This Might Be the Most Egregious Union-Busting Campaign in the Country Right Now
Baristas at Compass Coffee in D.C. allege that management created fake accounts and hired the owners’ friends to dilute a union vote. But the workers say they aren’t giving up.
By Sebastian Ward, More Perfect Union
Union organizers at Compass Coffee, a Washington D.C.-based cafe, are persisting with their unionization efforts despite facing severe union-busting tactics from upper management. In recent weeks, the coffee chain has hired 124 new “employees” at seven locations in what organizers say is an illegal ploy to dilute the pro-union vote.
The wave of new employees includes friends and family of the CEO, corporate lobbyists, and other food industry executives. The union also says that the company has created fake social media accounts to sabotage the campaign. The election is scheduled for later this month.
“It’s a Dunning-Kruger level union busting," said Chris Buchanan, a worker at the Georgetown location and member of the organizing committee. "You’re so foolish that you don’t even realize the foolishness of the things that you’re doing."
Compass Coffee was co-founded in 2014 by college friends Michael Haft and Harrison Suarez, and now has 17 storefront locations across Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia. Workers began organizing for a union in March 2020 after management banned tips in favor of an hourly pay raise. The policy change was based on a customer survey that found customers tipped out of “obligation rather than genuine individual desire,” according to a memo sent out by Compass Coffee, but multiple workers told MPU that the two wage increases were negligible — one was 25 cents, and another by 50 cents — resulting in a reduction in take-home pay.
Three weeks after the company instituted its new policy, union organizers had majority support from the workers and were ready to alert management of their intent to unionize, until Compass shut down its storefronts due to COVID-induced financial issues. 150 out of 189 employees lost their jobs, including all of the original organizers, almost entirely snuffing out the movement.
But now, after a year and a half of biweekly meetings, shop visits, organizer trainings, and collaborating with workers at other cafes, the unionization movement at Compass is back in full force.
“There was a lot of agitation, but also just building relationships,” Penina Meier-Silverman, a worker at Compass’ Georgetown location and a member of the organizing committee, told MPU. “Figuring out that my cafe isn't the only one going through these problems, your cafe isn't the only one going through these problems — we're actually going through these problems together, and it's for the same reason.”
When Compass workers went public with their intent to unionize with Workers United on May 31, they were met with mass support from the local community and workers throughout DC. Many customers came in to congratulate them and offer support, Cameron Call told MPU.
Their key demands were reinstating tips, measures to address health and safety issues, and better benefits; Compass cut their 401(k) plans last fall. They also want a fully staffed maintenance team, especially since one of the two maintenance workers for the 17 stores was fired after signing the union letter. (That maintenance worker would have been in the unit and has filed an unfair labor practice over the dismissal, said Call, an organizing committee member and supervisor at the Franklin Park and McPherson locations.)
Despite the public support, the workers were met with silence from Compass management, who never sent them a formal correspondence.
Three days later, Compass bought a new storefront on 14th Street. It was the old location of a different coffee shop called Wydown, where workers were also unionizing under Workers United, and often partnered with the Compass Coffee workers.
Five days before the scheduled union election for Wydown workers, management shut down their two DC locations and fired more than 30 workers, an act the workers view as an obvious attempt to union-bust. When the old Wydown workers applied to work at the new Compass location, their applications were immediately rejected.
“It’s a smack in the face that they were unionizing, got shut down, and then when Compass immediately bought the cafe, they didn’t hire them,” Buchanan told MPU. “They showed up to our rallies our first week going public, so there has been a strong sense of solidarity between us. We show up for them, they show up for us.”
Ironically, Compass went on a hiring spree at the same time — and found some unusual candidates. On June 9th, a union organizer noticed that 84 new hires were added to the company’s HR platform under Max Deem, Compass Coffee’s Chief Revenue Officer. These new hires were added almost exclusively to the 7 locations petitioning to unionize.
Many of the new hires turned out to be plants installed by Compass management, the union claims: friends and family of Compass CEO Michael Haft including Haft’s wife and her sister, corporate executives, and government officials, all hired conspicuously close to the union votes.
One of the new hires was Cullen Gilchrist, the CEO of a ‘food and beverage business accelerator’ called Union Kitchen, which lists Compass Coffee as a company within its “ecosystem” of food businesses. Union Kitchen was charged with 26 NLRA violations and forced to pay $25,000 in back pay to five workers they illegally fired for union organizing.
Other new hires, organizers say, included several high-ranking employees at Union Kitchen and members of Haft’s family, as well as Uber lobbyist Liz “Tizzy” Brown. After organizers publicly named Brown, she told The Guardian that she attended one training and “never worked a shift beyond that initial training, and as soon as this all came to light I reached out to Compass and asked to be removed from their employment system.”
Compass also hired a number of new low-wage workers, some of whom do not speak English and were not provided employment resources in their primary language, the union said. According to multiple Compass union organizers, many of these workers were told to vote ‘no’ at the union election during training. They were also told that they would have to pay $1,000 if they unionized, organizers said. Although this was not disclosed to many of the hires, Compass employed them as 1099 contract workers. Union organizers believe it is likely they will be terminated after the election on July 16th.
