Quick Take
Just two days after Cat & Cloud café workers sent a letter to the company’s owners to formally announce their intention to unionize, the employees’ union heard from the owners’ attorneys, saying they would recognize the union without an election.
Cat & Cloud café workers celebrated last week. Only two days after they sent a formal letter to the owners of the Santa Cruz County coffee chain, announcing their intention to unionize, their union heard from the owners’ attorneys, telling them that Cat & Cloud would recognize the union.
For the workers, some of whom have been organizing for months, the initial acceptance elicited a sigh of relief.
“We met up, congratulated each other, and celebrated the victory,” said Nakoa Shoemaker, a barista at the Abbott Square location. “It was the first meeting in a while where the focus wasn’t strategy. That felt really good.”
Shoemaker said the union would include around 70 café workers in the county and would be a part of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5, the largest private-sector union in Northern California. UFCW represents workers in grocery stores and other retail, as well as food harvesting and processing, cannabis, financial services and health care.
Specialty coffee company Cat & Cloud has four locations in Santa Cruz County. The first one, on Portola Drive near Pleasure Point, opened in 2016. The company has opened three other cafés – on Swift Street on the Westside, in Abbott Square in downtown Santa Cruz and in Aptos Village – in the years since.
In a statement by the newly formed union on Instagram, workers said they have voiced their concerns about pay, scheduling, training and communication but managers don’t give them proper attention. It says the workers joined Cat & Cloud because they believe in the ideals the company says it upholds, such as hospitality, teamwork, ownership and artistry, but the workers said the company isn’t meeting its goal of creating spaces where people thrive.
“We want to make space to openly talk about these issues and have Cat & Cloud meet us with transparency and respect,” the statement reads. “We understand that it takes collective action to make changes — no worker can single-handedly change Cat & Cloud’s ethos. That is why a supermajority of our coworkers support our mission of forming a union.”
The move is the latest in a series of unionizations in local coffee shops. Two Starbucks stores became the first locations in the state to unionize in May 2022, with two other county stores following shortly after. Three cafés of third-wave coffee company Verve Coffee Roasters – on Pacific Avenue and Fair Avenue in Santa Cruz and another on Market Street in San Francisco – voted to unionize last October. Those workers needed to win a union election, though, while that won’t be necessary for Cat & Cloud employees.
Shoemaker said the workers’ concerns are not unique to the company, with wages, inconsistent scheduling and more input on decision-making as the most pressing matters. She said that starting at minimum wage in Santa Cruz is a major challenge for anyone, given the high cost of living and housing prices. High turnover rates prevent some longtime employees from progressing in the company as quickly as they believed they should have.
Ella Mailliard, an Aptos Village café worker, said wages were the biggest bargaining issue for most of her colleagues. She said every three months, workers could qualify for raises, determined by whether workers had completed specific skill sets. If they did, they could move on to the next set and receive a 25-cent raise. However, she said those evaluations were not consistent: “A lot of people would have those meetings pushed off unless they pressured their higher-ups to have them, which many don’t have the time to do.”
Shoemaker said the organizing effort was “a pretty balanced movement” and involved employees from each Cat & Cloud cafe, rather than one location leading the effort. Now, the two sides plan to come together and begin negotiating a contract. Before that, the workers will nominate a colleague to represent the workers at the bargaining table. For Shoemaker and the rest of the café workers, it’s a strong first step to having more power in the workplace.
“Our reasons are really to create better working conditions for us,” she said. “We had trouble getting through to the right people that could make changes, because we didn’t have a seat at the table.”
Cat & Cloud co-founder and CEO Jared Truby told Lookout that he isn’t concerned or intimidated about the idea of a union.
“I foresee this being an amazing opportunity to continue to do things that we’ve already and always attempted to do, which is to create the best working experience ever,” he said.
Truby added he’s aware of the hardships of working and living in Santa Cruz County, especially in the service industry, and has heard as much from former employees.
“The feedback we get for exit interviews is always ‘If you could pay more, we would have stayed, but we just can’t afford to,’” he said. Truby said he’s eager to meet with union representatives and work together, something he believes is integral to the business.
“It’s not a me-versus-you or an us-versus-them thing. That’s the worst thing that could be possible for our culture,” he said. “Let’s figure this out, and hear and see what’s possible.”
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