There Is No Such Thing as an 'Unskilled’ Coffee Job

Baristas connect the rest of the coffee industry to the customer. They aren’t just responsible for producing large volumes of coffee beverages, consistently and at speed, using considerable dexterity and honed skill to do so. They’re also educators and communicators, the most visible face of the industry, and can even play the role of confessor or therapist to their regulars.

And yet, to much of society, making and serving coffee is still considered an unskilled job. A barista is just someone who studied philosophy and couldn’t get a real job after college, or a teenager biding their time until the rest of their life begins. Today, baristas are among the lowest-paid and most demeaned professionals in the coffee industry. 

The concept of baristas as fundamentally unskilled is often used as an anti-union talking point, and it’s a stereotype that is helpfully laundered through the media and popular culture. Barista jobs in TV and movies are often looked down upon, or treated as a pathway to something better. In “Friends”, for example, Rachel’s job as a cafe waitress is always viewed as something she puts up with until she can leave for a “real” career.

The view that such jobs are easy or unserious isn’t harmless. The rhetoric around “unskilled” coffee jobs—including baristas, but also coffee pickers, production workers, and the other unsung workers who keep the industry moving—allows employers and the industry at large to suppress wages and resist any shift in power away from those at the top.

Mental Force vs Muscular Force

The binary concept of “skilled” and “unskilled” work goes back a long time, to the artisans and serfs of pre-industrial Europe. In the United States, it was officially codified by Alba Edwards’ occupational classification system for the 1910 census.

This system divided workers into two broad categories: those whose work required “mental force”—such as business owners and managers, professionals like architects and doctors, and public officials—and those whose jobs required “muscular force”. The latter were further divided into “skilled” (foremen and specialised tradespeople, such as blacksmiths), “semi-skilled” (apprentices and machine operators), and “unskilled” (labourers and servants).

The unskilled role, Edwards wrote, “requires no special training, judgment, or manual dexterity, but supplies mainly muscular strength for the performance of coarse, heavy work”. At the time, as Amanda Silver, Sarah Kalloch, and Zeynep Ton note in a 2021 article on the concept, “The majority of working people occupied the ‘unskilled’ group’”.

The authors go on to write that, “In the 21st century, ‘low-skill’ and ‘unskilled’ remained common terms. In 2020, the Social Security [Administration] defined ‘unskilled work’ as ‘work which needs little or no judgment to do simple duties that can be learned on the job in a short period of time.’”

The connection between these understandings of “unskilled” work and baristas can sometimes be explicit. In 2017, the U.K. government pitched what it dubbed the “barista visa”, a short-term visa that would allow European workers to live in the country for two years in order to stem the outflow of hospitality workers following the Brexit vote. “For the very low-skilled we’ve recommended what you’ve called the barista visa, which is to allow young people to come for two years, no extensions, learn the language, have some fun, go home”, Sir Andrew Green, the chair of the Migration Watch UK think tank, told the BBC.

The barista visa never happened—even the Financial Times thought it was a bad idea—but the cute nickname underlines the prevailing view of baristas among much of society.

‘An Expendable Workforce’

That dismissive perception is definitely how the majority of the general public views baristas. In a 2020 poll by the U.K.’s National Centre for Social Research, just 36% of respondents considered barista to be a skilled role. This is despite the fact that the majority of people almost certainly don’t know the scope of what a barista actually does, let alone how much skill and practice go into something as fleeting as the rosetta atop the latte that they post to Instagram.

The public is also not shy about voicing their disdain. The comments section on pretty much any news story covering barista unionisation is rife with demeaning critique. To test it, I Googled “barista union” and chose a random Washington Post article about the recent Compass Coffee unionisation drive. Even there, on a mainstream news outlet’s comment section, there was vitriol: “You want a share of the profits for pouring flavored water?! Open your own dang shop”, one commenter wrote. “What’s the point of this? Is it to take basically un or low skilled jobs and make them living waged?” wrote another.

Of course, internet commenters are a very specific (unhinged) subset of the general public, but this view of baristas goes beyond the digital commons, and is often parroted by politicians and talking heads. Senator Ted Cruz has referred to baristas as “slackers” who should “get off the bong” (?), while the conservative talk radio host Jason Rantz recently bemoaned “low-skilled baristas” with “starter jobs” where “you’re meant to earn some valuable skills and then either work to the next rung on the ladder within the company, or grow somewhere else”.

