Peloton is the new Tae Bo is the new Thighmaster. Why do we approach fitness as consumers?
When Tae Bo was all the rage in the late 1990s, Amanda Biers Melcher dove in head first. Living in LA, she says she’s tried “all of the workouts” — cardio barre, Bikram yoga when it was the (literally) hot thing, etc. But there was something special about the martial arts-inspired cardio fitness craze.
Biers Melcher was part of star instructor Billy Blanks’ “cult-like following” who worked out at a Sherman Oaks studio — now a Chipotle — alongside A-listers like Brooke Shields, Reese Witherspoon, and Magic Johnson, even appearing in one of the workout videos. The day she and a friend — both new moms — showed up for a class taping they’d been invited to, some of the excitement wore off. “We gave our names to the young woman with a clipboard and she said, ‘Oh, good, the alternative body types are here,’” she says, recalling that her friend burst out crying when they realized what was going on. “We were the fat girls in the video.”
Despite the embarrassing mishap, Biers Melcher stayed loyal to the workout … until she didn’t. Looking back, she’s not quite sure why she stopped going — at some point, the fad just sort of faded. “A lot of people just moved on,” she says. “Everyone does what’s hot, then something else becomes hot, and everyone does that.”
Like millions of people, Biers Melcher gave up significant portions of her time, energy, and maybe a little bit of dignity for a workout that she did really enjoy. And then, also like millions of people, she was on to the next thing.
Billy Blanks is still around, and you can still find people doing Tae Bo. But it’s nowhere near as prevalent as it once was. That’s the thing about fitness trends: They constantly ebb and flow, often by design. Fitness is not inherently a consumer endeavor, but we tend to approach it as one. The health and wellness industry is more than happy to oblige.
“Fitness is experienced in this country mostly as a consumer product, so the rules of the markets apply to exercise almost more than the rules of science or health,” Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a fitness historian, professor at the New School, and author of the upcoming book Fit Nation. “There is this constant cycle of exercise trends mostly because there’s the need to keep creating new products and flashy experiences for people to spend money on.”
There’s always something that’s in vogue (like Peloton six months ago, and SoulCycle a little before that, and CrossFit a little before that), and there’s always something that’s going to replace it, just like in fashion, said Rina Raphael, a health and wellness writer and author of the upcoming book The Gospel of Wellness. “There’s no money in telling people to go for a walk, right?”
Fitness science changes, just not as fast as fads
There are shifts in fitness governed by breakthroughs in exercise science, but those shifts are generally slow, Mehlman Petrzela explained. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, cardio and aerobics were embraced as a type of exercise that everyone could do. Then in the 1990s, there was a shift to strength as good for general health, and away from worrying that strength training would make you “muscle bound.” In the last 20 years, there’s been more research on mindfulness and meditation. “You see a lot of exercise programs incorporating that broader wellness perspective,” she said.
The pace at which exercise science evolves is, to say the least, much slower than the pace at which different practices evolve. There’s a difference between how exercise trends are driven by science compared to the capitalistic drive to repackage and resell.
If the point of your workout is to get in cardiovascular activity, the kind of workout that you’re ultimately doing isn’t all that different, whether you’re running on a treadmill or dancing around in a studio. If you’re trying to do low-impact strength, barre and Pilates aren’t lightyears apart. “It’s not so much a different exercise modality that’s being sold to you as much as it is a different way of doing it or a different package,” Mehlman Petrzela said.
Workout companies and fitness studios are constantly competing for business with all sorts of gimmicks and tricks to draw people in. I am a bit of a sucker for these types of things and have tried my fair share of fad workouts. For a while, I tried Mark Fisher Fitness, a queer-friendly boutique studio in New York that calls its members “ninjas” and is adorned with unicorn memorabilia. I once did a dance fitness class where you put on headphones and rocked out to terrible European dance music in front of the New York Public Library, pretending the experience wasn’t completely humiliating. Another time, I did a spin bootcamp class that was so hard to follow I wanted to walk out, except another guy did first. I tried CrossFit for a week and almost immediately got hurt.
“In this very, very crowded marketplace, you need to sell a different experience or a different packaging,” Mehlman Petrzela said. Sometimes we’re trying the new thing because we’re being marketed to and not because it’s actually different or good or advisable. But it’s not inherently a bad thing, she noted — people like different things for different reasons.
