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The last decade has seen an explosion in coffee industry organising. Beginning with New York’s Gimme! Coffee in 2017, a coffee union movement has spread across the United States. Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) remains the most high-profile coffee union, but workers at companies both big and small, including venture-capital-backed chains from Blue Bottle Coffee to Blank Street Coffee, have also campaigned for—and won—union elections.
However, winning an election is only the start. Far fewer coffee unions have secured a first contract, and many remain locked in stalled negotiations. SBWU has fought for years to win a first contract with Starbucks, including multiple strike actions, while Blue Bottle workers walked off the job in an attempt to get the Nestlé-owned company to the table.
Unfortunately, this isn’t unusual. The majority of unions fail to secure a first contract within a year of winning an election, says Margaret Poydock, senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “While the National Labor Relations Act requires employers—and unions—to bargain in good faith, there is nothing in the law that requires parties to reach agreement”, she says. A Bloomberg Law analysis from 2021, for example, found that the average time-to-contract was 465 days.
For those who do manage to win a contract, however, the benefits are tangible. Unionised workers in the U.S. earn an average of 18% more than their non-union counterparts, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they are also more likely to have access to health care and pensions.
The advantages even go beyond the unionised individuals themselves. Research from the EPI has shown that unionisation also “shape[s] the social and political fabric of the communities they operate in, lifting standards for union and nonunion workers alike”.
Coffee, for most, is a low-wage and precarious industry. Workers in the U.S. must navigate an offensively low federal minimum wage—it is just $7.25 per hour, and hasn’t changed since 2009—and at-will employment laws in most states, which allow employers to summarily dismiss their staff without cause. Workplace protections are weak, and bad bosses abound.
Unionising, and securing a contract, isn’t just a nice-to-have, then. It’s one of the most powerful ways workers can combat these threats and improve lives. For many, that makes ratifying a union contract a prize worth fighting for.
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These successes are notable, because many anti-union companies use the bargaining process to further intimidate and oppose their workers following a union election. Especially in high-turnover industries like coffee, stretching out contract negotiations is a tactic that can lead to unionised workers leaving and support for the union diminishing. “Anti-union employers often see first-contract negotiations as another opportunity to defeat the union, and will often delay negotiations to squash workers’ momentum after a successful union election win”, Poydock says.
Sometimes, if a company holds out long enough, the union will disband on its own. If a contract isn’t reached within a year, workers can file a request to decertify, which has happened at multiple coffee shops. The process is often bankrolled by right-wing organisations, such as the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
The negotiation period—and the amount of resistance from management—varies depending on the company. Negotiations between Intelligentsia and its union took just four months from successful election to ratified contract. The owners of Colectivo Coffee in Milwaukee, on the other hand, pushed back hard against their employees’ organising. In the lead-up to the vote in 2021, the company hired another “union avoidance” firm, Labor Relations Institute. It also fired workers, and held mandatory meetings from which organisers were banned (Colectivo denied this).
After the vote was finally certified the next year, following multiple challenges, it took another year before a first contract was ratified. However, winning the contract was worth it. According to Graham Kilmer in Urban Milwaukee, the contract included “raises across the board for Colectivo employees, additional paid holidays, and new policies for scheduling and breaks”, among other benefits.
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Blank Street Coffee is another company that has seen a protracted union struggle play out. Since its founding in New York City in 2020, Blank Street’s rapid growth, combined with its millions in venture capital backing and mission to “disrupt” specialty coffee through automation, has made itamediadarling.
Jaye Balentine was the 91st employee to be hired by the company, and says that it was a pretty good place to work in the early days. “While there were significant shortcomings in management, we were able to bring a lot of individuality and agency to the workplace”, she tells me.
The pay was good, and significantly higher than at other NYC coffee jobs. But as the company rapidly expanded, and what Balentine calls its “Starbucks-ification” took place, staff worried about losing their higher-than-average pay. They also had concerns over scheduling, technical support for the automated espresso machines, and health and safety issues.
In 2022, Blank Street workers in New York City filed to unionise, and by March 2023, 100-plus workers at more than two dozen stores across the city had joined. (Baristas at seven Boston-area stores unionised in 2025, and are still locked in contract negotiations.) What came next was what Sequoya Waring—another organiser who, like Balentine, was on the union’s bargaining committee—calls “11 months of brutal negotiations with the firm Blank Street hired” before a contract was ratified. (That firm, Jackson Lewis, is the third-largest “union avoidance” law firm in the U.S.)
“One of the enticing things that drew me to Blank Street was a policy they have that guarantees an employee will receive $23 per hour after tips”, Waring says. “This is something they aimed to remove during negotiations, seemingly as a retaliatory effort. We eventually got them to lock it into our contract”. Blank Street did not reply to a request for comment.
