Like the waitresses before them, CUPS rallied customers to their cause. Owner Thomas Toupin agreed to voluntarily recognize CUPS, but listed the cafe for sale on the same day. He offered the staff the first opportunity to purchase it. One GoFundMe campaign and several fundraisers later, the employees scratched up $ 500,000 to buy White Electric. In May 2021, the cafe re-opened as an employeeowned co-op.
“ We were the first successfully unionized coffee shop in Rhode Island history, which is a cool thing,” Chassaing says.“ Even cooler is seeing how much things have changed in five and a half years. People don’ t even care about what we did because there’ s so many [ coffee shop unions ], and it’ s growing.”
“ To say [ that unionizing ] was utterly transformative would be an understatement.”
— Andrew Wojcicki, a Seven Stars shift supervisor
Mike '’ s Estate Services One of New England’ s largest consignment shops
And growing beyond food service jobs, says Zachary Schaller, an assistant professor of economics at Colorado State University. In February, Schaller and two co-authors published an analysis of Starbucks Workers United’ s effect on unionization in general. Their countylevel examination of union activity after a Starbucks location voted to organize found that“ the Starbucks campaign had a substantial causal effect. And to the extent that we can measure that, it can explain about 20 percent of the non-Starbucks unionization wave, which
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