People have all sorts of different motivations for quitting an exercise program: They get bored and look for something else, or find that certain workouts aren’t sustainable over a long period of time, physically or psychologically. I spoke to one man for this story who started running in those five-finger toe shoes for a while until he stepped on a rock, resulting in an injury it took him eight months to shake. I spoke to another woman who got into doing workout videos based on one of those mini trampolines but had to give it up after moving to an apartment building where her downstairs neighbor didn’t exactly appreciate her bouncing around every morning.
“There’s a whole bunch of group fitness trends that always cycle through. They fall out of favor for different reasons,” Raphael said.
Peloton is not dead, it’s just not going to be the big thing forever
So I guess this brings us to the Peloton of it all, arguably the last Big Hot Thing in exercise. The connected fitness company was well poised to take off at the outset of the pandemic, when many gyms shut down and people needed options to exercise from home. Consumers wanting a bike or treadmill faced months of back orders, and Peloton’s market cap surpassed $50 billion. But like so many fitness companies before it (not to mention spinning competitors Flywheel and SoulCycle), Peloton’s star has started to fade.
“We have yet to see Peloton evaporate as a company, what we are seeing is it’s evaporating as a perceived mega-cap changing the world,” said Simeon Siegel, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets.
Peloton remains popular among many of its users and has millions of subscribers, and it remains a nearly $4 billion company. Still, it is nowhere near the breakout story it was viewed as just a couple of years ago. As Vox has documented in the past, investors have begun to sour on the company, which has faced challenges in manufacturing and logistics. People just aren’t going to buy limitless amounts of treadmills and bikes. And like so many fitness trends before, there’s nothing particularly special about what the Peloton bikes and treadmills do in the first place.
“What Peloton did so well was less creating a truly innovative product and more telling a truly compelling story,” Siegel said. Essentially, Peloton’s success has been in its community much more than in its engineers. “The rise and fall of Peloton has been written by storytellers much more than it’s been written by numbers.”
Even when they fade from the limelight, most exercise trends truly never go away. “There are still people around doing almost all of these programs except the ones that are total scams that get disproven,” said Mehlman Petrzela. (See: those vibrating ab belts, though there are people probably using those, too.)
Maybe not many people are doing Tae Bo anymore, but they are doing classes that incorporate boxing. Heck, you can still find some Tae Bo classes on YouTube. Biers Melcher is well aware of the Peloton trend, but she insists that Tae Bo was different. “It lacks the kind of star power, I think, or communal star power of Tae Bo,” she says. “Every class was like a rock concert.”
The same can be said of Peloton. A recent ride with the singer Lizzo crashed the app, so many people tried to join. Some of its instructors, including Cody Rigsby and Robin Arzón, are celebrities in their own right, much like Billy Blanks was 20 years ago. SoulCycle, which lost some of its sheen during the pandemic, generated a cult-like following that had its followers clamoring for bikes at its ultra-exclusive studios. Some fitness programs have managed to become almost a religion for their adherents.
There’s no such thing as an exercise trend that lasts forever, except for maybe running and walking, but again, beyond selling you shoes and smartwatches, there’s not a whole lot of money to be made off of those. And really, who among us doesn’t have at least one piece of long-abandoned fitness equipment sitting somewhere in our garages or basements or closets?
There’s no harm in trying a new thing, even if it’s expensive (as long as you can afford it), and hey, maybe you might like it. Indeed, experts say that whatever the latest fashion in fitness is, what’s most important is finding the one that works for you, because that’s the one that has a chance of sticking, or at least being the most effective for now. As Raphael puts it, “Find something you really like.”
We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.
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Have ideas for a future column or thoughts on this one? Email emily.stewart@vox.com.
Optimism, not despair, is the way to inspire kids to help the future.
As a teenager, I was really serious about doing good in the world. I volunteered at my local library and as a tutor for struggling students. When an international charity came to our school and gave a presentation about starving kids overseas, I gave them all my lunch money. I was the target audience for dozens of pitches about how I, as a child, could do good in the world — from fighting climate change to ending global hunger.
Now, as an adult with my own kids to raise, I have profoundly mixed feelings about how all these important moral messages were taught to me and how I see them imparted to teenagers today. I think we can do better when we talk to kids about how to do good in the world.