New York is an expensive place to live—MIT’s calculator puts the living wage for a single person with no children at more than $38 per hour. Meanwhile, the average hourly barista makes between $17 (the city’s minimum wage) and $18.25 per hour before tips (and sometimes much less). Since securing a contract, Balentine says, “by and large, we receive better pay and additional benefits than other coffee workers”—even if it is still below the living wage.
As well as preserving that pay structure, Balentine says, union negotiators won an hours guarantee for full-time workers, scheduled raises, paid time off, and a grievance and arbitration process. “Workers were far less emboldened to talk back to management, openly criticise policies, and self-advocate in the face of poor treatment before we had a union contract”, she says. Since ratification, with shop stewards to assist them and explicit procedures in place, workers have been far more vocal.
Organisers are also in contact with workers at other companies who are either unionising or exploring the prospect, Balentine says. How do working conditions at Blank Street now compare to these other places? “Anecdotally, workers at other companies are far less willing to openly resist management out of fear of termination, while our grievance and arbitration protections, as well as a level of employee solidarity, encourages workers to speak up”, she says.
Coffee Union Contracts in the Gateway to the South
Louisville, Kentucky, has witnessed a particularly fruitful coffee union movement in recent years, including a number of contract ratifications. When workers at Quills Coffee announced their intent to unionise in 2024, the company voluntarily recognised the union, and nine months later the two sides ratified a first contract.
Covering nearly 60 workers, the contract included wage increases, four weeks of paid family leave, elimination of wage caps, and improved workplace protections. In February 2026, workers at a Quills outlet in Indianapolis also unionised, were voluntarily recognised, and received the same contract as their colleagues in Kentucky.
For workers at Heine Brothers Coffee and Sunergos Coffee, both also in Louisville, the process wasn’t as easy. Like Quills workers, organisers from both companies unionised with 32BJ, a branch of Service Employees International Union, in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Despite pushback from both companies before and after their elections, organisers eventually succeeded in negotiating and ratifying union contracts. Neither Heine Brothers nor Sunergos replied to a request for comment.
At Heine Brothers, a specialty chain with 17 locations around Louisville, 232 unionised workers voted to ratify a four-year contract in 2023 after a four-month negotiation period. The contract organisers secured included increased minimum hourly wages and set automatic pay rises over the course of the four years, as well as more paid time off and dispute resolution provisions.
Jonathan Musselwhite has worked at Heine Brothers for almost 20 years, part of that time in management, and says he was inspired to push for a union in part to ensure that every employee received fair treatment. “I was lucky to be part of the bargaining committee and to be able to sit across the table from management and say, ‘Here’s the good experiences that I’ve had. Is it so much to ask for everybody to have the same good experience?’”
After negotiations at five-location Sunergos stalled, meanwhile, workers went on strike in November 2023 to pressure the company to agree to a first contract. Following a week-long walkout, the two sides agreed on a contract that increased the minimum hourly wage and included just cause protections against unfair terminations. “Those first post-contract paycheques were crazy for someone who’s trying to pay for grad school”, says Riley Olson, a barista at Sunergos who started shortly before the contract was ratified.
Like nearly every other state in the U.S., Kentucky has at-will employment laws, which means companies can fire their workers for nearly any reason. Just cause protections give unionised workers more job security, and representatives at both Sunergos and Heine Brothers fought for those protections to be included in their contracts. “Our bargaining team would not let that go; that was part of why we had to go all the way to a strike”, Olson says. “I’m really grateful that they fought for that”.
Always Be Organising
The majority of the U.S. public holds a favourable view of unions—Gallup puts public approval at 68%, while Pew has it at 55%. Despite this support, just 10% of American workers were unionised in 2025. The actions of business interests and capital play a big role in this discrepancy, and the Trump administration’s hobbling of the National Labor Relations Board has made things worse.
But as the coffee industry has shown, workers can still organise and fight for better workplace conditions and pay, even amidst challenging pushback. Having a ratified contract has certainly benefited Blank Street workers. “Overall, I find that store issues are rectified way quicker, economic benefits and worker protections feel more secure, and I overall enjoy my job better as a unionised barista”, Waring says.
Unions, especially in the U.S., are one of the most important tools that workers have. The benefits they bring are both material, in the form of higher wages and workplace protections, but also intangible. Unions fight back against the stacked deck of modern capitalism, and go some way to combating the power imbalance between owners and workers.
At Blank Street, the bargaining committee is gearing up to negotiate their next contract starting later this year (Heine Brothers and Sunergos workers will start their renegotiations in 2027). As Balentine puts it, the work of organising never really stops. “Contracts must be renegotiated, and benefits and protections can always be improved”, she says. “While short-term wins—successful unionisation votes, contract ratifications, etc.—should be celebrated, we have to keep a view towards expanding worker power and our capacity to influence and improve our conditions over the long term”.
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I'm a coffee writer and creator of The Pourover. Based in Scotland, I have over a decade of experience in the specialty coffee industry. Ask me about coffeewashing. It's pronounced Fin (he/him)
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