Daily News | Unions are brewing at coffee shops and restaurants. Will they change Philly’s food scene?
Before she started at Starbucks, Reichman Lemieux worked at McDonald’s. Both experiences galvanized her belief that service-industry workers need a more powerful advocate. “I’m a firm believer that corporations will only ever be self-interested and if you want any real protections against that, you need to have some sort of legal and official bargaining chip,” she said. “A union gives that.”
“We want the business to succeed,” Zastempowski said, adding that the union wasn’t formed in response to anything negative. Rather, it echoed Korshak’s social justice rhetoric, one of the primary reasons many employees wanted to work there. “As a small, minority-owned company, we understand the importance of being heard,” Nesbit wrote. “Good Karma Cafe respects and supports our employees and their decision to form a union. We look forward to collaboratively working together.”