librarypunk - 153 - Class Composition in the Cafe Sector / Blue Bottle Independent Union

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

This week we’re talking about workers’ inquiry with the Blue Bottle Independent Union for cafe workers! Learn about workers’ inquiry, organization, and how you can do it too! Media mentioned Part 1 (on what cafe workers think and do while at work): https://notesfrombelow.org/article/class-composition-in-the-cafe-sector-part-1    Part 2 (exploring how cafe workers are organizing at work): https://notesfrombelow.org/article/class-composition-in-the-cafe-sector-part-2  Marx 101 questions Enquête Ouvrière (“Workers’ Inquiry”) for Benoît Malon’s French newspaper La Revue Socialiste https://notesfrombelow.org/article/introduction-karl-marxs-workers-inquiry Blood in the Machine: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/?lens=little-brown https://theworkandus.squarespace.com/  https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/ https://workingpeople.libsyn.com/  http://workersinquiry.work/ Support Blue Bottle Union https://www.bluebottleunion.org/  https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/support-blue-bottle-workers-taking-on-nestle Transcript: https://pastecode.io/s/jmhcyzvo Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zzEpV9QEAG

Let's go. I'm Justin. I'm a general purpose academic librarian, and my pronouns are he and they? I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library, and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian and I guess an organizer, and my pronouns are he, him. And we have guests, which like to introduce yourselves.

Yeah, I'm Anastasia, she are they pronouns, and I'm a reluctant academic and researcher. I'm Alex, and I'm the organization. with the Blue Bottle Independent Union. I'm Kevin. I use he and him pronouns. I am a labor educator and a union organizer. 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.

All right. So we've been wanting to do this episode for months now ever since Jay met Kevin to talk about workers inquiry or inquiry. I always, I knew someone who's very strict about the difference between those words. So I think technically it would be inquiry, but I'm not going to get it, get into that. But for people who don't know, I wanted to to start off with asking, what is the Blue Bottle Union? 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 like the Starbucks one kind of goes location by location. So you've got like 70 locations. How many places are trying to to get like a shop organized? 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 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.

I 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. 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 recent. I am curious before we get into workers inquiry, what if there are, well, I guess they're certified and you don't have a contract so there's not a grievance process yet, 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 junior organizers and changed hours without negotiating with us, all kinds of things, and the board is moving slower than molasses. I'm unfortunately not surprised, but yeah, go ahead, Jay. I was just going to 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. Yeah, can you maybe clarify the question? You're asking, like, what an independent union is or how the process differs? Yeah, like, what is an independent union?

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 then 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 you 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. I'm wobbly. I'm going to be snarky this whole time. Awesome. But anyway, so why, there's two articles and notes from below that really get into everything, but why specifically did Blue Bottle Union 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 coworkers 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 continued process. Yeah, and I guess maybe Kevin could jump in, but when you're doing this process, is it like iterative? Do you like send out questions multiple times or like, 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 Nippin'Fox maybe about two years ago. I wrote an article for Labor Notes on an independent union. Wobbly Associated Independent out of Portland, Oregon, called the Bergerville 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. I mean, to do what city they were organizing it. I was like, okay, these people on the other line of

or Zoom call who like want to talk about organizing. And I love that. So 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 has been a union organizer for years now, when I have surveyed hospitals. So one of my last big hospital is 2200 workers. We are bargaining third fourth, second third, fourth contracts with the various and tried 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, 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 experience of other way that. They were 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-bo. 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 UK, you see the Europe, especially Southern Europe, where inquiry is 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 due to the cafe sector in general was kind of in jump, but I'm sure both Anastate and Gonzo have much. Go ahead.

I just forget the question. I could look at the workers inquiry all night. Because, you know, is the question asking iterative? like how you said it acts as a feedback loop. So how often are you asking questions and getting information back? Because that's a lot of work. 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, 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 coworkers 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, you 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 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 not completely compromise us was either through like paper hamlets or just messaging people directly. 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. 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 organized. 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, right, 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. 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. 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 are 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 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, you remember off the top of your head the tiny URL for it? It is one of those bitlies, so B-I-T-period L-Y slash cafe inquiry, and it'll take you right to the Google For.

So we're basically asking folks to read our inquiry. Just to go back a sec, we read 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 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 there 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 things.

