The 401 REPORTER
BY ELLEN LIBERMAN
ILLUSTRATION: ALAN DIPETRILLO.
Filling Their Cups
Staffers at three Rhode Island cafes have formed unions since 2020, with the trend showing no signs of stopping.
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N JUNE, STARBUCKS STORE 27290 became Starbucks Workers United Store 703. The twenty employees at Providence’ s University Heights location voted to join the grassroots union that sprang up at a Buffalo, New York, Starbucks nearly five years ago. When a colleague first approached barista Skylar Colon about organizing, the twenty-year-old knew little about unions; she knew plenty about what needed to change in her workplace.
“ For starters, more staffing, also better pay,” she says.“ I thought it was an amazing idea, because I realized that I don’ t have to get used to the way things are. I can fight as part of the whole for things that we need collectively. When you’ re in a union, you’ re working together for a brighter future for all.”
Since May 2020, staffers at three cafes in Rhode Island have sought a brighter future through collective action. White Electric Coffee in Providence was the first, voting to unionize six years ago. Seven Stars Bakery baristas from all locations joined the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 328 in 2022 and ratified their second contract in January. The first Rhode Island Starbucks to unionize in downtown Providence unanimously voted to form a bargaining unit in 2023.( In February 2025, the workers at a fourth cafe with multiple Providence locations, Ceremony, initiated talks with the UFCW, but the attempt to organize fizzled.)
“ To say [ that unionizing ] was utterly transformative would be an understatement,” says Andrew Wojcicki, a Seven Stars shift supervisor at the chain’ s East Providence location.“ I was lucky enough to be among those who organized at Seven Stars, to bargain for the first contracts, and then we really got to see and hear the fruits of that labor.”
The rise of the coffee shop union shop has stirred interest at a time when union density is at an all-time low. Only 10 percent of wage and salary workers— 14.7 million Americans— belonged to a union in 2025, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. At their most recent peak in 1954, unions represented 35 percent of the nonagricultural workforce. Rhode Island has the nation’ s fifth highest union density at 16 percent.
Labor scholars and economists had long written off the food and drink services sector— with one of the lowest union rates of 1.8 percent— as too transient, too atomized and too low-wage to successfully organize. But the nationwide and growing Starbucks Workers United movement has inspired new analyses of its impetus, its wider effects and what this means for the labor movement in general.
“ Ever since the 1980s, the mood’ s been quite gloomy with labor, especially the way it’ s reported in the media: It’ s all been about decline. So, this resurgence has been quite a shift,” says Timothy Minchin, a history professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, who has written about Starbucks.“ Prior to this, the received wisdom was: Organizing is really hard. You have to have a lot of organizers, throw a lot of money at it, and it takes a lot of time. [ Starbucks Workers United ] threw a lot of that out. They did it themselves largely. They didn’ t have a lot of them, and the central organizers used social media to mobilize very quickly. So, this has epitomized a new genre of [ workerto-worker ] organizing.”
The roots of coffee shop unions go back to 1900, when Seattle waitresses formed the first local. Then, as now, waitressing was considered unskilled labor, and women in food service were relegated to the lowest-paid positions, such as working in coffee shops. But they rejected that label. Unionized waitresses positioned themselves as skilled practitioners of a craft that relied on social skills to build bonds with their customers, leveraging that argument and patron support to get better pay and working conditions. In the 1940s and 1950s, all-female waitress unions represented nearly one-fourth of the trade nationally, according to Dishing it Out,
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