GreenStar Workers Seek to Unionize with Workers United

Ithaca Times, August 8, 2024

Workers at the GreenStar Food Co-op in Ithaca are pushing for unionization, citing a need for improved workplace democracy and better working conditions. Despite a majority of workers expressing support for unionizing with Workers United, management has opted to hold an election rather than voluntarily recognizing the union.

 

“It was a disappointment for management not to recognize us voluntarily because we did have a majority of workers on cards,” GreenStar employee  Maxwell Bollman said during a recent press conference. “The election process will be democratic, and we’re excited that workers here will be able to exercise that right.”

 

Bollman said that workers have requested that management sign fair election principles, ensuring equal time for workers and management to discuss the organizing drive. “We’re hoping they sign those because we hope they respect our right to organize,” Bollman added.

  

David Meyers, a GreenStar employee, emphasized the need for workplace democracy. “Workplace democracy is my focus. I think it's important to have a voice and be heard, but I think it's also important that we take part in the decisions about the work we're doing.”

 

Front-end worker Nico Lewis expressed frustration with management’s handling of issues and the lack of support for diverse employees. “They’re not taking care of their more diverse employees and not listening to us when we have problems. We all just really want to start being heard,” Lewis said.

 

Jessica Marks highlighted the contradiction between GreenStar’s democratic principles and its daily operations. “There’s a lot of talk about being democratic in the co-op, but in the day-to-day operations, different departments are not being run democratically,” she said. “Management is very adamant that they are in charge and don’t want the daily workflow directed by people who actually do that work.”

GreenStar Food Co-Op employees held a press conference on August 8 to discuss their ongoing effots to unionize with Workers United, seeking improved workplace democracy and better working conditions. (Left to Right: Alicia Richard, Jessica Marks, Joe Damiano, Nico Lewis, Aaron Spayth, David Meyers, Maxwell Bollman)

Matt Dougherty

GreenStar is a consumer cooperative, meaning it is owned by its customers rather than its workers. In contrast, a worker cooperative is owned and democratically controlled by its employees. “In a consumer co-op, the workers do not necessarily have any privileged or democratic voice in decision-making whatsoever, other than being one of 14,000 members,” Meyers explained. “Unionizing is a way for us to seek a democratic voice for workers inside a consumer co-op.”

  

Meyers emphasized that the union effort is part of a broader push for community improvement. “In addition to doing this for ourselves, we see ourselves potentially inspiring other places. If they see somebody unionizing here, they might think, ‘Well, we can do it too,’” Meyers said. “We’re aiming for a more coherent and supportive community.”

Roads End, Paths Go On

Roads' End 

Indescribable joy in your being

Saudade - a Portuguese word that does not translate

Skylight in the sand, glimmers bouncing off the waves

Not the Algerian sea sun and sand of Camus

To be sure

A northern equivalent

A bitter cold bite of air and frigid water lapping at the shores

Unstoppable sunset

Reflections in the sand

My orange my blue

So I play the Pogues' “Lorelei”

On auto-repeat in my head

I remember

You more vividly than I do my own face

I have known no other like you and

For the first time know

That love can exist no matter what

Just as

Sky

Sea

Sand

Burning orange fire

Exist

Roads may end

Paths go on

I will see you

Be with you

Love you

As long as there is breath

And beyond

Let's walk.

How Chicago became the top “fair trade” city in the United States

 

By Megan Kramer, Medill Reports Chicago

Rich Troche, manager of Everybody’s Coffee in Uptown, knows everything about the shop’s medium-roast “Coffee of the Month” – who roasted it, where it was grown, how it was processed and even what different processes do to the beans.

In March the featured coffee came from the San Ignacio farm in Peru and was roasted by the Metropolis Coffee Company in Chicago. The coffee has a tangy lemon undertone and is served in purple ceramic mugs. To care for both its patrons and the farmers who grow the beans, Everybody’s Coffee serves fair trade and direct trade coffee from around the world.

In a fair trade agreement, farmers and artisans in developing countries negotiate fair prices for their products, which usually result in a better payout.

David Meyers, roasting coffee in Rogers Park, is the mind behind the Chicago Coffee Confederation and Café Chicago. (Megan Kramer/Medill)

Bringing it home

With the help of Chicago Fair Trade, Chicago became a fair trade city in May 2011, making it the largest such city in the U.S. and the third-largest globally after London and Toronto. Founded in 2006, Chicago Fair Trade comprises 70 member organizations including businesses, nonprofits and universities.

