153

Sadie:
[0:28] Justin i'm a general purpose academic librarian and my pronouns are he and they

Sadie:
[0:33] i'm sadie i work it at a public library and my pronouns are they them i'm.

Jay:
[0:37] Jay i'm a cataloging librarian and i guess an organizer and my pronouns are he him and we have guests.

Anastasia:
[0:45] Would you like to introduce yourselves yeah i'm anesthesia she or they program pronouns and I'm a reluctant academic and researcher.

Alex:
[0:52] I'm Alex, and I'm an organizer with the Blue Bottle Independent Union.

Kevin:
[0:57] I'm Kevin. I use he and him pronouns. I am a labor educator and a union organizer.

Jay:
[1:05] Welcome. My soundboard was gone, so that's the only button I have tonight. So that's it. Thank God. Because I got a new computer. You love this soundboard. Don't give me shit. No, I hate it.

Jay:
[1:18] All right. So we've been wanting to do this episode for months now.

Alex:
[1:41] To start off with asking, what is the Blue Bottle Union? Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Blue Bottle is a specialty coffee chain that has roughly 70 locations in the United States and over 100 globally. They are wholly owned by Nestle, which is hated both by ordinary people and by union organizers. We founded our union back in April of 2024 and have been fighting for a first contract ever since. Oh, wow. How many people are involved with like the union? Because I know.

Alex:
[2:21] 70 locations. How many places are trying to to get like a shop organized? It last year, we organized all six locations in Massachusetts. And as of I think yesterday, four locations in the East Bay in California were certified to join our union. So at the At the moment, I think we have 12% of their United States labor market. And by certified, is it certified by the union or the NLRB? The NLRB. Okay. Go ahead. What was I going to say? We've been doing regional bargaining units. So the bargaining unit in the East Bay so far has four stores. The bargaining unit in Boston has six.

Alex:
[3:00] Okay. So then if you have a contract, it goes for all six at once. Yeah. Cool. I guess that answers my second question, which is what is recent activity like? because this is all.

Alex:
[3:22] But if there are any outstanding issues that the union was working on besides the first contract. We have a ton of unfair labor practices filed against the company, most of which haven't even had a merit decision by the NLRB. And a lot of them are fairly substantial, such as going back on past practices of giving us the opportunity to bargain over discipline and terminations, pushing through renovations or the installation of cameras without reaching impasse on either. In the case of cameras, we were negotiating that as part of our contract, and they declared impasse and installed them without reaching impasse on the entire contract. They've fired union organizers. They've and changed hours without negotiating with us, all kinds of things. And the board is moving slower than molasses.

Alex:
[4:13] Yeah, I'm unfortunately not surprised.

Jay:
[4:16] But yeah, go ahead, Jay. I was just gonna say we should probably clarify what like what an independent union is and like why this struggle might be different than like people who are not in independent unions, for example, like what that practice of unionizing and is like.

Alex:
[4:34] Yeah, can you maybe clarify the question you're asking, like, what an independent union is or how the process differs?

Jay:
[4:39] Yeah, like, what is an independent union?

Alex:
[4:42] An independent union is a union that's not affiliated with a larger union that already has established contracts or a due structure. Depending on how you lean politically, you might refer to a lot of them as business unions because either they operate in the interest of management or, in some cases, they are controlled by management. In the first case, it's a pejorative term, and in the second case, it's a more literal designation. Many people will say that the benefit of joining a larger union or affiliating with one is that you have access to resources. What resources means is usually very vague. Most people are thinking money or lawyers. We currently have pro bono legal representation, and at least in my own experience, we have not really needed much money to do effective organizing. A lot of it has been done by workers on the floor ourselves, and any money that we have needed has gone towards things like a strike fund or filing for our 501c5 status, if I remember correctly. That's a designation that gives us tax exemption from the government, at least for now. Yeah. And yeah, honestly, the further away you can stay from the AFL, probably the better. But too late for the CIO. Um, I'm wobbly. I'm going to be snarky this whole time. Awesome. But anyway, so why there's two articles and notes.

Alex:
[6:11] Want to start like workers inquiry on as a strategy? I think that some of the most effective organizing that we've done has been when our co-workers realize that their own experiences are similar to the experiences of other baristas. Having a narrative framework for or understanding of one's own experiences on the shop floor also helps you to investigate further why the workplace is structured in the way that it is. Workers' inquiry has been beneficial to us because it helps workers see their own experiences as part of a larger structure around them rather than existing in isolation. And then as a method, it's beneficial because it creates a feedback loop for collecting experiences or investigating into the experiences of workers on the shop floor and then reflecting them back to the workers. So it's supposed to be a consistent process. Yeah, and I guess maybe Kevin could jump in, but when you're doing.