Here are some things I wish I’d been told, which would have been incredible conversations to have with my parents and which would have equipped me better to achieve real good in the world as an adult.
Be confused openly and out loud, but also treat confusion as something that can be solved
Too often, the messages I got from adults about how to do good in the world fell into one of two camps.
One camp was full of excessive, yet conflicting, certainty: obsessing over cutting out plastic bags in favor of cloth reusable bags, or telling me that I shouldn’t get cloth ones if I was going to lose them before I’d gotten at least 50 uses out of them. I was told never to use plastic water bottles because of the chemicals, or that the metal ones were even worse for the environment. I got simplified presentations of geopolitical situations like the now-infamous Kony 2012.
Obviously, this can be disorienting and ultimately disillusioning. If a situation is complex, and presented to you without complexity, then when you learn the full picture it’s easy to lose confidence even in the parts that really are simple.
The other camp (perhaps made up of disillusioned veterans of the first camp) tended to go too far in the other direction, insisting that nothing really mattered and it was impossible to know if any organization did any good. That’s where I heard that there was no point in giving money to homeless people as they’d just waste it on drugs, and no point in pushing for political change as no one in Washington was trustworthy, and no way of telling whether overseas charities made the world a better place for the recipients. Sometimes, people telling me those things wanted me to give up entirely. Sometimes they just wanted me to “choose with your heart!” rather than trying to figure out what worked.
Either way, this was alienating too. What I wanted to hear was that my questions were good questions and possible to answer. We could look up what people experiencing homelessness do with money (they don’t spend it all on drugs) and which international charities are best. We could research issues that were interesting and important to us. One of the most essential transitions between childhood and adulthood is the transition between being a consumer of advice, knowledge, and wisdom and being a producer of those things. It can be tremendously empowering to tell a young person, “I don’t know the answer, and it might be no one knows the answer, but let’s try to learn it.” Knowledge isn’t handed down from on high; it is produced, and kids deserve to see, and be part of, that process.
Don’t use your kids as a way to deflect your own guilt, despair, or frustration — and teach them to recognize when other adults do it
Some adult climate activists in particular relate to kids in a way that can be very damaging. Often, they’re frustrated our society has done so little about climate change. So they write off their own generation as hopeless and say that the only hope is the children, putting huge burdens on the shoulders of people who are just starting to figure out their own priorities.
Sometimes, kids get exaggerated messages about climate change, like that they will personally die young from climate change, which broadly isn’t true. When I see kids holding signs that say “Why should I study for a future I won’t have?”, I don’t feel inspired by their conviction; I feel frustrated that someone, probably someone grappling with their own guilt and anxiety about climate change, told children that there’s no future. This is not a good way to inspire them to fight for it or a fair way to enable them to set their own priorities.
Needless to say, not only is there a future, but studying is one of the best ways for a child to be positioned to tackle climate change. It’s seriously wronging kids to discourage them from the very paths that will let them make a difference in the world by telling them there’s no world to make a difference in.
We all have our moments of despair and hopelessness, but kids aren’t equipped to take those expressions of frustration with an appropriate grain of salt. Don’t put that on them.
Take your kids’ moral convictions seriously
Teenagers have deeply felt moral convictions. They may go vegan, become activists for a social cause, get passionately angry about issues, explore religion or deconverting from religion, demand to know why your family doesn’t give all its money away to charity.
I know this because as a teenager I became a vegetarian, became a committed effective altruist, got very worried about artificial intelligence, explored Jewish observance, came out as a lesbian, spent most of my savings trying to help a friend in a bad home situation, and — I’m sure — gave my parents quite a few gray hairs.
But the crucial thing is, none of that was a “phase,” best patiently waited out. I really am a lesbian, now married with a wonderful wife. We invite all our friends to our weekly Shabbat dinners. I have varied the exact details of my diet over the years, but I still avoid factory-farmed meat. I’m still an effective altruist; my wife and I donate 30 percent of our collective income to the best global health charities we can identify. If my parents had seen my radical life changes and decided to talk me out of them, or to assume I’d outgrow them, they would have missed out on connecting with me, their child who was trying to make sense of her moral priorities and personal identity in a confusing world.
