Taking the Shop: An Interview with the Slow Bloom Coffee Cooperative
by Max Belasco
Source: Gabe Perez
In July 2020 Augie’s Coffee, a popular specialty coffee shop chain based in Redlands and the Inland Empire region of Southern California, fired all of its baristas and coffee shop workers citing the hostile economic climate resulting from the COVID-19 closures. What it did not mention was that its staff were organizing with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE). Despite being fired, the workers remained committed to fighting for their rights, and ultimately owners Austin and Andy Amento chose to close Augie’s Coffee permanently by the end of the year – five days after the NLRB filed a formal complaint against the coffee chain.
It would have been easy to give up with their workplace gone, but the former Augie’s Coffee workers loved their craft and wanted to continue serving coffee. They decided to organize the Slow Bloom Coffee Cooperative in Redlands California, a coffee cooperative run completely by the former staff of Augie’s Coffee, and are organized as SBCC Local 1011 of UE. Strikewave caught up with Erik Lopez and Matthew Soliz, two former Augie’s Coffee baristas involved with the union drive and the founding of Slow Bloom. Erik currently works at the cooperative while Matthew now works as Slow Bloom's staffer at UE.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Strikewave (SW)): How did the Augie’s Coffee union drive inform the creation of Slow Bloom?
Erik Lopez (EL): We started off wanting more job security. We wanted baristas that have been working at Augie’s for ten years to have more than a minimum wage. I guess we got tired, and we tried unionizing. Then the owners did us dirty: They told us they would look into our issues, and then next thing we know we’re learning on Instagram that we all got fired—we don’t have any jobs.
SW: You found out on Instagram?
EL: Well I found out on Instagram—it was crazy!
Matthew Soliz (MS): We all had been working in food service around downtown Redlands for 8, 10, 12 years. And the goal with the union drive was to win jobs that were sustainable, that we could continue to work indefinitely. Have a decent life, have enough so we don’t have to change jobs every couple years. And when we moved into developing the cooperative, the goal was still to make good, sustainable jobs to generate our own jobs. And that still is the guiding principle.
Another way the union drive informed our work is that we have real dedication to each other. We all went through a hard thing, got fired together, got spat on, dealt with real injustice done to us, and that brings people together. Erik and I, we didn’t know each other before the union campaign; now we decided to take on a massive undertaking with very little background knowledge of each other, because we went through this struggle with each other.
SW: Did you ever feel a temptation to just give up, move on to another job? What made you committed to continuing the boycott of Augie’s?
MS: When it became clear that we were not getting our jobs back, I remember thinking I did not want to deal with this again. That’s when UE organizers said to us “you know, you could just take the shop.” They shared with us what workers at Republic Windows were able to do in Chicago back in 2008, and after a week we decided we could do this. The shop was successful, we had really talented staff, and we wanted to keep doing what we love.
A lot of us just had a cartoonish refusal to be defeated. Like what, we’re just going to let ourselves be defeated? Gotta keep fighting somehow.
EL: I definitely had that feeling. When everyone got fired, it was so bleak. Nothing like that ever happened to me before—I really loved my job and to lose that can make you feel worthless. This is my livelihood, and they took it away just like that. I think you can get nihilistic. But what made me hopeful was seeing the local community supporting us and having our coworkers support each other.
SW: I remember Augie’s had closed the shops and the roastery but tried to sell things online to keep the lights on and wait for you all to give up.
MS: They were selling beans and bulk stuff out of the warehouse for a while. I don’t think they ever meant to close the business. I think what happened was that they got connected with a labor lawyer, and the lawyer told them to pursue a long-term fight—because they’re paid by the hour and want this dragged out. And the math ended up being that the best move was to cut their losses and run.
But for a while I think their plan was to consolidate the business, keep only the flagship store open, and invest in creating a wine business. Once we made it clear that we were going to keep pushing on the labor board front and the organizing front they ended up saying “okay, we’re going to take our money and walk.”