Kevin:
[7:21] Because I know surveying is difficult, so how logistically does this work? Well, I can address that a little bit more generally, but maybe Gonzo can address it first in the context of Blue Bottle. I was contacted by Blue Bottle independent folks maybe about two years ago. I wrote an article for Labor Notes on an independent union, a wobbly-associated independent out of Portland, Oregon, called the Burgerville Work Union. It was organizing fast food workers there. and one of the only times labor notes addressed independent unions it's only the second time in their entire history they talked about working class self-activity which is an important concept we'll get to later i'm sure funny enough i was chatting with a number of the organizers in blue bottle independent union before i even knew where they worked it was like security culture right they wouldn't tell me where they were what city they were organizing in i was like okay these people on the other line of the phone or zoom call who like want to talk about organizing and i love that. And one of the things I was really amazed and impressed by, and still am, is how smart they were in producing their own kind of internal surveys and documents. As someone who's been a union organizer for years now, when I have surveyed hospitals, so one of my last big hospital, 2,200 workers, we were bargaining third, fourth, second, third, fourth contracts with the various and try to do a master contract. So we got all this survey data information, and it went to the bargaining team. It went kind of back out to members in the form of priorities.

Kevin:
[8:42] Right, or bargaining proposals. But there wasn't an ongoing conversation where these workers saw their actual experiences at the workplace and also in their larger lives. Reflected in the experiences of others the way that they were like already doing that in a really smart way it seemed unlike many other organizing campaigns to really build power and support and knowledge really from the get-go it seemed like it was really part of the dna which is something that's a little too rare here in the united states you see that okay you see the europe especially southern europe where work inquiries are common but you don't see that a lot here in the united states and they were already kind of doing that so going from the work they were already

Kevin:
[9:22] do to the cafe sector in general was kind of in jump but i'm sure both anastate and ganso have good.

Alex:
[9:27] I just forget the the question i could oh like the workers inquiry all night because you know is it is the question asking iterative like, asking questions and getting information back because that's a lot of work.

Alex:
[9:46] Certainly it is but it's worth it typically it starts out with there's a series of questions that we feel are crucial to our own organizing that we want to begin surveying workers on and although you might be able to get some answers to these things in one-on-one conversations.

Alex:
[10:04] As we know like with surveying people sometimes people feel more comfortable sharing their own responses or like true thoughts when there's not a person that's like that they know is organizing right in front of them. So when we started out prior to even announcing our campaign in 2020, in 2023, a lot of the things that we were asking our co workers about is, you know, what they would change if they had, you know, complete power to, like if they're the CEO for a day or something like that. If they had questions about like what unionizing looked like or what being independent would mean. And then, of course, like typical union stuff like asking for demands and bargaining. The thing that we did differently, though, was that we then created little pamphlets or zines that we would then distribute to all of our coworkers, you know, kind of in secrets. That way our bosses wouldn't find them to reflect back to them what we'd actually gotten back as results. And I think that there is something really important about like print culture in our organizing, especially early on, is because when we didn't have like a way to completely broadcast to others, either through email or through social media or website or whatever, the only way we could that would, you know, not completely compromise us was either through like paper handflits or just messaging people directly. And I think that's something that we're still trying very hard to maintain, even now that we're a public organization. Yeah, go ahead.

Anastasia:
[11:29] Yeah, I think I missed part of the question because my internet cut out, but I think the question is about our process for the inquiry, right? Yeah, and like how often do you send out new questions and get answers? Yeah, so I sort of jumped in on this project, I guess maybe a little over a year ago, after Kevin and I were kind of scheming about workers' inquiry projects that we wanted to do, our typical scheming. And so I jumped in at the point where then we kind of formalized it into some survey and interview work. And Kevin and I are both like working class academics who also are organizers. So we decided to kind of take on a lot of that work using, you know, what we can from our workplaces to get that done. And so the iterative part started to look like at that point, first, us sitting down with Gonzo and other BBIU organizers to figure out the questions, that we want to ask in the formal survey, which was like a Google survey. Really carefully. Like that took us a while to do that. Like we put some work into it. Like it was not, you know, you already had the questions, Gonzo, a lot of them already from like the work you already did.

Alex:
[12:39] But then also like we asked other union organizers what they would add. And that might have been a mistake because it ended up being way too long for this initial questionnaire.

Anastasia:
[12:49] Yeah. So it was long and we had to sift through quite a bit of stuff that was hard to disaggregate, for lack of a better word. And then from there, folks were asked who, you know, had signified that they would want to do a one-on-one interview. Folks were asked to do one-on-ones with us. And we circulated that survey in a number of different ways. Like, obviously, Gonzo and BBIU circulated the survey. Kevin circulated it. I circulated it through various signal threads and whatnot so that we could get a good sample of kind of Northeast cafe workers to participate. So after the initial survey, did you make like a second.

Alex:
[13:27] One or a third one? Or how did that go? We actually have another one circulating right now. I mean, at time of recording, who knows when this will go out, where we're asking cafe workers to respond to what we've written and produced for notes from below. Kevin, do you remember off the top of your head, the tiny URL for it?