You might worry if your child is changing rapidly and adopting lots of new priorities you don’t understand. And they might not stick with all their new ideas. But you want to nurture a relationship with your actual child, the person in front of you, not with some extrapolated future version of them.
That means valuing the compassion, curiosity, generosity, and conviction that has led your child down whatever paths they’re traveling, and it means genuinely listening to them and learning both alongside and from them. That seriousness and respect will mean the world to your kids — and help them to conquer the world.
This piece first appeared in Vox’s Extra Curricular newsletter. Sign up here!
Inside the uphill battle for Starbucks workers trying to negotiate a union contract.
Workers at a Starbucks right outside the University of Texas campus in Austin filed to unionize in March and won their election by a landslide in June. It’s now nearing the end of August, and union workers say their requests to begin bargaining for a contract have largely been ignored by Starbucks.
Some workers believe the coffee company is using these delays as one of many union-busting tactics meant to prevent workers from exercising their right to organize: The longer it takes to create and agree on a contract with the company, the longer it will take for union workers to actually enjoy the benefits of being in a union and the more likely the union movement will lose momentum.
Delays are especially acute at Starbucks. Since the Austin store filed to unionize, for example, about half of the workers there have left. The turnover at that location is always high since many of its workers are young college students, who typically graduate and find higher-paying jobs. The food service industry is also notoriously transient: People don’t usually stay at any given job for long.
That’s why members of the national union, Starbucks Workers United, say the company is making a difficult situation worse. They accuse the company of firing workers who were outspoken for the union and forcing others to quit with unfair scheduling. Workers in Austin say the company is no longer hiring back students returning from summer break, who used to be given priority. The idea, workers say, is to dilute the union effort with new employees, who may not be as supportive or aware of the union, making it even harder to organize and establish a contract.
“It is taking longer than we would like, longer than we had hoped, and longer than it logically and decently should,” Lillian Allen, a barista at that Austin Starbucks, told Recode. “But to expect logic and decency from a large corporation in America is an act of folly.”
@sbworkersunited When Starbucks cancels your bargaining session last minute #starbucks #littlermendelson #bargaining #uniontok #collectivebargaining
♬ original sound - SBWorkersUnited
The Starbucks store in Austin isn’t the only one facing bargaining delays. Of the more than 220 locations nationwide that have voted to unionize since December, only three have made it to the bargaining table to discuss a contract with Starbucks.
Many of those who fought to unionize these Starbucks stores have already left the company. Since Recode reported on the union movement in April, a number of the workers featured in that article are no longer working at Starbucks. One got a job as a teacher; one says she was fired for union organizing, although the official reason was tardiness; and another left because she couldn’t take how the company was treating workers.
Starbucks spokesperson Reggie Borges told Recode that claims of delay tactics are false. “From the beginning, we have been clear that we will respect the process and bargain in good faith with the stores that vote for union representation,” he said. Borges added that, as of August 1, the company has “engaged or responded to demands to bargain with a majority of the stores and are working through additional requests.”
Workers have said that the company’s responses, when they’ve gotten them, have been vague and noncommittal. Last week, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal body that oversees union elections, issued a complaint against Starbucks for “failing and refusing to bargain collectively and in good faith” with workers at its Roastery in Seattle. A complaint means that the NLRB investigated the union charge and found merit. After the NLRB issued a separate formal complaint in April, it took the company to federal court, where a judge last week ordered Starbucks to reinstate union workers in Tennessee the company had fired in retaliation for organizing.
Starbucks Workers United has also filed an unfair labor practice charge against Starbucks on behalf of stores nationally, saying the company has failed to bargain. The NLRB is currently investigating. In a related letter, the union has asked the company to select dates and times between August 22 and September 23 to begin bargaining. After being contacted by Recode about the bargaining delays, Starbucks responded to the union but failed to provide a date to meet.
So far, the union has filed a total of nearly 300 unfair labor practice charges against Starbucks, and the NLRB has issued more than 20 complaints. These processes, however, are time-consuming and the NLRB’s remedies are hard to enforce, so the union is trying a lot of other tactics to get Starbucks to bargain and eventually agree on a contract.
According to some labor experts, union contract bargaining should only take about a year. But it’s now apparent that, at the current pace, negotiations between Starbucks and its unionized employees could take much longer.
