The Millhouse Café has spent years as an unofficial meeting room for Bellwater's council members and reporters. This week, the baristas who pour their coffee voted to unionize, saying the shop's civic prestige has not translated into pay that keeps pace with downtown rents.
Baristas at The Millhouse Café voted 11-3 this week to unionize, making the Vale Avenue coffee shop one of the first downtown small businesses in Bellwater to organize its front-line staff. The vote, certified Wednesday, covers fourteen part-time and full-time baristas and shift leads; one ballot was left blank.
The new bargaining unit will affiliate with the Wentworth Service Employees Union, Local 219, which represents hospitality and retail workers across the county. Organizers said the drive began quietly nearly five months ago, after a round of schedule changes cut some baristas’ guaranteed weekly hours from thirty to twenty-two.
A café that doubles as a City Hall annex
The Millhouse Café has long been an unofficial extension of Bellwater’s civic life, a place where council members, reporters and lobbyists linger over coffee between meetings at City Hall two blocks away. Wren Castellano, a barista who has worked the counter for three years and helped lead the organizing committee, said that reputation cuts both ways.
“We pour coffee for half the people who run this city, and most of them don’t know our names,” Castellano said. “It’s not that anybody’s cruel about it. It’s just that nobody thinks about what it costs to make their oat milk latte until we start talking about union cards.”
Nate Aubuchon, a shift lead who has worked at the café for six years, said the push gained urgency after rents near Vale Avenue climbed faster than wages. “I make two dollars more an hour than I did when I started, and my rent has gone up by more than three hundred a month,” Aubuchon said. “You can’t budget your way out of that gap. You have to bargain your way out of it.”
People assume downtown is doing great because the storefronts are full again. What they don’t see is that a lot of us who work those storefronts can’t afford to live anywhere near them anymore.
Wren Castellano, barista and organizing committee member
Owner says he was caught off guard
Café owner Harlan Voss, who bought the business from its founding family a decade ago, said he did not see the organizing drive coming and has mixed feelings about it. “I like to think I’ve been fair,” Voss said. “I also understand that liking to think something doesn’t mean it’s true for everybody on my staff, and I have to sit with that.”
Voss said he has not decided whether to challenge the certified vote and is consulting with a labor attorney about his options, though he stopped short of saying he would contest the result. He pointed to the café’s already thin margins, citing rising costs for milk, lease renewal terms on Vale Avenue and the minimum-wage increases the city has phased in over the past several years.
“I’m not the enemy here, whatever people want to believe,” Voss said. “If bargaining gets us to a schedule and pay structure that keeps good people behind the counter for years instead of months, that’s not a bad outcome for the business either. I just need the math to work.”
Part of a broader downtown affordability strain
Theresa Nakamura, executive director of the Bellwater Chamber of Commerce, said she has heard similar frustration from workers at other Vale Avenue businesses, even where no organizing drive has taken hold. “Downtown’s comeback has been good for owners and, frankly, good for the city’s tax base,” Nakamura said. “But if the people staffing that comeback can’t afford to live within twenty minutes of it, that’s a problem the whole business district needs to take seriously, not just one café.”
She noted the tension echoes concerns raised elsewhere in the city over who benefits from its economic revival, including a Foundry Row lawsuit over an apartment developer’s affordable-housing commitments. “Different neighborhoods, same underlying question,” Nakamura said. “Can the people doing the actual work still afford to be here in five years?”
Not every barista at the café supported unionizing. Two of the three “no” votes came from part-time staff who said they worried a union contract could reduce the scheduling flexibility they rely on around class schedules at Kincaid University. One, who asked not to be named because she still works alongside colleagues who organized the drive, said she backed her coworkers’ right to vote but was unconvinced organizing was the right tool for a fourteen-person staff.
- Guaranteed minimum weekly hours for staff scheduled more than one year
- A grievance process for schedule and discipline disputes
- Wage increases tied to the café’s annual revenue rather than a flat schedule
Those three items, according to Castellano and Aubuchon, will anchor the union’s opening proposal when bargaining begins, likely within the next month. Local 219 representative Diane Kessner, who has guided the organizing committee since the drive became public, said she expects a first contract to take the better part of a year to negotiate, based on similar campaigns her local has run at other small hospitality businesses in the region.
“Small businesses are harder to organize than big chains in some ways and easier in others,” Kessner said. “Harder because there’s less money to work with. Easier because everybody actually knows each other, and that makes for a different kind of bargaining table.” Voss said he intends to keep the café open and fully staffed throughout negotiations, adding that he has “no plans to make anyone’s coffee break weird” over how they voted.