Kevin:
[13:46] It is one of those bit.ly, so B-I-T period L-Y slash Cafe Inquiry, and it'll take you right to the Google form. So we're basically asking folks to read our inquiry. Just to go back a sec, we... Like hundreds of pages. We had 35 folks that really spent a lot of time to respond to our Google. Gonzo and other BBIU organizers were good enough to like sort them into narratives, right? And they put together a rad little zine of that material that then served as the base for writing itself. But it was a ton of material in the state. Like people don't really have the opportunity to speak about what they do all day and what they think about, how organizing and how they feel about it, good, bad, and ugly. And this gave folks an opportunity and they really took advantage of it and said a considerable amount of mural. It really would have taken a week of reading almost to get through everything. But the inquiry was published by Notes from Below, which is a group out of the United Kingdom that has been doing workers inquiries for about a decade now. They work in various different sectors, sometimes thematically, right? They have a new one coming out on those who work in the kind of like creative arts sector. They've done infrastructure, they've done supermarkets, you name it. They've kind of investigated that, Not just in the UK, but around the planet.

Kevin:
[14:58] And being that we see, or I see, and we see ourselves kind of in concert with the kind of work that they're doing, running a really long two-part workers' inquiry, they're pretty much the best folks to go to. There's already an audience for that who are going to learn, and hopefully we're building out as well, not just for inquiry, but just to learn about cafe. So that two-part article ran about two weeks ago, the end of July 2025, and we're giving folks about another month to respond, I'm sure we'll end up extending, you know, dead wire. And we want folks to read the inquiry and share what they thought of it, right? Like what resonated, what didn't resonate, what kind of organizing did they do? Did this help them think about organizing? And that's kind of that feedback, right? Like when you're doing organizing campaign in small shops, in a set of cafes in Boston, you kind of already have a natural

Kevin:
[15:46] audience. I mean, that's why it's somewhat unique. The employer hires and we organize, right? So like you already have kind of a set cafe workers. Yeah. And this is true of the service in general, is a lot more amorphous, right? And so there are folks who work at Blue Bottle, as we talked about before we hopped on the call today, worked at other caps. And then Blue Bottle independent union organizers worked at Starbucks or part of the Starbucks campaign. And I'm sure there are plenty of folks, cafes that are working three other jobs, the same sector, maybe in a different sector. And we want these kind of processes and conversations that kind of naturally take place, the sector, to circulate, right? That's the circuit. So the inquiry went out really to the readership for folks to take at end of July.

Kevin:
[16:26] And now we're asking folks to respond to the inquiry after they read it and give their, you know, surveying is a difficult process. That's true of national surveying agency. I just went through all the data with a colleague for union density in, and we actually like just can't come to conclusions on a good thing because if they interviewed one construction worker in three years, we can't talk about what kind of density, right? So all there's data issues, there's survey response problems.

Kevin:
[16:54] But one thing I think was pretty amazing is that not one of the 35 folks that responded to our inquiry, like no one used shorthand. People really went into answering some, we even had someone who was like, oh, I don't have time to respond right now. And then like said all the stuff, right? So we really kind of lent toward a longer survey and we really got a lot of substantive. Maybe we had a shorter survey, and Gonzo has said this, if we had a shorter survey, then it's quite possible we would have gotten 100 people rather than 35. But having that depth of experience was really important to kind of share the actual day-to-day experience of cafe work back to other. And Gonzo, I know you guys are.

Alex:
[17:30] Yeah, the other thing I wanted to mention, which was particularly appealing to me about this process, is that we're not attempting to necessarily be scientific in our process, meaning that we're looking more for the experiences that people, workers have and what that what their own reflections on the structure of the shop floor is like rather than trying to come to some ultimate truth about the

Alex:
[17:56] nature of the shop floor yeah it's the power of narrative it's why history is still a discipline even.

Sadie:
[18:01] Though social science exists yeah sadie do you have something yeah i was gonna i was just gonna ask like i guess this kind of segues into the history of workers inquiry too like so this isn't a process that's just for like because blue bottles fairly new union so it's it's not a process just for new unions or new sectors it's something that happens iteratively across like a whole sector is that what i'm understanding correctly so this is something you can do with like your individual union across the whole sector of people like regionally you know you pretty much do this in any way you can think of right am i understanding that correctly yeah.

Alex:
[18:38] Pretty much and i mean one of the points of doing this kind of inquiry is that it's meant to help provoke or produce class consciousness amongst the people that we're surveying and also reflecting this back to. And that's not necessarily something that unions are always interested in, especially unions that I can think of that are the ones that we would not want to affiliate with. But yeah, I mean, if you're a rank and filer in a union at a library, you can go around and just ask all of your library co-workers what their experience on the shop floor is like. It's fairly straightforward.

Anastasia:
[19:14] I'll kind of add to what Gonzo just said there and say to your question, like the thing about workers' inquiry is that Like you don't have to necessarily be unionized. You don't even have to be in a union. You might not even be considered formally a worker. Right. And I think that's what is so intriguing about the method as like an organizing tool. And we can see even workers who might not normally be categorized as workers essentially using this method. Like there's a project called The Work in Us that's a survey of incarcerated workers led by Stevie Wilson, who's an incarcerated individual. That's essentially a worker's inquiry about the work of being incarcerated. So it's a really rich method for organizing and for like Kevin said,

Anastasia:
[20:00] circulating struggle, right? And seeing where those struggles intersect. Yeah, there was actually a question I had because there's, I kind of ran into.

