was really cool”.

The two representatives returned to Boston with a clearer idea of their union’s place—not just within the U.S. coffee-organising space, but internationally, as part of a network of connected groups within the Nestlé ecosystem. “The employer itself has one playbook”, Pyne says. “The severity of the violence is kind of unique to [Colombia], but the union busting is the same no matter where—they’re trying to use fear to break our union and to break their union”.

“The thing that I’ve been thinking about is how extractive this industry is,” Pyne continues. “Nestlé extracts all the wealth and resources from Colombia and other countries and brings them back to be consumed in the U.S. or the U.K. The only way that we’ll actually be able to [fight back] is through actually fostering these relationships and listening to the organisers who have been dealing with much harsher conditions than us”.

Like Nestlé’s international circuit of unions, Starbucks workers have also benefited from their employer’s global reach. There have been historic and recent unionisation drives in Canada, New Zealand, and Chile (although not, as yet, in the U.K.). Starbucks Workers United staged a week of solidarity actions in support of their Chilean colleagues, who went on strike in March over the company’s failure to agree a new union contract. (After a 25-day strike, organisers were able to win a new contract.)

Real Coffee Community

These international collaborations show coffee’s much-celebrated community-building in action.

Community is a popular coffee buzzword these days, used by companies of all sizes to denote their authenticity and local focus. It can often feel shallow, more a marketing hook than anything concrete, especially when it comes to big corporations and the hip brands they acquire. On its blog, for example, Blue Bottle states that “community is core to who we are as a business”. Nestlé, meanwhile, is “working to help ensure thriving, resilient communities exist today and for generations to come”.

While these appeals can often feel insincere—a box-checking exercise for PR and marketing departments—when it comes to coffee unions, the word “community” is alive and well. What is a union, in the end, if not an exercise in community-building? Workers coming together, often from very different backgrounds, joining forces to fight for their rights in the workplace.

As well as the grassroots community of local organising, coffee unions—especially those within multinational corporations—can be part of global solidarity movements. Whether it’s American Starbucks organisers speaking out in support of their Chilean counterparts or Blue Bottle baristas visiting Colombia to learn from Nestlé workers, such international outreach strengthens what Dr. Rivera-Salgado calls the “horizontal organisation” of worker solidarity.

This is something that the Blue Bottle organisers have taken to heart. “We want to be a more radical union, and we want to be able to make really big strides in organising, especially in the coffee industry”, Sadow says. “We can look at the struggle in Boston, or the U.S., or internationally, and we can find those similarities and find those communities. At the end of the day, we’re all being exploited”.