Dino
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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And then, yeah, so that was still within the first few weeks of when we filed our paperwork to have an election with the NLRB to be a certified shop owner.
Behind the Bastards
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according to the government not that that's always important yeah yeah that's something that we wanted especially as the fucking trump regime unfolds yeah yeah no it it's really it's a really tough position especially because i mean we're we're iww members and i know that there's definitely an internal debate of whether or not you know contractual agreements versus direct action yeah but there's always the option to choose to both a combination diversify our tactics but
Behind the Bastards
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But yeah, so that happened. They also hired a union investor.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, according to LM reports from the government that they have to file, they spent over $100,000 in like a span of like two weeks to hire this union investor. Jesus Christ.
Behind the Bastards
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It's like a report that you file with the, I think, forgetting which department it is, but... Is it the OLM?
Behind the Bastards
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Thank you. Yeah. So they are required to file that by, I think, March 30th of the following year for fiscal reasons. So we finally got those documents this previous year. So they did spend a lot of money. And this guy who is just... basically messing with us for like two weeks.
Behind the Bastards
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And he was, you know, trying to be super helpful, answer any questions about the union and like tell people that the union was, you know, like racist, not for them or that the union was exclusionary or that unions cost a lot of money. And thankfully that didn't work. We won all of our elections. But leading up to that, it definitely was
Behind the Bastards
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kind of morale dropped a lot people felt a little bit they were questioning whether or not it was the right decision we made to unionize in the first place because it seemed like this was just the start of Pete's just messing with us because they care on and it didn't seem like there was much that we could have done in that situation other than try to maybe have fun with the union buster and mess with him but even then that still wasn't like enough to kind of out the fact that like
Behind the Bastards
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people were just being messed with at work and they couldn't literally leave. Like there was someone like on the floor asking them questions about their, you know, activity with the union. And even though now we know it's like illegal and we could have filed unfair labor practices on that at the time, we just didn't do it.
Behind the Bastards
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And now we're learning about it, but that's something I definitely wish we knew and stood up for a little bit more. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. So management shouldn't be asking for your affiliation within a union. They're not allowed to ask or make assumptions about it. So if I'm a manager, I'm not allowed to go up to me and be like, hey, Dino, since you're in a union, what is the union doing about X, Y, and Z? That's not an appropriate question. And there's definitely times where my own manager asked me questions like that.
Behind the Bastards
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And I definitely had to... hey, this is actually not appropriate for you to do. I don't feel comfortable with this. But that's not always the case. And some workers definitely were disclosing private and confidential information about the union to management. And it was really hard to make sure that every worker felt comfortable.
Behind the Bastards
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And they definitely picked out workers based on social personalities and things like that, which is really disheartening to see.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, no, I think another thing that's kind of on everyone's mind is that a group of us got written up for another direct action that we did back in October. And then we got written up like the week of Thanksgiving and holidays and finals for most of us that were students. So that kind of just dropped morale and activity.
Behind the Bastards
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And because of the holidays, people were either kind of not paying attention or just organizing activity tends to just drop during the holidays. Yeah. People are just a little bit... Everyone just checks out. Yeah. People check out. People go home. And especially for us and food service retail, a lot of people are kind of just around for school.
Behind the Bastards
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So my location, we're a few blocks away from UC Berkeley. So most of the students go home and... They're not going to log into Zoom for a 30-minute union meeting and hear what's the most recent check-ins that we need to do. So that is a little bit frustrating that Pete's definitely wrote us up right at the perfect time where activity kind of drops. So they're adapting.
Behind the Bastards
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They're learning a little bit more. And it's kind of... It's really frustrating. But yeah, no, a group of us, including me, got written up for something. And it was just a blanket discipline. And it started restricting all of our abilities to cover shifts, to swap shifts, to pick up hours, to call out. And they restrict everything so badly. And then are also final warnings.
Behind the Bastards
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And there's no period... In which all these made up rules that they're making kind of end. I'm just waiting to hear when my manager decides to stop punishing me, which is obviously very personal. And that's really worrisome because we tried to file a grievance with Pete's according to what they told us. All our district managers were like, yeah, file a grievance with HR. We'll discuss it there.
Behind the Bastards
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And then we did that. We filed a grievance. We all signed on. And then management turned around and was like, actually, you haven't bargained for a grievance procedure. So we actually don't care about this. And unless it's legally mandated, we won't listen to you. Yeah. So now we're getting stuck between like, we want to bargain. We want to go to the table.
Behind the Bastards
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We want to meet with Pete's, but they are creating these made up rules on how they want to bargain and meet with us. And they're unwilling to cooperate with us. There's like five public shops and they're like not willing to meet with us at the same time. That actually makes no sense. We have like the same bargaining team members for all our shops. We're in the one big union. Like,
Behind the Bastards
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It doesn't make any sense that they're trying to, I mean, it makes perfect sense for management to try to divide us, but it's what the workers want to be in one contract to, you know, be able to do like one grievance and like, you know, go against management together. But yeah, it's like a really annoying thing and it's really frustrating to not really know exactly what our next move is.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I think one of the main things that we think that we've been really quiet about is how much union investing they've been doing and just talking to the public about that. I think part of why we're here today also is it's going to help with that. A lot of people, especially when people were calling for boycotts on Starbucks, were like, okay, we'll go to Pete's then.