Kevin:
[20:37] It's just that sort of informal organizing that everyone, everyone does at work. So I can jump in there. I keep hitting the button like, yes, yes. I love this.

Jay:
[20:46] I was like, stop you up and Justin.

Kevin:
[20:49] So part of the process workers inquiry, and this really comes out of the traditions that have used it. And I want to say like two very different about this topic. And then we can kind of get into some more of the kind of verbiage and language and concepts. And those are useful or folks could use them in various process inquiry. I think the first is what it's trying to identify is everyday practices at the worst, right? The old adage, if you have time to lean, you have time to, right? Where the boss expects you to be literally moving at all times is not something that either our mental or physical capacity do.

Kevin:
[21:23] Profits take place in these moments and very often workers themselves in order to actually have a pace of work that is sensible slow down production right or if the boss makes a dollar i make a dime that's why i shit on time it's pretty straightforward that like you just sit longer while using the facilities in order to like actually get your physical capacity so you can go back out there and expend your rights so there's actually all kinds of forms of everyday resistance that workers have been using since the dawn of capitalism for 500 years. The kind of classic examples, the Luddites, right? They would throw their wooden shoes into the machinery in order to prevent those machines from operating. So they actually could like have an actual day off. The Luddites were smart. They weren't just doing that willy nilly. It wasn't just against technology. They were doing that because they knew different kinds of machines were going to de-skill them, take away their labor, make their actual working days, right? So workers inquiry tries to identify not just formal practices or practices that might be but everyday forms of resistance and mutual aid and solidarity in every workplace.

Kevin:
[22:26] Formal, informal, even among those that don't consider workers or typical sociologists or union organizers. And then one other short thing because I know Gonzo wanted to jump in and that's that working class culture has always been producing narratives and first persons and forms of music and poetry and art that speaks about working people's lives on the shop floor and in general, right? Like, is there a direct line between the emergence of first-person narratives of work and workers' inquiry in the United States and zine culture, of which there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people just talking about their working lives? And that's only just one particular subculture. They exist on TikTok, elsewhere, technologies for them. And that happens to be the case. Workers' inquiry is just one particular method of identifying these informal practices that are taking place at work, the kind of conversations that happen at work around water coolers, such as existed, but certainly after service in the service industry, among other groups of workers in the break room, right? These kind of conversations and knowledges circulate all the time. Workers' inquiry is just one of many ways that you, in order to kind of formalize that and push forward so that workers could unsell, as Gonzo said, and develop their own consciousness that doesn't come externally, doesn't come ideologically, It comes from reflecting and seeing their own common experience. So with inquiry, we're really just talking about a particular tactic and folks can choose other ones. Doing open-the-mic nights, for instance, could be useful for talking about the services in cities. And those things do take place. This is just a particular... I know that was a lot.

Alex:
[23:55] All I had raised my hand earlier to say was that I wish Rocky were here, another organizer that was part of the BBIU campaign, because they have gone on lengthy monologues to me about how much they love the book. Was it blood in the machine about the leddites and they now work as a ceramicist

Alex:
[24:11] and so they've even begun making like mugs and plates that commemorate the leddites which is really.

Jay:
[24:16] Funny nice yeah lots of librarians have been reading that book because of as like part of our struggle against ai being adopted in so many libraries yeah it also makes me think something i've almost never maybe i'm looking in the wrong places.

Anastasia:
[24:48] Of culture as like a unifying organizing thing. Yeah, it reminds me of one of our survey participants who I think would fit the bill of what you're describing here. He chose to read our survey out loud to his fellow co-workers at work so that they could marinate on some responses, which was an interesting tactic that we really appreciated. It's good yeah absolutely i i just think about lectors all the time because they were a big deal.

Jay:
[25:45] Technical composition? What tradition is that from? Go nuts. Just all start yelling.

Anastasia:
[25:50] I think you have some stuff to say about this. So I'll let Kevin start.

Kevin:
[25:54] So I'm technically writing a book on this right now. And by technically, it's basically haunting me.

Kevin:
[26:01] I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about these things and trying to trace out some particular ideas. It'll be out hopefully next year or the year after. Part of this is there is a number of different heterodox Marxian traditions here in the United States and Europe that really wanted to understand capitalism from the working class. If you read Marxist Capital, it's an abstract ideal of how capitalism operates, but it doesn't tell you a lot about how workers actually experience the working day, even with a really robust and rich chapter of capitalism.

Kevin:
[26:29] And it emerged. And I think the only way really to talk about the concepts is also to talk about where it came from historically, because then folks develop concepts to try to explain what they were seeing. Right. So the term workers inquiry comes from an 1880 list of one hundred and one questions that Marx submitted to a French socialist. These French socialists were like, yeah, what do workers think on the factory floor? What are they where there's their experiences at work? And Marx wrote up this hundred and one question. You can Google it. It's pretty easy. It's out there on the Web for all to see. Notes from Below also published a really great book on Marx's workers inquiry. You can go and actually get PDF or purchase a copy at .org. So check that out. They, this particular author, trace through not just the creation of the 101 questions, but really its circulation, how it was used by others in various worker and working classes throughout. But those questions still are pretty applicable. Like, I teach them in my courses. I use them in workshops, in our workshop. And it's like, are there light bulbs? Is there a union? Do children work in place? These are pretty basic things. And out of 101 questions, a good portion of them still apply. And then that's right. He tried to understand the divisions of both racially and gender. He wanted to understand various forms of technology. forms of informal organization.

