Inspired by the wave of organizing that burst into public view with the unionizing of stores in Buffalo, New York, in 2021, Potter called up the Starbucks Workers United campaign and began to mobilize their Louisville colleagues. In May, the store’s employees became the first certified Starbucks union in Kentucky.

Potter is one of the many young people joining a wave of unionization efforts in food service. In the last year, 240 Starbucks stores have unionized. Since then, workers have voted to unionize at Chipotle, Trader Joe’s, and even at the cafeterias that fuel tech giants like Google.

“I think people have been angry for a long time, but before . . . workers would just go with it,” Potter said. “I think part of it is COVID—people were looking around at structures that exist thinking, ‘It could be better.’”

Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, said young people have played a key role in the current wave of service industry unionization. “This sector has not historically been highly unionized,” Wong told Civil Eats. “But in the last year or so, there has been significant growth in the organizing at Starbucks and in fast food restaurants, and many of these campaigns have been led by young workers.”

Like Potter, Wong sees the pandemic as a catalyst. “All of these so-called essential workers are in the types of jobs where you have to show up, be in front of customers, and many of the workers were concerned that they were in environments that were unsafe, with high rates of infection,” Wong said. “So, in spite of the fact they are called essential workers, they were being treated like anything but.”

In 2021, just over 10 percent of workers in the U.S. belonged to unions, compared to 20 percent in 1983. Wong said that while there used to be more union representation in the hospitality and restaurant industries in major cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, it declined in part because of the expansion of fast food service, which offers low wages and few benefits.