SW: They were going to pivot to wine?
MS: They took out a permit for a spot in the city and have this little social media blitz that we found out about. So we had a bunch of community supporters write in to the Planning Commission to say “don’t give them a liquor license for this building” and we were able to get it blocked.
SW: How do you think you were able to get such strong community support?
EL: I think one of the reasons why Augie’s was so successful was that we have very sociable baristas. We made genuine connections with the people we saw every single day. We have been seeing the same regulars for eight years, and I know that our regulars knew that we’re not machines that just make coffee—they saw us as people. And when we asked them to show up for us, that’s exactly what they did.
MS: In Redlands, we live in suburban southern California. Augie’s was the place—the only public space left—where people could meet. For the ten years I worked there, I would walk downtown and see my friends and be there and meet a bunch of people. And beyond Augie’s many of us came from different shops and restaurants—we had connections all over the city. We spent a lot of long hours with folks one-on-one in different businesses. And I think it’s also partially a “right place, right time” situation with the cultural phenomenon of the coffee shop and the downwardly mobile barista. A bulk of our group was the cohort of people who graduated high school in 2008 during the recession, got the only job they could find in food service, and are running out of economic leash at this point.
SW: Can you expand more on that idea, the “downwardly mobile barista”?
MS: There’s something about the cohort of folks that were drawn to this industry in the last ten years as we saw a third wave of interest in coffee shops—the six-dollar pour-over type of industry. It wasn’t easy to get a job at Augie’s—you had to be somewhat skilled. You had to be skilled, you had to be personable, you had to be able to convince someone to buy a nineteen-dollar bag of artisanal coffee and not go to Stater Brothers for a tub of Folgers. That started in the smaller specialty coffee shops and over the last decade, we’ve seen this pour over into Starbucks.
SW: How do you feel things are different at Slow Bloom than they were at Augie’s?
EL: We don’t have a boss, we are our own bosses. We don’t have anyone telling us what to do or on our back about insignificant things. If someone is five minutes late it’s not the end of the world. And while a manager or a boss might be upset about that, we all understand that shit happens—no one is going to be written up over traffic. But also everything is very transparent. You can walk up to those keeping the books and ask how we are doing, and we get to decide democratically what to do with our profits. And that’s amazing—as a worker, I’d never thought I would be able to have real decision-making power over my workplace.
SW: So no secret wine business?
EL: Nah. But I know that because things are transparent and we all have genuine trust in each other.
MS: It’s still hard, focused work at Slow Bloom—work that requires a lot of attention and care. But look at the quality of product we can put out and the care we put into the work. When I worked at Augie’s and the shop was busy I wouldn’t want to be there, because I get paid the same regardless. At Slow Bloom, you bust through a busy day, you feel good. You get to see all the customers you satisfy, the tip jar looks good, your life feels good.
SW: Not all cooperatives are union shops, but Slow Bloom is part of SBCC UE Local 1011. What is so important about being a union shop and not just a cooperative?
MS: I think it’s very valuable to be part of a union because we fundamentally understand that our method of growth is not the same as a business owner. A business owner makes money, takes capital and invests it in business, takes the profit from that and continues investing. We don’t see that as a sustainable form of growth. Our best way to secure our jobs and the growth of our local area is to continue organizing. And we specifically wanted to be a UE local because in the UE constitution it’s written that no one can get rich off the union, that no one can be excluded from the union based on race, gender identity, or political beliefs. And a lot of cooperative structures are just bad—they water down worker votes with tons of consumer votes. We believe in one worker, one vote, true majority democracy in the workplace.
SW: Coffee shop organizing is having a moment. You were all on the bleeding edge of the organizing wave, along with other chains like SPoT in Buffalo and Collectivo in the Midwest. And of course Starbucks has become one of the biggest labor stories in the US. Why do you think this is happening specifically in coffee, and now?