Kevin:
[27:40] All those things are identified. And then in 1947, a pamphlet appeared by a small little kind of Trotskyist, heterodox Trotskyist group of the Johnson Forest. They left the party and spent kind of six months through a working class struggle, a world revolution, and they had actually read the first English translation of Marx's part that appeared about a decade in English translation in socialist public states.

Kevin:
[28:05] So they actually had a factory worker who just kept a diary of their experiences at a General Motors plant in Linden, New Jersey, after the 1946 strike waves, after the war, as kind of a new form of organization is emerging and a new form of production is emerging. And they basically write a narrative of what that is, right? There's always kind of a different way of like, you know, you could write a diary, you could have what's called the fountain pen method, where like a militant or academic, just like is there, instead of reading a story, is like listening to a story and describing it for folks. So there's a number of different methods you could use to capture workers' inquiry. And then there's various ways you can share it. You can share it in the way that Notes Below has or we have. You can share it as a first-person narrative, which the American pamphlet was. That's at least the first part. And the second part was more of kind of an analysis of alienation on the factory floor and the production process and what that meant for traditions, those pamphlets and ideas and questions spread throughout workers' movement across the planet. And folks have used workers' inquiry in order to understand how the faculty is operated. And then, of course, because they were producing all this knowledge and all these ideas and all this material was circulated, they then developed a number of concepts to really examine how working people experience. Yeah it sounds like i have reading.

Jay:
[29:25] To do but of course i was honestly shocked you hadn't heard of this you know honestly yeah well yeah it's just specific terminology just yeah don't know missed it somehow my my knowledge of everything except for that part that's why you got to know this stuff that way i could say that's that's something jay knows what's what's sort of the.

Alex:
[29:57] Linked to, what are you hoping is going to come from this step, Alex? So one thing is I think that it's useful, weirdly, like in union meetings to have materials like this to share.

Alex:
[30:10] In a meeting that we did with general membership back in this past May, we played a clip of a Starbucks worker from, I think, the Working People podcast talking about their experience being strung along for a promotion, not getting the hours that they need to make ends meet and so on and so forth. And if you initially ask somebody what their experience at work has been like or what they would change if they had ultimate power with them and their coworkers to change anything, it's actually really tough for people to think of things, not because they're disconnected from their own working lives or because there aren't things that they would want to change, but because very often without having their own experiences reflected back to them in some way, they either don't believe change is possible, they in their own minds naturalize the exploitation that they experience and think, oh, that's just the way things are, or they struggle to see their own experiences as anything more collective or having to do with the structure of the workplace. So this is a bit of a cop out answer, but it's still true that the point of gathering more responses and having people read the inquiry is in order to be able to do more inquiries and have people read the response. There's an element of this of like trying to build up a culture of this within the union and have people actually understand their own working conditions and think about their working lives as something worth investigating.

Alex:
[31:36] And there's also, I guess, the part where this helps our own organizing, where if we can see commonalities between shops or in different tactics or methods that management's using to divide up workplaces, that only becomes possible to know through doing this kind of work. Because this is also something else that I think gets overlooked, or people don't really investigate that much, is that the different tactics that management uses on the shop floor, either to divide workers or to extract more surplus value or whatever, aren't made up in isolation. It's done in reaction to whatever workers are already doing on the shop floor. It's not like bosses are not that smart.

Jay:
[32:15] This is true.

Alex:
[32:17] Like they're best no smarter than you and me. And at worst, you know, having the position of like a fake job where you get to tell other people what to do, like corrode something about your capacity to actually think. But anyways, enough harping on how bosses are. Things like point of sale systems, for instance. One perspective on them, like Square Toast, they offer hourly breakdowns of sales. They can tell you which worker collected the most tips or who's sold the most of a certain kind of pastry or things of that nature. Some might argue that this technological innovation exists as a way to increase profits because it increases efficiency and of course like this is naturally something that bosses would want is to have more access to data in order to be able to maximize you know their efficiency in making sales you could also view this as a method of surveillance to try and figure out which workers are taking pastries that they're not supposed to and this is something that you can only really figure out if you begin to investigate the experiences of other workers on in similar working conditions i i could probably think of other examples but i'd have to read through our responses again yeah.

Jay:
[33:32] Like i think this is really applicable to just like what like what being the shop floor of a library right because there's so many different types of workers in a library like we all do a lot of different things like sadie works in it i do cataloging justin is in a completely different type of library right and even within the same library within the same department people might not know what other people do and how like they are being like affected by management how management is targeting them how their labor is being exploited like the cafe workers in my library for example are technically like a separate company aside from the library, right? That they are subject to completely different, like... Labor conditions than the library workers in the library because we're in unions but like there's this sort of like way that we're also isolated from each other even in relatively small libraries and i think learning how even like someone who has a completely different role in a library than i do how they're being affected what how their labor is being exploited like that's powerful like that's how

Jay:
[34:50] you start working together. Yeah, go ahead.