And this gave folks an opportunity and they really took advantage of it and said, a considerable amount of mail. 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 work as inquiries for about a decade now. They work in various different sectors, sometimes thematically, right? They've a new one coming out on those who are working 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 UK, but around the planet. And, you know, you. seeing 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. We're going to learn and hopefully we're building out as well, not just for inquiry, but just to learn about PEPA. So that two-part article ran about two weeks ago at 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, what they thought of it, right? Like what resonated, what didn't resonate? What kind of organizing they do? Did this help them think about organizing? And that's kind of that feedback member, right? Like when you're doing organizing campaign in small shops, in a set of cafe in Boston,

you kind of already have a natural audience. I mean, that's why somewhat unique. The employer hires and we organize, right? So like you already have kind of a set. Cafe workers, and this is true of the service in general, is a lot more amorphous. Right?

And so there are folks who work at Blue Bowl. 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 different sector. And we want these kind of processes and conversations that kind of naturally take place the sector to circulate. So the inquiry went out really to the readership for folks to take at end of July. And now we're asking folks to respond to that 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. 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 answers. 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 if we had a shorter survey and Gonzo 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.

dated day experiences of cafe work back to other. And Gonzá, 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 workers have and what their own reflections

on the structure of the shop floor is like, rather than trying to come to some ultimate truth about the nature, of the shop floor. Yeah, it's the power of narrative. It's why history is still a discipline, even though social science exists. Say, did you have something? Yeah, I was going to, I was just going to 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 bottle's 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 pretty much do this in any way you can think of right am i understanding that correctly yeah 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 coworkers what their experience on the shop floor is like.

It's fairly straightforward. I'll kind of add to what Gonzo just said there and say to your question, like the thing about workers' inquiries is that it's 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 workers inquiry about the work of being incarcerated. So it's a really rich method for organizing and for like Kevin said, 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 some new terminology in especially part one when I was reading it, sort of like class recomposition, technical composition, sort of stuff like I've never run into before. It really caught me off guard. And so when you were talking about like counter planning, it sounds kind of like the term like Jay would mention of like, you don't have to be unionized to organize. So is that kind of what like counter planning is? It's just that sort of informal organizing that everyone, everyone does it work. So I can jump in there.

Like hitting the button. I'm like, yes, yes. I love this. I was like, stop you up and Justin. So part of the process work is in. 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 to do, but 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 should 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 right. 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 really-nilly. It wasn't just against technology. They were doing that because they knew different kinds

of machines were going to deskill 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 beization, but everyday forms the resistance and mutual aid and solidarity. In every workplace, formal, informal, even among those that don't sit workers, or typical sociologists or union organized. And then one other short things I know Gunza wanted to jump in, and that's that working class culture has always been producing narratives and first persons and, you know, 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, just 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 to work around water coolers, such as existed, but certainly after service and the service. industry, among other groups of workers in the break room, right? These kind of conversation and knowledge is 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 themselves, as Gonzo said, and develop their own consciousness that doesn't come externally, doesn't come ideologically, 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-to-mic nights, for instance, could be useful for talking about the service cities, and those things do take play. This is just a particular. I know there was a lot.

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 Luddites? And they now work as a ceramicist, and so they've even begun making like mugs and plates that commemorate the Luddites,

which is really funny. Nice. Yeah, lots of librarians have been reading that book because of as 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,

but never come across in like labor literature is like lectors in factory works of people who would read to workers. So they were like performers, right? They were like local celebrities. So you would stand up there and you would read the newspaper. you would read plays and like that kind 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 just think about lecturers all the time because they were a big deal around where I grew up, which is in the factories in Ebor. So people were like celebrities. Like if you were the lector, you were, you know, we would now say like a local actor or whatever, but they were a big deal. Yeah, I guess I would like to ask a little bit about the the terminology. cheese. Like, where's, what's, where does this come from? The, the counterplan, class recomposition, counterplanning, technical composition. Like, what, what tradition is that from? Go nuts. Just all start yelling. Yeah, Kevin. You're going to have some stuff to say about this. So I'll let Kevin start.

