For a worker to comfortably afford Santa Cruz’s rental market, they would have to make about $80 per hour.
Yet the average food service or retail worker in Santa Cruz makes less than a fourth of that. Combined with groceries, bills and coursework, student workers are dealt a nearly impossible hand.
“People are expected to pay for housing, but they’re making anywhere from $15 an hour to, maybe, $22,” said Joe Thompson, a lead organizer of the union efforts across Santa Cruz’s Starbucks locations. “It’s just not enough to cover housing costs.”
Santa Cruz is seeing an unexpected uptick in the labor movement. This past summer, Woodstock’s Pizza and Verve Coffee workers won their union elections. Employees at sporting goods shop REI and adult store Good Vibrations formed unions last year. In 2022, the Ocean and Mission Streets’ Starbucks locations were among the first three in California to unionize. Across the city, workers have turned to unionizing as a way to address their shared problems.
Jamie Cunin, a union representative from Woodstock’s, explains that wages were a major motivator to organize. Employees had noticed that Woodstock’s pay rate in Santa Cruz, while consistent with other locations, barely exceeded the city’s minimum wage.
“We were getting paid 50 cents above minimum wage. [Other locations] would get $1.50 to $2 above minimum wage,” Cunin said. “We’re one of the busiest locations. It felt unfair that we weren’t getting any merit for that.”
Many retail and food service workers in the city are also students, which comes with its own set of challenges.
According to Cunin, workplaces in Santa Cruz take advantage of two things: young workers who often aren’t fully informed on labor laws and a rapid turnover rate.
“A lot of people are graduating and moving elsewhere. The working body is changing so frequently. We have to put more effort into keeping the union relevant.”
But there are also advantages to organizing within a young workforce. According to Sasha Pavy, the worker who started the union efforts at Verve’s Pacific Avenue location, young workers are often more open to the idea of creating a union.
“Young people are more ready to take those risks. Even myself, I was like ‘I’m willing to lose my job. Let’s do it,’” Pavy said. “We all felt that way, that if we lose our job, so what? At least we’re doing something.”
Beyond being a bargaining tool, many workers found their union provided them with a source of community and trust amongst their coworkers.
“It was really powerful. Upper management boasted that unionizing would dismantle the family dynamic. [But] the workers are the people that have the family dynamic,” Cunin said. “People felt safer to share their concerns with the union than with management.”
In addition to the bonds formed within each union, solidarity strengthened across organizing efforts, with members from older unions offering guidance on navigating the legal process.
“I got to talk to [Thompson], who organized Starbucks. The things that pushed them to unionize were the same things that pushed us,” Pavy said. “Getting started was hard. [He] helped me figure out how to organize things.”
Multiple active unions also appeared at rallies for new organizing efforts to show their support.
“At our first rally, we had Bookshop Santa Cruz, who unionized before us. We had people from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. It was more than Woodstock’s forming a union, it was becoming a part of a solidarity movement. Different workplaces are going to experience different kinds of mistreatment, but there’s a middle ground.”
Thompson hopes that the recent union activity will inspire more young workers to become involved.
“Every worker should have a union,” Thompson said. “Being able to fight for something with your coworkers and build something that you can look back on and say, ‘We did this for ourselves.’”
“I hope that this will bring more young people into the labor movement long-term and that they will continue to realize the importance of the fight.”