Anastasia:
[34:52] I'll jump in here because what Jay was just describing is kind of answering Justin's question about some of the terminology that we were using from these heterodox Marxist traditions. So like the technical composition of labor, right? Or of class, right? That's talking about the labor process, right? Exactly this question. How is it literally organized? How are you like triangulated, for example, between like back in front of house, right? And in the survey, you can start to see that, right? Where, you know, not necessarily in our survey, but like, if you were to survey people, you could start to see like, oh, there are these conflicts that are being prodded that are actually, it's a management problem. It's not like actually a problem between these workers, right?

Anastasia:
[35:35] And so that's like the technical composition, literally, how is the work organized? Like, how are we distributing different parts of that labor process through the different departments or spaces, right? Like in the workplace, the social composition is then getting to those questions of like, well, who's doing it, right? And like, are we also then, you know, prying on like, different forms of marginalization, right? Like, why is it that like, certain languages are being spoken in certain parts of the workplace versus others, right? Like, as a exploitation tactic. So those are those two components and part of this is what we get from notes from below like kind of theory wise is that like the the process of inquiry what it can help us do is sort of make what they call the political leap to like string all that together and be like wait hold on no actually like i'm not mad at back of the house for being slow that's not what's happening management is like effing up right and like making us have this oppositional relationship because they're understaffing us or whatever it is, right? You would be able to actually see that by doing this and by looking at each other's responses, sharing them, having the open mic that Kevin suggested or circulating a zine or notes from below link. Yeah.

Anastasia:
[36:53] Yeah. The front of house, back of house issues was really interesting because I've worked.

Alex:
[37:29] Like front of house more female dominated back like a house more male-dominated, all that kind of stuff. Go ahead, Alex. I mean, you mostly touched on what I was going to say, and I think, like Anastasia said, the interesting thing here about the political leap of joining the technical and the social composition of the workplace is then you begin to ask, how is it that certain populations are pushed into this kind of work? Most of the cafe workers that we surveyed are queer or gender marginalized in some way. And I think that that's fairly representative of like the sector as a whole. And it's interesting how different populations are pushed into work that others won't do.

Jay:
[38:11] Yeah, I mean, like, I remember how I've had multiple friends who left their, like, you know, white collar office jobs, because they started to transition. And the best way to get surgeries and healthcare covered was to get hired by Starbucks. Because at the time, then even if you were part-time, as long as you worked a certain amount of time, then they would cover your surgeries. So I had multiple friends move into the cafe, like barista sector, just for the fact of transitioning. And then Kevin, I saw you had your hand up.

Kevin:
[38:49] Yeah, I did not want to interrupt that flow. I mean, those things not only were identified in our survey, but have been identified by union organizers, right? Storbrook's Workers United, Blue Bottle, Independent, Pete's Coffee Workers, right? Like there is a ton of cafe worker organizers.

Kevin:
[39:04] And the good portion of folks that are leading the charge are BIPOC and LHQI. And that makes sense for all the points that. One of the things I wanted to go back to that Anastasia brought up is those kind of conflicts that result in workers because of management's processes and how workflows and the work process actually operates. And one of the things that I've not done, I've done anything similar or neighboring was catering is very different. Also classed, also racialized, has a lot of similarities. But that work process is different enough that like I learned a lot about from reading these responses, even though I know cafe workers support a cafe worker and service industry organizing for many have read other narratives and other similar inquiries about the sector or the larger service sector. And what is obvious, I think, in our inquiry, and that's true of inquiry in general, is that people's perspectives on the work is contradictory. Folks reported very often that they love their co-workers, they love coming to work, they love working with their co-workers, they love creating a sense of community, they have their regular customers. But also, like, then they're also being stalked and sexually harassed or, you know, being mistreated because they are wearing pronoun buttons, right? There's all kinds of contradictory and complex experiences, especially those who deal with the general public, like cafe workers, experience. Also, another one that I think is really important, especially about organizing, is that very often workers felt like they had a really good relationship with

Kevin:
[40:28] immediate managers, right? Especially at cafes, managers were like baristas two weeks ago, right?

Kevin:
[40:34] And similar cohorts, similar demographics, relationships. Also, you very often knew the manager because they were co-worker poor. So you have a different relationship with your manager than you do with some far-flung executive that commutes via private jet every day and makes more in a thousand years than you'll ever make. And it makes more in a day than you'll make in a thousand. But it was those kind of contradictory and complex feelings and thoughts and reflections and conversations that cafe workers have that actually is reflective of how all works, right? So very often from a union or ideological perspective, we have these kind of idealized versions of what we think workers do while they're at work. And very often those are contradictory and difficult. And organizing needs to address that. Class consciousness develops out of that. Those are really... Alex?