To ensure these new hires fulfilled the working hour requirement to vote in the union election, four hours over the course of 13 weeks, Compass management retroactively changed the hours of the employees and assigned them to the new hires. Rebekah Edwards, an organizing committee member who works at the Rosslyn location, recalls finding this out:
“We noticed all the new employees [were] only being assigned to union cafes, and it's a very long list. So we started importing it into our own spreadsheet to do some research and then that night, I just had a feeling, so I thought, let me take a picture of my schedule,” Edwards said. “Then the next day, that same schedule that I worked changed.”
Compass Coffee didn’t respond to a list of questions from More Perfect Union sent before publication. But Michael Haft told The Guardian last month that “all employees of Compass Coffee at the locations that have been petitioned are eligible [to vote],” and implied the influx of hiring was related “often normal turnover and growth in the service industry.” He declined to comment on individual hires, citing privacy concerns, according to the Guardian.
Although the workers have filed charges with the NLRB for diluting the election pool, they say they’re unfazed by the maneuver — and ready to work alongside the new hires who aren’t plants.
“A lot of these folks are just vulnerable people that need work and they're being used and exploited in this situation,” Call told MPU. “And from my perspective, the more that we can get on board with this union, the merrier…let's bring them in and make them part of this, because even the folks that [Compass Coffee] are just going to use and discard in a couple weeks, I want to fight for them to keep their job because they deserve to have a job.”
Since the Compass workers went public, the company has begun cracking down on minor policy infractions, a tactic similar to that allegedly used by coffee giant Starbucks in its yearslong fight against unionization. People faced disciplinary infractions for wearing graphic t-shirts, discussing unionization with customers or amongst themselves, and even for “not smiling enough,” as one worker told MPU. The workers have filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB against Compass for illegal write-ups.
“It's like dictatorial disciplinary power,” said Meier-Silverman. “We don't have an HR department, so all of these decisions are at the hands of three men and there's no vehicle to challenge them or do anything about it.”
Another concern brought up by many of the workers is Compass Coffee’s attitude towards the local unhoused population. According to Meier-Silverman, who works at the Georgetown location, there was a storewide campaign to ban unhoused regulars, saying that “they smelled bad” or “had too many bags.”
Half of the workers at the Georgetown location were almost fired last October for using discount codes to give cheaper drinks to unhoused customers, and at one point, a barista was asked to kick out a paying customer who looked unhoused, organizers told MPU.
The union also believes that Compass Coffee management has created a fake X account impersonating the workers' union account. After replicating the profile picture and bio, the fake account began reposting verbatim the original content and art from the worker-run account. They also privately messaged people who engaged with their posts, asking them to retweet and follow to boost their visibility.
When members of the Organizing Committee confronted the account owners, they claimed to be upper management in support of the unionization effort. They provided proof by sending pictures from inside the Wydown location during renovations and from a meeting room in Ivy City, Compass Coffee's main administrative center. The workers requested that they stop or at least distinguish themselves as a separate group unaffiliated with the official account, but the account owners refused.
In response, the workers added "official" to their account name, but the fake account did the same. When the workers added watermarks with their logo, so did the fake account. The management-run account even altered edited art and graphics from the real page to display their username instead. Eventually, the fake account paid for the blue checkmark on X, presumably as a final bid to pose as the real account.
On June 21, Senator Bernie Sanders accidentally retweeted a post from the fake account, giving it significant exposure. Seizing this opportunity, the fake account posted its first piece of original content, a reference to the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian militant groups in southern Israel with a call to “divest from [Compass’s] genocidal zionist affiliations!” (Black Lives Matter Chicago posted a similar graphic in October that drew negative media attention.)
The fake account, which purchased Twitter verification, later deleted the post and reposted the Compass union's response word-for-word: a screenshot of their own inflammatory post and a statement saying it was not affiliated with the union account, a statement that the union had not yet been formed so it could formally poll its members, and a call for people to block and report the account.
Although all the organizers are perplexed by the goals of the fake account, Edwards surmises that they took inspiration from Starbucks suing Workers United last year over a social media post related to Palestine, saying it angered their customers and damaged their reputation.
“I think some people from upper management saw what happened with Starbucks and a union voicing support for Palestine, and Starbucks cracking down and being able to sue,” Edwards told MPU. “I think they said to themselves, ‘Let's just do that, but worse.’”
The ongoing effort to unionize at Compass Coffee is another example of the nationwide trend of baristas and coffee workers unionizing for a better workplace. Despite aggressive union-busting tactics, baristas around the country have seen substantial success — Starbucks Workers United have successfully organized more than 400 stores and is reportedly on the verge of reaching a collective bargaining framework — and Compass is looking to be next in line.
“It would be such a disservice to myself, to my coworkers, and to the other folks that are trying to fight for this union to give up 10 feet from the finish line,” Call told MPU. “I would much rather keep fighting to the bitter end if we have to, because at the end of the day, we deserve this union. We make the money for Compass Coffee. My coworkers deserve a good union with good benefits and reliable hours.
“This is the stuff that every worker should be having and we're so close at this point,” Call added. “We refuse to give up.”