Op-Ed: Reflections on Wydown Workers United
A former barista serves the tea on working conditions at the closed coffee chain
On May 14th, I lost my job at the Wydown Coffee Bar.
We had been attempting to form a union. The hope was that we would be able to strike a bargain with the company regarding the conditions of our jobs. Instead, the owners, Chad and Alex McCracken, decided to close the shop. In doing so, they put 30 people out of work.
In the days since, we’ve heard all manner of commentary on the situation. Our customers, for their part, have been overwhelmingly kind to us — for many of them, we were an integral part of their daily routine. Their support has played no small part in keeping us going in this difficult time.
If you browse the comments sections of local media, however, you find a different tone entirely.
“Just get a different job if you don’t like it.”
“This is your own fault, you threatened to bankrupt the shop.”
“It’s coffee, not a coal mine — why do you need a union?”
It is apparent that some people simply do not understand what work in the service industry entails. Starting pay at the Wydown was $11 an hour, the minimum wage for tipped workers in DC. (According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the living wage for a single, childless adult in the District is $23.90 an hour). There were no raises unless you were promoted. No health insurance — not unless you worked 30 hours a week, which would be entirely reasonable if the company ever allowed anyone to meet that threshold. Certainly no paid time off.
At Wydown, as with most coffee shops, the day starts before sunrise. Our bakery and kitchen staff clocked in at 5:30 on weekdays, 6 on weekends. Half an hour later, the baristas showed up. Over the course of the next thirty minutes, we would prepare the iced tea and coffee, brew the hot coffee, dial-in the espresso, re-assemble and fill milk pitchers, drain and refill the front-of-house ice bins, and set up the tables and chairs. The first customers would often arrive before we had the chance to get a cup of coffee ourselves.
Each shift, we faced a number of environmental hazards — chemical burns from dishwasher fluids, Carpal Tunnel from tamping espresso grounds, pulled muscles from hauling ice and milk, cleaning excrement off the toilets. To refill spray bottles, you had to lean into the mop closet, balancing carefully, putting your mouth and nose within millimeters of filthy mop-heads.
A particularly egregious example was the bakery at our Apollo location: there was no ventilation. The staff there say they regularly braved 80-degree heat in a cramped room for hours at a time.
No workplace is perfect, of course. The problem is that when trouble struck, we simply weren’t listened to. It felt as though the owners didn’t care about inconveniences to us: if it didn’t affect them, it wasn’t a priority. The irony here is that a lot of these issues concerned customer experience, the efficiency of the business, and the quality of our product.
We had a set of syrup bottles, for example, which would spray in all directions when used. The espresso bar was covered in sticky residue at all times. You’d try to clean it, but after another ten minutes you’d start to notice sticky spots on the espresso tamper, contaminating your portafilter and ruining the coffee-bed. During a rush, there wasn’t time to clean up too carefully, you just grabbed whatever rag was on the bar and wiped the gunk off. We asked over and over again for new bottles. We got them eventually — after more than six months.
That might seem fairly inconsequential, but Wydown ownership’s indifference applied to even our most severe concerns: the 14th Street location had a problem with flooding behind the counter, and every so often, for no apparent reason, water would begin to emerge from the seal between the floor and the kitchen sink. It sometimes smelled like sewage, other times like rotten fish. The staff felt fairly certain that this was a hazard to both ourselves and the customers. Management disagreed, and we semi-regularly served coffee while standing in pools of putrid water.
When our espresso machine malfunctioned one Saturday afternoon, the company’s Director of Operations just shrugged and told us that maybe a technician could take a look by Tuesday (it took longer). We could have turned off online orders during the course of the emergency, even closed the espresso bar. Instead, the next day, I recall wait time on drinks stretching to over a half-hour. Those espresso machines malfunctioned a lot, actually — the steam wands were supposed to be safe to touch when not in use. The two permanent scars on my arms say otherwise.
The crux of this is that we didn’t feel we were treated as human beings. This is more than a simple material issue: the American ideal of work — clocking in at 9 AM, getting out by 5, happy hour with friends and co-workers on Friday nights, unwinding over the weekend — is not something service workers get access to. In many ways we actually facilitate it — the weekend brunch doesn’t exist without someone to mix those bottomless mimosas.
So when your friends want to go out on a Friday, you have to say no. Bad idea to be drinking the night before a morning shift. Instead, you go to bed at 9. You try to fall asleep but can’t, because you slept in that morning to try to recover from your 6 AM the previous day. Maybe you’ll get a Saturday off next month? Every once in a while you notice you’re free for the next couple days; you invite your friends to hang out. They decline, because it’s Tuesday.
This is no way to live. Sometimes you feel like you aren’t really living at all. Our naysayers make two assumptions: either someone out there does enjoy these conditions, and we weren’t cut out for the job; or that no one does, but there is a class of people who simply deserve it. I don’t think anyone seriously believes the former.
Why do we deserve this? Because we had the hubris to work in a coffee shop? Because we were so arrogant as to find fulfillment in a job some people deem unimportant?
We felt that we worked hard enough to be entitled to a greater say in the operation of the Wydown. What’s wrong with that? Those who say that the business would have gone bankrupt clearly misunderstand our intent. There’s no point in blindly sucking a business dry. What we wanted was to be a part of the business, to make decisions regarding working conditions and to ensure that our portion of the profits was fair. We could never have demanded money that the business didn’t already have. All of this would be a moot point if it turned out that the Wydown was secretly floundering. I think the fact that the owners chose to close indicates that, in all likelihood, the opposite was true — they just didn’t want to share.
The coffee industry attracts people in transient moments of life — students, people who are uncertain about their career, people who quit their desk job. Many of these people don’t see coffee as their long-term plan. That’s how companies like the Wydown continue to exploit people: when someone can’t take the grind anymore, they quit, the business hires someone new, and the cycle continues. Those who leave are the lucky ones. Others can’t afford to, and are forced to commit themselves to the job indefinitely. They don’t deserve this treatment. No one does. It won’t stop until someone makes it stop, and that’s what Wydown Workers United tried to do. A lot of us didn’t intend to be in coffee long-term, but people felt that something had to be done. We wanted to leave a better job for our co-workers and all future employees of the company.
A union is the only true answer to this problem. We got rid of monarchs and dictators in the sphere of politics (mostly, anyway) because we knew we couldn’t rely on the benevolence of singularly powerful people. We ought to think the same way about our workplaces. Our employer is more powerful than each of us as individuals. It’s easy to fire one person for complaining. But it’s much harder to fire everyone: by organizing as a union, we make our employment a matter of discussion, not decree.
By winning our union vote, we would have secured a more empowered experience for all future employees.
Of course, things didn’t pan out how we had hoped. The owners, I believe, cared more about power more than their continued financial benefit. They chose to go against their own economic interest, torpedo their entire business, to avoid treating us as equals. But I want to say to every service worker reading this: that isn’t a reason to give up. The horde of consultants, hill staffers, and non-profit desk jockeys who think of themselves as the main characters of this city aren’t more important than you. You make their breakfast sandwiches, you brew their coffee. You keep this whole thing going. You deserve better, and you should feel no shame in saying so.
Someone has to do something — that someone could be you.
730DC reached out to Chad & Alex McCracken, owners of the Wydown, for comment and did not receive a response. This article will be updated should we hear back.