“It’s certainly in the interest of the employees and the union to start bargaining as soon as possible,” said Risa Lieberwitz, a labor law professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and academic director of its Worker Institute. “Unfortunately, where there’s a company that’s been hostile to unionization, as Starbucks has been, it’s pretty common to see some delays before bargaining gets started.”
The options workers can pursue to speed up the process are limited. The NLRB can rule that a company is not bargaining in good faith and order it to do so. However, if Starbucks doesn’t comply, there’s little the NLRB can do to enforce that decision other than taking the company to federal court — a process that’s even more time-consuming.
Because of these challenges, Starbucks union workers plan to up the ante. Since January, the Starbucks Workers United has already held about 80 strikes, with 55 of those happening this summer, the union told Recode. That means about a third of all unionized Starbucks have gone on strike. Though many of these strikes were over things like unfair firings and closing union stores, union workers say that future strikes will be over bargaining and contracts, citing a long list of Starbucks delay tactics, ranging from misdirection to old-fashioned taking their sweet time. The company, again, has denied doing so.
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Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
And while the journey to a contract is arduous, Starbucks workers are well aware of the uphill battle they face and that they may not be at the company long enough to benefit from a union contract. But, they say, the fight has never been just about them.
“We’re not just fighting for the baristas who are here now,” Allen said. “We’re fighting for all the baristas who will come after because we want this to be as good of a place to work as we know it can be.”
Starbucks is delaying union bargaining
It can be difficult to decipher who is exactly at fault for delaying bargaining, since the Starbucks union’s account of the process so far and that of the company are at odds with each other. What experts say, however, is that the union has every reason to want to bargain while Starbucks has every reason not to.
“They’re grasping at straws. They’re trying every delay tactic that they can think of,” Rebecca Givan, associate professor at Rutgers University’s labor school, said of Starbucks. “You’re not bargaining in good faith if you’re not bargaining.”
Representatives from the three stores that have begun bargaining, two in the Buffalo area and one in Mesa, Arizona, say that Starbucks is applying delay tactics there as well.
Michelle Eisen, a barista at the first unionized Starbucks in Buffalo and a member of the Starbucks Workers United national bargaining team, said the company has met to bargain about a half dozen times since their first meeting in January, but the two parties have made little progress. The initial bargaining session was largely wasted, Eisen said, as the company presented a list of ground rules she felt were meant to kill time, including “no screaming” and “no slamming hands on the table.” The meetings are held on zoom.
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Ross D. Franklin/AP
In general, Eisen said, the company will hear a union proposal, not really engage with it, and then request time to discuss it on their own before punting negotiations to the next meeting. Since this has happened over and over, she said, the delays have become excessive. She added that while the union has presented more than 10 proposals, the company has not engaged those seriously and hasn’t come to a tentative agreement — a building block for creating a contract — on any of them.
“You’re supposed to present these proposals, and then there’s a back and forth and the company says, ‘Okay, we like this part of this proposal,’” Eisen said. “None of that happened.”
Meanwhile, Starbucks has only made one proposal: a manager’s bill of rights. Eisen said the proposal was pretty much a repeat of the company’s handbook; Starbucks declined to comment on the specifics of the negotiations.
Starbucks is now trying to make bargaining sessions happen in person, rather than the agreed-upon virtual meetings, which can be difficult for a national bargaining committee of workers located all over the US.
The company is also contesting an election near Kansas City that the union won in April. Starbucks alleged that the region’s NLRB office colluded with the union to allow some workers to vote in person during a mail-in ballot election. In response, the company asked the NLRB to make all pending and future election votes in person.
Labor experts say in-person elections could favor the company: They can be more intimidating for workers, since the employer can supervise who is and isn’t voting, and are less convenient for workers, who have to travel to polling places and take time off to vote. Voting in person also gives companies more time to hold captive audience meetings, mandatory sessions during which the company tries to dissuade workers from joining the union. NLRB rules state that these meetings must cease 24 hours before ballots are mailed out — usually a few weeks prior to the election — rather than 24 hours before an in-person election.
Workers say this call for in-person voting is just one more delay tactic by Starbucks to push off a union contract.