The Café Chicago project

In 2011 the Latino Union of Chicago and the Chicago Coffee Confederation, a group of small-batch coffee roasters, teamed up to create their own fair trade endeavor, Café Chicago, which takes the fair trade model and applies it locally. The company buys coffee beans from La FEM farmers, a farming cooperative in Esteli, Nicaragua, that is run entirely by women and focuses on women’s rights and empowerment.

Café Chicago then roasts, packages and sells the coffee to local restaurants, grocery stores and directly to consumers from its website. All proceeds go to the nonprofit Latino Union of Chicago, which works to improve social and economic conditions for low-income immigrant workers through various programs that address issues including unsafe working conditions, immigration reform and policies, and leadership and other training.

Café Chicago took the fair trade movement a step further not only by helping La FEM farmers and their families in Nicaragua but also by providing jobs for and teaching new skills to immigrant workers in Chicago.

Originally from Mexico City, Alejandro Serrano has worked as a roaster at Café Chicago for the last 18 months and says he is learning a lot on the job.

“We focus on improving our skills, learning every day more about coffee and the coffee roasting business,” he said. “We also focus on sales and on training new members so they can participate in the cooperative.”

Serrano says there are currently five people employed at Café Chicago in North Park and that the leadership of the organization has improved. They are working to expand the business in order to make it self-sufficient and separate from the Latino Union while still supporting it, Serrano said. Café Chicago advertises its coffee on Facebook and other websites.

Not without setbacks

Meanwhile, the Chicago Coffee Confederation has hit a few bumps in its conceptual road. David Meyers founded the confederation in 2009 when his original business venture, Resistance Coffee, started to grow. The group eventually comprised three fair-trade and organic coffee roasters – Grinderman Coffee, Miscellaneous Treats and Resistance Coffee – but is now much smaller.

“CCC is largely merely an idea now,” Meyers said. “Our other coffee roasters, who were great contributors to the development of Café Chicago, have moved to other cities.”

Even though Meyers acknowledges that fair trade as an alternative economic model can be a struggle due to factors like these, he said it can still be a movement for justice by “taking bites out of the capitalist economy and making it more social.”

    Labor

Chicago’s Cafe YO! Combines Youth Jobs, Activism, and Caffeine

Kari Lydersen / In THESE TIMESMarch 23, 2012

Chicagoan David Meyers was never one for a 9-to-5 job that didn’t let him express his creativity and desire for radical social change. So seven years ago, Meyers founded a one-man fair trade organic coffee roasting and distribution outfit called Resistance Coffee. The labels on his bags of coffee usually bear information about an ongoing social justice struggle or a cryptic image like a McMansion with a slash through it, or an alternate name like Kropotkin Koffee.

Learning about coffee on the fly, Meyers roasts fair trade beans from around the world in small roasters stashed in garages around Chicago, and sells them to individual buyers and coffee shops, often as fundraisers for local groups. (Full disclosure: David is a friend of mine.)

This spontaneous and DIY spirit also characterizes Café YO!, a new venture Meyers helped launch in January, which trains urban youth in roasting and marketing fair trade coffee, and ideally will allow them to visit and connect with independent coffee growers around the world.

In April, the first three teen members of Cafe YO! will begin roasting coffee and creating custom artistic labels for the coffee bags, working three days a week for $10 an hour. While the pay isn’t high, given the group’s lack of financing, Meyers told me that the idea is to ​“plant the seed” of do-it-yourself entrepreneurship in kids from low-income, beleaguered neighborhoods like Humboldt Park, Cafe YO!‘s first outpost thanks to collaboration with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center.

Meyers noted that many youth in these neighborhoods have natural business and networking skills, but find only limited options like fast food joints, the military or the drug trade in which to use their talents. He hopes Cafe YO! can provide another outlet. Meyers told me:

There aren’t jobs out there for young people now, so what a lot of them are doing is just making their own jobs. The hipsters are doing this all over the place (with artistic micro-enterprises)… We’re trying to cross the race, class and gender divide, taking the business skills some kids have from their daily lives and incubating the idea that they can do something else.

The teens will spend one day a week roasting coffee, one day on designing the custom labels and one day on marketing. While coffee roasting is in and of itself a skill, Meyers sees it as perhaps more important as a symbol. He told me:

Roasting creates this weird space where you get really creative. Roasting one day a week might sound like a little thing, but it’s actually a big thing, it’s doing something that creates wealth and value, it’s making something happen just by the will to do it. When you combine the culture, politics and economics (of the project), you can go from the idea that people who are making something are exploited to them being empowered.