Alex:
[41:18] Yeah, just to speak on experience that I had a few months ago that... Or actually, no, this is almost a year ago, but it stuck with me. That's kind of some of the things that Kevin was saying is I love a lot of the regular customers that come in. Sometimes, though, because of the nature of where the shop I'm at is located, people, even if they're very friendly, will come in that are politically opposed to the things that I stand for. Like, I saw this one elderly gentleman come in, and he was wearing, like, brown overcoat and a Lehman Brothers baseball cap. And He was old enough. He was like in his 70s. So he was old enough where it was not like some post ironic thing, like commenting on the nature of, you know, finance is something that we all aspired when it wasn't any of that. I am pretty convinced that he either like worked for Lehman Brothers or had somebody in his life that worked for Lehman Brothers. And I still had to be friendly to him and serve him coffee, even though that is not something that I would ever support. And like i would want to ask him like aren't you ashamed of yourself to show your face in public supporting that um yeah so there's this weird dynamic with cafe work specifically where, sometimes the people i mean i guess this happens in catering or all other kinds of industries as well where like sometimes the people that you're serving are people that are organizing against your own interests but it's the only job or work that you can get yeah.

Sadie:
[42:35] And i think a lot of that That is translatable to especially like frontline customer public service library work. You know, as somebody who both worked as barista for a long time, first job five or six years before moving on to working as a public service in a library before I went into IT, like the, yeah, I had regular patrons that I absolutely love, love to chat up, love to see. I had a patron who stuck around only long enough to ask me out and then left. And then as soon as he realized I wasn't available, just vanished from the library, which was a good thing. But I didn't even realize that was happening for a week. And, yeah, so like a lot of that sort of any sort of public facing service work is like going to have that sort of experience. Right. And even the having to serve people who would organize it or are organizing against you. Also very true in the library. You know, people are still trying to ban books like that. And a lot of them are actually library patrons. Right. So it's mostly Moms for Liberty, but we've done enough episodes on that. But yeah, so I feel like your guys' workers' inquiry can really span across so many people's experiences. And it was a really interesting, good thing to read as a former barista and current library worker. Alex, do you have something.

Alex:
[44:00] Or did you leave the button on? I forgot. Do I still have my hand face and I left? Yeah.

Jay:
[44:05] I looked away.

Alex:
[44:06] So I couldn't tell. No, sorry.

Jay:
[44:09] You're good. But I'm curious with the technical composition.

Alex:
[44:42] When you dream of it because i think it's always good to to imagine a future you actually want to see yeah i mean this is the a tough question especially it's one that i struggle to like let myself imagine at times because of the nature of like climate change and like coffee as a colonial commodity. So I don't know, I have a few friends that have or operate worker owned cooperative cafes. And I don't know what a future with that like across the sector would look like necessarily. Because getting into like the hypotheticals of it, you'd end up needing to have worker self management of roasteries or also have like some worker self management of like importers or green coffee buying in order to not have competing interests begin to crush, you know whatever is best for a cooperatively run place yeah this is a tough question i actually don't know yeah it's hard and that's why i always like to bring it up because we have someone on and say like oh i'm i'm.

Jay:
[45:54] What do i want at the end of the day because it feels fanciful and like we're not allowed to think about those things like utopian is a slur or whatever yeah yeah Yeah, go ahead, Kevin.

Kevin:
[46:05] So I have a two-part answer. And a number of years ago, I wrote a book. And the argument I made there and the argument I would hear is that workers are already working. To get through a working day with your labor power being extracted through your effective and to book the past, you have to organize with your co-workers in order to get the right. Cooperation is utilized by capital and the bosses among workers to exploit, take the labor process, actually operate and function. Mark is very clear about this in capital. Workers are organized in their everyday lives in order to survive. It's true of slave societies and peasant societies, in factories of old, of the social factory today. Workers are or is. What organizing a workers' inquiry does is furthers that competition, that political composition, and that knowledge and consciousness among workers so that they actually can then go into my second answer to this question, and that is workers need to decide that themselves. As somebody who works in higher education, I have a couple of ideas on how I think higher ed should be organized. I know Anastasia has probably more than me since higher ed educational fair away. Currently. But actually what we don't need is answers. We don't need ideological or historical examples. Those are all helpful.

Kevin:
[47:10] To have conversations and guide possibilities. But actually, what in fact we need is we need a political project that emerges to make those. And different kinds of workers are going to make those decisions differently based on context, based on the workflow and the kind of jobs they have. Different cafes that are going to serve different purposes are going to be organized in different ways. And if it is a unionization campaign, if it's a solidarity union that doesn't seek recognition and rather just operates kind of direct action as a direct action union on the shop floor, if folks want to seize the production, right? Those are kind of decisions that are going to need to come out of collective process. And workers' inquiry is part of many possible collective processes. As a union organizer, I always tell people it's up to the side, right? Who they vote for, how they organize. What we're here to do is provide feedback mechanisms and hopefully some theoretical, political, and ideological frameworks and historical examples, do that allow people to think through and may be different. And one of the things that Gonzo said earlier is that when you ask people, like, how do you want your workplace to be organized? No one's ever asked them that question, right? So how do we have conversations where political possibilities, forms of organization, political proposals emerge out of where people from their everyday lives, because actually they're going to understand better. I used to be a healthcare union organizer. I've never worked in healthcare.