EL: Coffee shops are super profitable and workers make the bare minimum. I worked at Starbucks before—I know exactly why people are organizing. The management is terrible, they have to put up with so much disrespect, all the while being worked to death. I got tired of it and quit my Starbucks job walking out in the middle of a shift saying “I don’t get paid enough for this, peace.”
MS: On top of that, a lot of the workers are in close proximity to each other, physically. Workplaces where you are with a bunch of coworkers doing the same thing over and over for hours in the same room are getting rarer, but it’s still present in food service. And coffee shops are different from restaurants in that you don’t have your classic front-of-house, back-of-house split. In your average Denny’s you’re going to have a back of house prepping all the food, speaking mostly Spanish, making a different wage, seeing their work as fundamentally different than the front of house. Two workforces on totally different pages.
SW: Like you mentioned before, it’s actually pretty difficult to get a coffee shop job—it does require a degree of skill and experience.
EL: A lot of people during our organizing campaign would ask me “if you want to make more money why don’t you get a real job?” And yet here I am making a specialty product that is super profitable making my boss tons of money. How is that not a real job?
MS: If someone thinks making seven specialty, made-to-order lattes every ten minutes is something easy, I’m happy for them to join the line and see what it’s like. The expectation of quality is always so high, but the expectation of labor required never meets those standards. It’s laughable.
SW: It sounds like you have expectations of artisanal perfection in what is essentially a high-paced production line at a factory. Especially now, with online ordering.
EL: You have no idea. At Starbucks, all the online orders came in on a little label printer. We’d be getting twenty drinks from the drive through, and all of a sudden we would get an online order of ten drinks. The managers do have control of online ordering, but they won’t stop it because customers will come in upset saying they can’t order online. The rushes would give me panic attacks. That’s something I like about Slow Bloom—the shift in customers is noticeable, people understand in a way they didn’t at Starbucks.
MS: That reminds me of another thing we realized when building Slow Bloom. Beforehand at Augie’s there were aspects of the job that we thought were part and parcel of working in a coffee shop that were revealed to be just stupid ways the boss would try to control us. Take how we distribute tips. The way I always knew from previous jobs was that you work in the morning, after your shift you split the tips in the bucket, then you walk away. And what that produces is really unequal wages for the workers in the morning and the night. You get familiar with the fear of not moving customers quick enough on the bar, or kiss the right customer’s ass who walks in and knows the owner, you’re going to be pulled off your Saturday morning, get two nights next week and you’re fucked.
SW: Is it that big of a difference?
MS: You’re not making any money. And so you have to put on this whole act in front of the customers—especially those who knew the owner. Because it only took one comment, one time they would mention to the owner “you know, Matt seemed low energy today”—and I would be done.
SW: How common would you say that is in food service?
MS: It’s an industry standard. And that stuff would always tend to hit your coworkers who need real protections. My trans coworkers, my coworkers who spoke English as a second language – those people are always the first ones to go to the shitty shifts. The first ones to be made pariahs.
But since being at Slow Bloom we realized things do not have to be that way, it doesn’t help business in any way or make people work harder, it’s bullshit your boss feeds you to control you. We can pool the tips, everyone gets a nice pay bump, and everyone feels the incentive to do well for the group.
SW: Many baristas and coffee shop workers who are at smaller coffee shops might look at Starbucks and say: “Well I can’t do that here, we’re too small.” What advice do you have for those workers?
EL: Keep at it, man, and don’t stop. I know there are a lot of tactics the boss can use, like stalling workers until they give up. Keep at it, have your coworker’s back, and outlast them.
MS: You have a better chance of improving your life by taking action than any other option you see in front of you. And when you talk to your coworkers, the things that are going to move them are the immediate issues in their lives—wages, hours, tips. And if your shop is too small, or your coworkers are not committed enough—reach out to other workers in food service around you. There are people who share your experiences and feel the same way, and building that network is going to help you do what Erik suggests—refuse to fucking lose.
Max Belasco is a rank-and-file member of UPTE-CWA and a member of the Strikewave Editorial Collective.