Behind the Bastards
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They're like the good company. And I think Pete's gets away with a lot because they have that... kind of protection of like, oh, they were a small company from Berkeley and they're still in the Bay Area. They're so small. Now they have like so many shops like across the world. They're like an international conglomerate.
Behind the Bastards
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They're part of like a large holding company and they got bought out like over 10 years ago and the quality has been declining. They treat their workers like shit. We don't get any raises anymore unless it's like minimum wage increases are mandated by law. So a company that maybe was right and was maybe a little bit better is now like just going downhill.
Behind the Bastards
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And I think people still like pride themselves and being like a Pete Nick and being a customer and being part of this like weird subculture of coffee that is no longer kind of popular. There's just like it's just not what it was back when it was created, like in the 60s in Berkeley. It's not it's not the same and it can't go back to that anymore.
Behind the Bastards
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Just not with the way that they're union busting out the way that they're just cutting the quality of everything. And over like, yeah, everything, the exploitation of us and in other ways that they do, it's just not sustainable anymore.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, so you can go to our social media at Pete's Labor Union. We also have our website.
Behind the Bastards
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We have an intake form, so if any barista is interested in reaching out, learning more about organizing, what that entails, and if you want to organize their own shop, we have members, part of our organizing committees that are willing to meet with you, sustain contact through however long you need for your campaign, and you'll be part of our organizing. We have...
Behind the Bastards
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Shops across the country organizing with us. It's very exciting. I'm sure there might be a shop near you already organizing and we can get y'all connected as well.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, so the first store that organized actually was in Davis, California. They organized, I think, in 2022. They launched their public campaign at the end in winter, and then they voted for their election back in January 2023. That's around the same time period where a lot of media was writing about their unionization process.
Behind the Bastards
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And a couple of the Bay Area stores heard about it and started to meet together. And that's kind of where we started. We weren't IWW at the start, but we eventually started meeting with unions and chose IWW.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. When we joined the IWW, we were basically fully organized to the extent that we were going to be. We already had our committee set up. We had our meetings regularly. We had like Robert's rules and everything already implemented.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, when we started organizing, it was very secretive and it was a little bit scary at the time because there was a lot of already kind of union busting from management. There was a lot of managers kind of like trying to overhear people were talking about the union or already instigating themselves and asking, like, what do you think about unions?
Behind the Bastards
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And it was a little bit scary to try to just like go up to coworkers and be like, hey, like, are you interested in, you know, hanging out after work and, you know, talking shit about our manager or something like that. And over time, we eventually started doing one-on-one conversations with our co-workers and meeting together.
Behind the Bastards
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Once we had our three stores that really were solidified, we had at least one person in each store that was willing to drive the campaign forward for moms in maybe even years. As some of us have been around for that long now, we felt ready to kind of like start setting things into stone. So we had like meetings every single week and we had bi-weekly meetings at some point.
Behind the Bastards
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We had committee meetings and people started to kind of select themselves into like social media or we had outreach, we had intake. So other stores were also reaching out to us because there was like just secret kind of like people knew what was happening. People didn't want to say it out loud.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, so it was just a lot of like hanging out, having socials and things like that, that kind of like created the foundation for like personal relationships for organizing. And at the time, it was mostly just us complaining for a really long time until we were like, what if we did something about this?
Behind the Bastards
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Oh man, where do I even start? So Pete's, the second they found out that we were organizing, launched like their worst union busting campaign they could have ever imagined. Wasting so much money.
Behind the Bastards
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Right after we went public, the first big thing that they messed up on was they took me off the schedule indefinitely and we had to like file a whole unfair labor practice about it. An unfair labor practice is a charge with the National Labor Relations Board. And we claimed that they were being retaliatory. And at the time, it was very clear that management thought I was a key organizer.
Behind the Bastards
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I was very public and vocal about being a union member. At the time, everyone was. But for some reason, they singled me out. That was one part of how they messed up. But they eventually put me back on the schedule, apologized, gave me back pay. And we withdrew the... We withdrew the ULP because we were like, all right, I guess it fixed itself.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, no, just stack them up. And sometimes that's enough to put pressure, especially for smaller businesses or people who just like, especially corporations that don't necessarily have experience with union investing quite yet. Yeah. So at the time that worked. Within a week, I had my job back and everything.
Behind the Bastards
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And that was right after we had filed, which meant that if for some reason I wasn't put back on the schedule, I would have been gone leading up until the election, which would have been really bad in terms of having those one-on-ones with coworkers and making sure everyone was connected. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, no. And I think especially something that's very IWW of how we reacted to that situation was that my co-workers were also just like being really like annoying to the manager being like, what happened to Dino? Why aren't they at work? Like what's going on?
Behind the Bastards
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And I think that internal pressure also made it really uncomfortable for management to realize how much they had fucked up and how much my co-workers were willing to have my back. There was definitely more talk of actual direct action in other ways that eventually we actually didn't do because I got my hours back. So that was really good.