Once it gets off the ground, the idea is for Café YO to also raise money for causes, with one of the first being the Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera, one of 13 Puerto Rican independentistas arrested in the early 1980s who received inordinately long sentences after refusing to acknowledge the U.S. court system. Eleven of the prisoners had their sentences commuted by then-President Clinton in 1999; another was paroled in 2010, so only Lopez Rivera remains behind bars.

While the first participants are from Humboldt Park, the goal is for Cafe YO! to ultimately serve as an umbrella group for youth in different locations to start their own small coffee businesses. Meyers said that after a 10-week pilot period, they will evaluate whether the Humboldt Park youth might spin off their own business. Additionally, the urban bike collective Ciclo Urbano in Humboldt Park has partnered with Cafe YO! to deliver coffee orders.

Meyers and the other Cafe YO! founders — Jane Moccia and Eric Burton — are in the early stages of fundraising to send youth to meet with coffee growers in places like Puerto Rico and Nicaragua. Meyers said he has been talking wiith labor unions, among other groups.

Last year Meyers and other members of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center visited coffee growers in the highlands of Puerto Rico, an experience he said ​“opened doors to thinking more broadly about the world and what you can do in it.” He calls these types of connections ​“globalization from below,” as described on Café YO’s website:

Globalization from below. We do this within a new economic model that runs on equitable labor partnerships, makes the smallest possible carbon footprint, and works with youth who are developing the tools to create their own livelihoods and campaigning for change and justice along the way. We honor social life and action; we are greed abolitionists; and we take solidarity seriously…

Confederated, caffeinated, and free of sluggishness; we are promoting horizontal expansion, determined by the interests of project participants. The goal? To end the line artificially dividing wealth from the majority of the people of this earth. To put people before profit. To energize new and inspired realities. Hmm, what else? Oh yeah, to serve up some kick-ass coffee.

Cafe YO! initially will share a roaster with Café Chicago, run by workers at the Latino Union workers center, who are roasting and selling coffee with the ultimate goal of opening a café for day laborers waiting for work. Meyers also helped launch Cafe Chicago, which like Cafe YO!, has close ties to Puerto Rico. As I wrote for Area Chicago last year:

Norberto Gonzalez, 46, came to Chicago from Puerto Rico a year ago with no job or place to stay. Someone told him about the Albany Park Workers Center. He didn’t get any work his first day there, and considered ​“not wasting my time” by going back. But he did, and now he says the workers center ​“put clothes on my back, put a roof over my head. That’s why I want to give back and help create opportunities for other people.”

Cafe Chicago Hits the Ground Running, Stumbling, and Flying. All at the Same Time.

Cafe Chicago has hit the ground, running, stumbling, and flying. All at the same time.

First, the ground. We are creating a reality where the immigrant day laborers who are involved in Cafe Chicago can one day take it on fully, themselves, with the proper training. Personally, I did not know how much work this would be, but we are all committed to the idea, and the transfer is taking huge amounts of energy and time. That said, our cooperative members are taking on responsibilities as they can, and though it would have been easier to start a fair trade organic coffee company that funds social change and run by experienced outsiders, we really are maintaining a vision that we believe will prove to be where the deeper transformation happens, economic, social, and really, spiritual. Putting the workers in the drivers' seat.

We've had events at the Workers Center where 75 people showed up from all round Chicago, eager to learn about our work, wanting to take the ideas back to their communities, listening and singing along with the singer songwriters we've brought in to document our work in musical form. And it is here that we now realize, we've sparked a bona fide grassroots movement. From below. Pretty intense.

The cooperative has four regular members, and a dozen other day laborers involved in various ways, less regularly.

We've gotten huge name recognition in Chicago, while selling maybe 80-100 lbs of coffee per week (tiny!). We are working out so many glitches that come up with our language barriers, people's previous lack of experience of taking responsibility and ownership, lack of experience with business ....

But we seem to hit on the right methods slowly, and are good at bringing in outside support (for example, our college professor friend who is working on our Business Plan with us, has provided an amazing clarifying and focusing of our mission and our business). So, hitting the ground's proven to have quite a few stumbles, but we are learning to walk.

It helps to have a damn good rich and chocolatey coffee, from La FEM in the highlands of Nicaragua. At La FEM, the women who participate in the cooperative not only grow these magical beans but teach and learn construction and other building skills essential to further survival and thriving.

Our name recognition is coming through word of mouth; and a lot of writing skills put to good use in social media; the sway of the Latino Union and of the Chicago Coffee Confederation in different and complementary arenas; it's a real nice mish mash.