So I'm technically writing a book on this right now. And by technically, it's basically haunting me. I wake up in the middle of the night, like, thinking about these things and trying to trace out some with particular ideas. They'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 a deal of how capitalism operate. But it doesn't tell you a lot about how workers actually experience the working day, even with a really robust and rich chapter. 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 books developed concepts to try to explain what they were seen. So the term workers' inquiry comes from an 1880 list of 101 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 101 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 it's circulation. How was used by others in various

worker and working classes throughout it. But those questions still are pretty applicable. Like, I teach them in my courses. I use them in workshops, our workshop. And it's like, are there liable? Is there a union? Do children working place? These are pretty basic thing. And out of 101 questions, a good portion of them still apply in a lot, right? He tried to understand the divisions of they're both racially engendered. He wanted to understand various forms of technology, forms of informal organization. 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 Marxist's part that appeared about a decade in English translation in socialist public states. So they read that, and they actually had a factory worker who just kept a diary of their experiences at a General Motors plant in London, 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? It's, 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 as like listening to 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 an analysis of alienation on the factory floor in the product process and what that meant for society. So out of those historical moments and those historical traditions, those pamphlets and questions spread throughout workers' movement across the planet. And folks have used workers' inquiry in order to understand how the fact that is operated or are. And then, of course,

because they were producing all this knowledge and all these ideas and all this material was circulate, they then developed a number of concepts to really examine how working people experience work. Yeah, it sounds like I have reading to do. But of course, I was honestly shocked you hadn't heard of this. You know so much Mark's stuff. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's just specific terminology. Just, yeah, I don't know.

Missed it somehow. My knowledge of everything, except for that part. That's why you got to know this stuff. That way I could say, that's something Jay knows. What's sort of the direct hope of the outcome for doing this inquiry? Like, what immediately, say for this next survey, the one that we just 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. 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, like 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, you know, 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 don't, they either don't believe change as 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. 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. This is true. Yeah, yeah. They're at 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 a point of sales systems, for instance, one perspective on them, like square toast, they offer like hourly

breakdowns of sales. They can tell you which worker collected the most tips or, you know, 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, this is naturally something that bosses would want

is to have more access to data in order to be able to maximize 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

in similar working conditions. I could probably think of other examples, but I'd have to read through our responses again. Yeah, like, I think this is really applicable to just like what being the shot 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. how their labor is being exploited. Like, that's powerful. Like, that's how you start working together.

Yeah, go ahead. I'll jump in here because what Jay was just describing, it's 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? 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 other areas, right? Like, as an 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 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. Yeah, the front of house, back of house issues was really

interesting because I've worked in kitchens. And so I was always back of house unless I had to like run out to, you know, take over serving or something. Like, you do. Yeah. Now, I was, as you were talking, I was just thinking of sort of like the colorism that's used to segregate workers, like Pullman Porter's would be like very dark-skinned and other people who were run by, who were working at the trains would like lighter-skinned people would work clerical jobs and that sort of thing, lighter-skinned black people. So yeah, the sort of racialization, gender-raisation, like front-a-house more female-dominated, back-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? Like 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. I mean, wait, you know.

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 health care covered was to get hired by Starbucks. Because at the time, then, even if you were part time, like, as long as you worked a certain amount of time, then they would cover your surgeries. Right. So I had multiple friends, like, move into the cafe, like, bristice to sector, just for the fact of transitioning. And then Kevin, I saw you had your hand up. 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? Storbrooks Workers United, Blue Bottle, independent. Pete's coffee workers, right? Like, there is a ton of cafe worker organ. And the good portion of folks that are leading the charge are by, by, and Ocean QIHs, and that makes sense for all the points that folks. One of the things I wanted to go back to that Anastasia brought up is those kind of conflicts

that result clean workers because of management processes and how workflows and the work process actually operates. And one of the things that I've not done to have. I've done anything similar or neighboring was catering. Also classed, also racialized, has a lot of similar race. But that work process is different enough that, like, I learned a lot about it. 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 coworkers, 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 front on button, 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 when we're organizing, is that very often workers felt like they had

really good relationship with immediate managers, right? Especially at cafes, managers were like baristas two weeks ago, right? And similar cohort, similar demographics, relationships. also you very often knew the manager because they were co-worker for. So you have a different relationship with your manager than you do with like some far flung executive that commutes via private jet every day and makes more in a thousand years than you'll ever make it. And, you know, it makes more in a day than you'll make in a thousand years. But it was those kind of contradictory and complex feelings and thoughts and reflections and conversations that cafe workers have that actually is reflective on 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 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. Yeah, just to speak on experience that I had a few months ago that... Actually, no, this is almost a year ago, but it stuck with me. That's kind of some of the things that Kevin is 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. It wasn't any of that. I'm pretty convinced that he either, like, worked for Lehman Brothers or had somebody in his life that worked for Men Brothers. And I still have 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? 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, and I think a lot of 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 by receivers years before moving on to working as public service in a library before I became, went into IT. Like the, yeah, I had regular patrons that I absolutely love, loved to chat up, loved to see. I had a patron who stuck around only long in a.

enough to ask me out and then left. And then as soon as you realized I wasn't available, just vanished from the library, which was a good thing. But like, I didn't even realize that was happening for like weeks. 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 an experience, right? And even the having to serve people who would organizing or are organizing against you also very true in the library, you know, people are still trying to ban books like Matt, 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, it can really span across so many people's experiences.

