Verve Coffee Workers Want Living Wages. Fighting for a Union is How They’ll Get It.

The tide of labor organizing in the coffee industry reached a new shop this week, as workers at three Verve Coffee Roasters locations in Santa Cruz and San Francisco took their union drive public. At 10:30 AM on Monday — Labor Day — workers put on their yellow union buttons and delivered letters to management, announcing their intent to unionize with the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW). Their campaign follows successful union drives at several other Bay Area coffee shops: Starbucks, Peet’s Coffee, Highwire Coffee, and, most recently, Blue Bottle.

“In Santa Cruz, we have more and more unionized spots, and not just in coffee,” said Sam Creighton, a barista at Verve’s Pacific Avenue location in Santa Cruz. “REI is unionized. Bookshop Santa Cruz is unionized. Woodstock’s is unionized. The grad students [at UCSC] have a huge union. And Verve is the next stop on that whole line.”

Workers said their hourly wages, which start at $16.50 (California minimum wage) and are capped at $17.75 for those not trained as shift leads, aren’t enough to pay rent and buy essentials in Santa Cruz and San Francisco — two of America’s most expensive rental markets. Workers also said they hoped to win more consistent scheduling and better benefits, like parking validation and more paid leave.

At Verve, entry-level hourly pay is comparable to the price of a latte: a single drink can cost as much as $12 after tax and tip, depending on the customer’s order.

Verve’s customers aren’t just paying for coffee; they’re paying for a vibe. “Verve is a place that people want to visit when they visit Santa Cruz. It’s a tourist attraction,” said Ren Johnson, a barista at the Pacific Avenue location. “On TikTok, it’s a trend to go to a Verve cafe and order a blueberry cold foam matcha and post it on your Instagram…. It’s a performative coffee shop.”

“Creating an experience for the customer is part of the expectation,” Creighton said. “It’s customer service — and then some.”

Verve’s high standards — for presentation and customer service as much as for ingredients, roasting, and brewing — mean workers have to be highly trained. Verve has a dedicated “training lab” where workers go to master the coffee brewing process, the finer points of latte art, and the tasting notes for each bean variety on Verve’s menu.

“It really is fantastic the amount of skill they want us to have in creating this,” Creighton said, but they added that workers’ wages don’t seem to reflect the extent of their training and expertise. “It’s like having really nice, high-quality silverware that you let sit in the sink. It’s rusting. It’s tarnishing. If you put all this effort into having something nice, you need to continue to treat it well.”

Current wages also feel out of step, workers said, with Verve’s recent growth and likely plans for future expansion. Founded in Santa Cruz in 2007 by Ryan O’Donovan and Colby Barr, Verve now has ten locations in California and four in Japan — not counting their franchised locations in dozens of Capital One Bank branches, or their kiosks at the Menlo Park campuses of Meta and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

“This is a big corporation that’s expanding quickly and has huge amounts of revenue,” Creighton said. “And it seems to us like the right time, before they continue to push for expansion, to get a wall-to-wall union set up, so that as they do expand, that’s already in place.” A “wall-to-wall” union would include all non-managerial Verve workers: not just baristas and shift leads at the coffeeshops, but workers at Verve’s two roasteries and in its production facilities, where coffee is packed and shipped to a growing base of online customers.

Workers said they first reached out to representatives from UFCW a year and a half ago, and the campaign has picked up steam over the past six months. They said they’re hoping to see organizing efforts emerge soon at other Verve locations.

Verve management, who did not respond to Current’s request for comment, now has the opportunity to voluntarily recognize the union. Failing that, workers will hold an election, which they said they expect to win easily, since they already have the support of 90% of the roughly 60 workers at the three organized locations: Fair Avenue and Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, and Market Street in San Francisco. In the meantime, they plan to hold a rally tomorrow, Friday at 11 AM at Verve’s Seabright location in Santa Cruz — the site of Verve headquarters and the company’s original roastery.

After months of organizing cautiously, in secret, to forestall retaliation from management, workers said it felt satisfying to bring their campaign out into the open. “Now it feels real,” Johnson said. “It felt really good to talk to our manager and say: this is happening. We are a union.”