We have very good networks with almost all segments of Chicago's arts, radical, immigrant, worker, and progressive communities and our organizations. Our media work has exceeded all expectations, and is where we are flying: an article in internationally-read Latin American Herald Tribune; ChicagoUnionNews.com did a piece that put us in front of Chicago's unions (and national ones as well); and a piece on ABC7 News during primetime, probably the biggest visual media in Chicago, where we performed quite quite well. The New York Times will be around soon, it's the first media avenue I've begun to actively pursue.

All that said, we are now aware that we are not only a part of a large-scale economic seachange, but a leading voice. A tugboat. And we are keeping in mind, because we've sparked so many imaginations and tapped into a model of grasping and taking the reins of self-determination, that we can assist others in creating similar endeavors. Whether in coffee or other essentials. We hope to work with some of the other organizations in the National Day Labor Organizing Network, to establish ten more Cafe ______'s in different cities, by the end of 2013. They've been calling us, watching us, supporting us.

Locally, we've identified other niches where projects like worker-owned Cafe Chicago would have wide open space for success (such as a fair trade organic tortilleria), and rather than thinking we can do this too, will start working with others so that they can begin the process. Expanding horizontally, as the Chicago Coffee Confederation has, rather than vertically.

There's a lot more that could be said, but I wanted to let you know where we're at, and again thank you for your support, that support has proven to be vital to our sense that yes, we can do this, and others think so too.

So Thanks! And happy holidays to you ...

David

Cafe YO! - Made by Artists: Made by Youth: Making Community and a New Economy.

It started seven years ago.

Loss of employment led a guy to start roasting 100% fair trade organic green coffee beans in a friend's garage. Then selling it, bartering it, trading it for sandwiches and shoes and shelter, making a living while also raising funds for social change efforts ranging from the Chicago Women’s Health Center to Radios Populares to the Latino Union to West Town Bikes.
This endeavor became known as Resistance Coffee, and maybe you’ve seen it on the shelf at Newleaf Natural Grocery in Rogers Park.
Over two years ago, this quirky success morphed – not by growing into a larger, vertical, vertigo-producing corporation, mind you, but horizontally.
Two other fellas took up the original model, roasting on homemade equipment (BBQ grills! Propane! Dilapidated Garages! A field in Michigan!) with little or no investment, and now have parallel micro-endeavors, Grinderman Coffee (grindermancoffee.com), and Miscellaneous Treats. This trio call themselves the Chicago Coffee Confederation. This trio have gone on to bring in serious creative energy, artists of all kinds to assist with graphics, writing, artwork, web design, and even music related to social change and … coffee.
Last year, two of these roasters, David Meyers of Resistance Coffee and Michael McSherry of Grinderman, started working closely with the Latino Union in the creation of a larger project, called Café Chicago (CafeChicago.org). Café Chicago has grown into the city’s first immigrant-run worker-owned cooperative coffee roaster, toasting up fair trade organic beans grown by the women of La FEM cooperative, funding the immigrant rights work of the Latino Union (latinounion.org). Day laborers who've stood on corners braving bitter cold and extreme heat and boredom waiting for jobs to turn up, are now taking on all aspects of a coffee-roasting business. Not for profit, but for people and community.
Now the gang are up to something yet again.
The next phase of this movement, which is largely about growing community, economic justice, and the leveraging of resources and talents for people and the environment not profit, is youth-focused.
It’s a coffee venture.
It's Café YO!.

Café YO! Youth Organizing, Youth Occupying. The economy and the community.
The idea taking shape is the creation of a city-wide, youth-oriented coffee company. Fair trade? Check. Organic? Of course. Workers make the decisions? Mais oui. The workers and the creators this time - with the generous support and talents of a burgeoning group of adult artists, writers, musicians, activists, organizers who meet weekly at the Hideout's fantastic Bread and Soup gatherings – are youth. From across the city, we are coming together to not only roast, package, sell, and distribute this amazing coffee, but also to travel to countries of origin to establish relationships with coffee growers from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, and African countries.
Café YO! is also developing a citywide band of youth and adult musicians – bringing economics and creativity together in new ways. Another piece of the puzzle. Probably another story.
Café YO! is now making connections with teens around the city on street corners and through rad schools, and developing fundraising materials – a public relations packet, if you will. Funding will be forthcoming from various unions in Chicago and across the country, as well as from generous individuals of all stripes.
Consider supporting Cafe YO!. Your first reward? Making possible the very first stage of the very first youth-run, community-based fair trade organic coffee company in the country. In the world.
Your second reward? One day soon, drinking the coffee they bring.