"Our employers" probably should read "the owners of the business who have heavily invested in making their businesses one of the best coffee shops in the state". The reality of the situation is that you have 4 locations, 3 in high rent districts and your labor costs go up and the labor acts as though they deserve to have a right to dictate how the business is operated, you're going to have a tough time surviving. It sounds as though they'll likely continue roasting and distributing their product.Alec Hershman, 33, has worked at the Main Street location for three years and said he was working to negotiate a new contract with the shop through the The Washtenaw Area Coffee Workers Association union for six months. He said there has not been progress.
“We just found out yesterday our employers are laying us off,” Hershman said. “Unfortunately, staffing was growing tighter and tighter and they reduced the number of people who would cover a shift. We’ve all been exhausted and overworked."
A message seeking comment was left for the managers at Mighty Good Coffee.
“We had to file our first unfair labor practice against the company last week," Hershman said. “Then this week, we just got notice from their attorney that they are too stressed out to continue negotiating with us and they are closing all the stores.”
The first impacted cafe will be the Main Street location. Employees there will be laid off Friday, Hershman added. The location on South University will dissolve on May 5, he said. Mighty Good Coffee has other locations in Arbor Hills on Washtenaw Avenue, and inside the Jefferson Market.
I would be remiss not to point out the dishonest SJW nonsense in the article:
Paraphrased, "even though her lower wage had NOTHING to do with her race, the owners are still required to pay this person more money just because she is black."“There was a barista of color who was about the same tenure as I am, about three years into the company, who was paid the least amount of any of the baristas of that tenure,” Hershman said. “When she found out, she brought that to the attention of management and did not get a satisfactory resolution. It didn’t seem to us to be a case of malicious racism (or) intention to discriminate, but there’s absolute obstinance about addressing the issue or talking about it in a productive, progressive way.
Or perhaps being a barista is an inherently disproportionate white occupation. At least in Ann Arbor, I can't really think of ANY coffee shop that I recall seeing someone other than white working at. Everything is not about race.“They tried to get us to have mandatory meetings in which we would sign confidentiality agreements and talk about ‘repairing our company,’ which at that point was an all white company and it really just rubbed a lot of us the wrong way. We felt like whiteness was being constructed in our workplace in this unhealthy way and we needed to resist it."