The union is fighting back
Starbucks Workers United says it will continue filing unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB, but with an updated approach. Instead of mostly filing for things like retaliation, the union will increasingly target the company’s failure to bargain.
To counter the high turnover at Starbucks stores, which could weaken their shot at a contract, a number of workers told Recode about a concerted effort to bring new workers into the union fold.
@sbworkersunited Hey Howie! Dont be ✨toxic✨ union busting is below Starbucks. #starbucks #howardschultz #unionstrong #shameonstarbucks #dobetterstarbucks
♬ Toxic - Britney Spears
Brandi Alduk, a barista at a Queens location, wants to make Starbucks a better place to work, whether or not she stays there after she graduates from college in December. That’s why Alduk and her coworkers are distributing the work involved in bringing new employees up to speed on the union. She is a point person for what’s happening nationally while a coworker, who she says is more social and outgoing, reaches out to new hires. Those people, in turn, tell the next people, in order to keep any individual worker from burning out.
Alduk also says it’s not hard to convince new people that Starbucks needs a union contract.
“There’s new hires who’ve been there maybe three months, and they’re already feeling the wear and tear of the job,” she said. “They come and say something to me, and then I’m like, ‘Yeah, girl, imagine doing it for three years.’”
One strategy to make Starbucks bargain is attacking the company where it hurts: their reputation and, by extension, their bottom line. After turning to TikTok to get other Starbucks workers to vote yes on the union, union members are creating viral videos calling out Starbucks for failing to bargain. They’ve also teamed with progressive lawmakers like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to magnify their message
Workers have previously highlighted a whole host of other union-busting tactics. In May, the company falsely suggested that union workers couldn’t take part in increases to pay and benefits that Starbucks was rolling out company-wide. Labor experts told Recode that such a move amounted to illegally using the company’s economic power to influence whether workers join a union or to discriminate against those who do.
Baristas across the country have also said that Starbucks is systematically firing workers who support the union, but saying the firings were for other infractions.
The most notable example of this happened when Starbucks fired the so-called Memphis Seven — five of whom were union committee leaders, while the other two were pro-union — allegedly for allowing a TV crew to interview them in their store. The NLRB brought the case to federal court, where a judge found that the company “discriminatorily applied its policies to the Memphis Seven when terminating them.”
By broadcasting these infractions, the union hopes to get a company that prides itself on being progressive — a reputation that stands to attract progressive customers — to stick to its self-professed values and cooperate with the union. If it doesn’t, it could lose customers. The company’s shareholders have said as much and have been pressuring the company to stop union busting.
As goes Starbucks, so goes the nation
What’s happening at Starbucks connects to a larger conversation about unions in the US. One of the big criticisms of US labor law is that it makes it immensely difficult to organize a union, and even harder to get a contract. That’s one of the reasons union membership has been declining nationwide for decades.
@sbworkersunited We love our customers, especially when they don’t cross the picket line!!! #strike #picketline #starbuckscustomer #starbucks #union
♬ Super Freaky Girl - Nicki Minaj
The latest rush of unionizing at unlikely places like Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, and Trader Joe’s, however, is giving the union movement hope. In the first half of this year, union filing petitions were up nearly 60 percent over last year, according to the NLRB.
In general, Americans approve of unions more than at any time since 1965, according to Gallup. Most recently, a survey by career services site Jobcase of non-union skilled and hourly workers found that 70 percent would join a union at their current job, and about 40 percent said they’re more likely to do so than they were a few years ago.
But just because people want unions doesn’t mean they’ll happen. Starbucks workers will likely have to raise the stakes to get a contract.
The union could call for boycotts. They could also organize more strikes — what Cornell’s Lieberwitz calls the union’s “most powerful economic weapon.” If baristas at stores around the country refuse to work, the company will start losing money very quickly. Work stoppages will also bring greater awareness of the reasons the union is striking in the first place. If Starbucks continues to delay, we will likely see a lot more of them.
For now, even former Starbucks employees say they’re committed to seeing the fight through to the end.
Workers like Reese Mercado, a barista who left their position at a Brooklyn Starbucks earlier this month to work at a charter school, are certain they will be able to get the company to collectively bargain.
“We will make Starbucks give them a contract,” Mercado said. “We’re not going to keep allowing them to drag their feet in hopes that we’ll give up. We’re not going to allow that to happen.”