Kevin:
[48:30] I don't like going to the doctor. I don't understand how those things work. But I do know how to get people talking to each other and have one-on-one conversations and build power toward campaigns and contracts.

Kevin:
[48:41] I always told my health care workers, you're the expert on your job. You're going to understand it. No one is going to understand that better. And what inquiry does is it facilitates the process of folks, say, at a hospital, understanding those who check you in or those who provide medication or those who from appointment to appointment, those who clean rooms, right? Those jobs are very isolated. And unless you have the opportunity to talk to somebody, how your hospital is organized, you don't understand how other work operates. So it's not even that you see yourself in these narratives, conversation, the organizing process. But also you see others and understand their own experiences at work. And Inquiry does that, really. So two-part answer is workers are already organized. They organize in their workplaces, a larger society.

Kevin:
[49:23] And actually what Inquiry does and seeks to do is create the possibility of creating political projects to answer political questions that the three of us couldn't answer and 300 of us couldn't. This is going to have to emerge from the working class itself and from those who are doing these. If we come back at another podcast and want to talk about how to reorganize higher education. And I'm sure at the station, I have like ideas, maybe 10 between us, but like, that's actually a political question that needs to be answered, especially right now in the crisis of higher education, the crisis of service work and various other crises that are. Yeah. I kept going back and forth on agreeing or disagreeing with you while you were talking.

Alex:
[50:24] Question to ask but i do think we should take some time to dream a little bit yeah there's nothing wrong with dreaming it think maybe like guiding principles or like maybe yeah ideals that we would want our workplaces to be guided by rather than necessarily a program because I think that's the kind of thing that can only come about through inquiry the other thing I mean specifically with coffee and cafe work is just that like climate change is going to destroy the possibility for that in like 20 years and there's an urgency to addressing it through organizing right now that I don't think can be disentangled from how we might envision it in the future because if we can't actually even or if coffee can't even be grown in five or in like 10 or 20 years then there's actually not going to be any cafes yeah.

Anastasia:
[51:12] Anastasia i'll read an answer from our survey actually yeah it's one of my favorite ones and it's about it's a question that's like if you could change one thing about working at your current cafe what would it be and we have like 30 something responses to this but i'm going to cherry pick this one it would be a worker-owned cooperative that wants to become a food distro that wants to abolish work so hell yeah.

Alex:
[51:33] Hell yeah return.

Jay:
[51:35] To the monastery i don't know why i thought that but great well is.

Alex:
[51:42] To is there a fund that they can send money to to support the union yeah you can find out more about our union at blue bottle union so bluebottleunion.org on there you'll find bargaining updates a link to our strike fund as well as a few different zines and what else is there? There's a lot of information there oh including a google form if you want to organize your bluebottle location I don't know the likelihood that another bluebottle barista is listening to this but if you are and you've made it to the end of the podcast I love you please reach out to us somehow yeah absolutely we try to attract people besides library workers.

Kevin:
[52:22] But you never know. Anything else anyone wants to plug before we wrap up? I'm just going to say again that if folks are listening that aren't cafe workers or library workers, check out Notes from Below. Check out, which is Journal of the UK that we published with earlier. Check out Long Haul Magazine. It's a new publication that's sharing worker stories. Take a look at New Labor Forum, which is a more academic labor publication, and they'll talk about organizing and then have a worker story. Take a listen to the Working People podcast, which is amazing in sharing worker stories, right? There's 300 plus episodes now. There's a lot of actually opportunity to learn about what you do all day while at work in your field and others. And the opportunity to kind of reflect back on your own working conditions when someone else is talking about them, not only de-isolates us as working well in a capital society, but also allows us to learn about the struggles and daily lives of other people. That. So there's plenty of opportunity to do that. Check out those other resources and the like.

Jay:
[53:18] Yeah, Anastasia.

Anastasia:
[53:19] Yeah. And if you are a cafe worker, you can go to workersinquiry.org and access our survey. And also plug that I think for in the future, we'll be interested in helping facilitate the launch of other inquiries across other sectors and industries. So yeah, check out the stuff we're doing. Read all about BBIU,

Anastasia:
[53:38] send them some funds. Yeah.

Jay:
[53:40] Nice yeah like we've done episodes in the past of like day in the life where it was like what do we do in our jobs what does that look like or like non-library and library workers have come on to talk so like if you're listening to this podcast and you just want to yap about your job get in touch especially if you yeah especially if you work in housekeeping or facilities or a cafe in a.

Sadie:
[54:08] Good facilities person could not find someone to bring on but if you know someone you would like to come on talk about their job yeah.

Jay:
[54:16] That was what did we call those there's a whole series i can't remember.

Sadie:
[54:19] Yeah it was just a day of the life yeah okay.

Jay:
[54:21] Yeah yeah i think pod damn america had a series that i was ripping off and it was it was service workers it was called thank you for your service so yeah listen to those episodes actually they're really good pod damn america my co-host, thank you for your service episodes are really good. All right. Well, thank you all so much for coming on. And I'm going to send a donation to Blue Bottle on behalf of our generous funders.