And, you know, it was a really interesting, good thing to read as a former barista and current library worker. Yeah, Alex, do you have something or do you leave the button on? I forgot. Do I still have my hand face? I like looked away so I couldn't tell. No. You're good. I'm curious with like the technical composition part. I know there's no easy answer to this, but I always like throwing in difficult questions towards the end, which is what do you imagine organized cafe?

The future of organized cafe labor works looks like where you have this utopia front of house, back a house, cooperating. I mean, what does it look like in terms of what's the relationship with management? How do Capé self-organize? You know, what sort of future do you imagine when you dream of it? Because I think it's always good to imagine a future you actually want to see. Yeah, I mean, this is 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 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 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 talking about the future of like journal publishing. I'm like, well, what would you actually want it to look like? And we so rarely let ourselves like imagine actually 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. So I have a two-part answer, and number of years ago I wrote a book on the argument I made there, and the argument I would hear is that workers are already. To get through a working day with your labor power being extracted through your effective and to go to the past, you have to organize with your fellow workers in order to get, right? Cooperation is utilized by capital and the bosses among workers to exploit, make the labor process, actually operating function.

Marks is very clear about this in capital. Workers are organized in their everyday lives in order to survive. It's true slave societies and peasant societies in factories of old, of the social factory today. Workers are. What organizing workers' inquiry does is further that composition, 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 works in higher education, I have a couple of ideas on how I think higher head should be organized. I know Anastasia has probably even more than me since higher ed educational fairer away currently. But actually what we don't need is answers. We don't need ideological and historical examples. Those are all helpful 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 in. 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 see recognition and rather just operates kind of direct action as a direct action union on the shop floor, if folks want to seize them to 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 process. 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 in maybe different. And one of

the things that Gonso 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 health care union organizer. I've never worked in health care. 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 contract, right? I always told my health care workers, you're the expert on your job. You're going to understand that. 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. And actually, what inquiry does and seeks to do is, 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 our 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. But the point is like just this, like you said, it is politically difficult to even imagine an answer to that question. And so yeah, you do need a political project in order to start formulating that question. And it's important to understand, okay, what does the other person in the other department think about what work looks like? Because I don't know what they are thinking.

So I understand why it's a difficult question to ask, but I do think we should take some time to dream a little bit. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with dreaming. I 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. And Stasia. I'll read an answer from our survey, actually. Yay. It's one of my favorite ones. And 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 distra that wants to abolish work. So, hell yeah. Return to the monastery. I don't know what I thought that, but great. Well, is there anything we can point our listeners 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 bluebottle union.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 blue bottle location. I don't know the likelihood that another blue bottle brace 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, 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 or library workers, check out of the below, check out, which is a journal out of the UK that we published with. Check out Longhall magazine. It's a new publication that's sharing worker's 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 workers stories, right? There's 300 plus episodes now. There's a lot of actually opportunity to learn about what 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 full in a capital society, but also allows us to learn

about the struggles and daily lives of other folks out there. So there's plenty of opportunity to do that. Check out those other resources and alike. Yeah, Anastasia. Yeah, and if you are a cafe worker, you can go to workers'inquiry.work 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, send them some funds.

Yeah. 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. Yeah, especially if you work in housekeeping or facilities or a cafe in a library. If you are doing a non-library and job, we would love to have you on.

That was our dream to get a 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, that was what did we call them? Those. There's a whole series. I can't even remember. Day in Life. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think Poddam 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.

Poddam America. My co-host, Jake Flores, of my other podcasts, Preacher and the Slave, listen to it. It has nothing to do with libraries or work. It's a religion podcast. But I'm plugging it because it's still up and going. But yeah, those thank you for your service episodes are really good. All right.

Well, thank you all so much for coming on. Yeah, this was great. I'm going to send a donation to Blue Bottle on behalf of our generous funders who have funded the show for the past the next year. So I will send that your way. All right. Good night.