Such a pervasively negative view of frontline coffee workers has to come from somewhere. My hunch is that it’s a combination of the widespread contempt for service workers, combined with the more specific view of baristas as pretentious hipsters catering to pampered Millennials. 

It is a dichotomy that the coffee industry exacerbates, whether intentionally or not. On the one hand, baristas are lauded—just look at the status of the World Barista Championship, and the pseudo-celebrity careers it has launched. But on the other hand, baristas are often exploited, with wages and benefits still too low across the board. The average barista makes $15.25 per hour in the U.S., while in the U.K. they make an average starting salary of just £19,000.

In a 2018 article for VICE, Gowri Chandra explored the difficulties of being a career barista in an industry that doesn’t value the position. “It’s probably not that surprising that baristas can be viewed—from [an] industry perspective—as an expendable workforce”, Chandra wrote. “It’s a shitty ubiquity of the service industry, which is often burn and churn”.

The piece also looked at a curious tension: Even as specialty coffee became more popular and widespread, and baristas became more respected by certain subsets of the public—we want our coffee well-made, after all—their overall wages and position have remained stagnant.

“We Americans worship at the altar of craft coffee, reveling in its complexity and revering its art form”, Chandra wrote. “But somehow, we’ve managed to commodify the very people who make it: The baristas. Something is not adding up here. If we believe in the artistry of baristas—and supposedly, we do—why are we treating them as unskilled, expendable, low wage labor?”

High-Skill, High-Stress

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the concept of “unskilled” work for what it is: a marketing ploy. As the virus spread and those who could hunkered down at home, frontline workers were rebranded. Those who cooked food and made coffee and looked after the elderly were no longer “unskilled”, they were “essential”. As a satirical headline in McSweeney’s put it: “Low-Skilled, Easily Replaceable Employees Must Return to Work Immediately, Otherwise Our Society Will Collapse”.

Coffee workers responded by unionising. The pandemic was cited as “a catalyst” by organisers at the first Starbucks location to file for unionisation in Buffalo, New York. Along with hazard pay, baristas sought protection from the virus and from ever-more-abusive customers.

Other coffee workers used a different form of collective action for similar reasons. In 2020, workers at Heine Brothers’ Coffee in Louisville, Kentucky, staged a wildcat strike to demand better protections as they continued to work through the early stages of the pandemic. Several locations had to shut down, and the strike ended with the baristas gaining safety protocols and extra hazard pay—but the company’s management also stepped in to try to keep some locations open. It didn’t go well.

“Being a Barista is a high-skill, often high-stress job, especially with a drive thru,” worker Evelia Jones told the Real News Network. When the company’s owner, Mike Mays, picked up some shifts covering the drive-thru during the stoppage, Jones said he “was freaking out” and had to leave early. “So if it’s so ‘low-skill’ of a job that Heine Brothers’ only sees it worth $8 an hour, how could the whole CEO not even hang for one shift?”

Two years later, Heine Brothers’ workers announced their intention to unionise with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Despite pushback and allegations of union-busting, workers eventually voted in favour of unionising, and in 2023 ratified their first contract with the company. The four-year contract included a minimum wage hike and automatic pay rises, as well as more paid time off and paid holidays. The contract “sets an example for other workers about how much they can raise standards when they come together”, according to Alexis Hardesty, an organiser with SEIU.

The myth of the unskilled worker has often been used as an anti-union talking point, attempting to divide workers and create animosity between those deemed “skilled” and their co-workers. “Class-based propaganda has been especially persuasive with respect to white-collar personnel”, wrote the George Washington University professor Charles B. Craver in a 2005 paper. “As the U.S. has been transformed from a production economy into a white-collar, service society, corporate leaders have subtly suggested to lower level management workers that they have more in common with their highly paid superiors than they do with their blue-collar compatriots”.

The recent wave of coffee unionising has shown how baristas and other undervalued workers in the industry can work together to fight for better wages and working conditions. It also, and this is important, scares the shit out of industry leaders. Just witness Howard Schultz’ meltdown in the face of gentle prodding from Senator Bernie Sanders during testimony the former Starbucks CEO gave regarding his company’s alleged union-busting.

Still Undervalued

I was a barista, off and on, for the better part of a decade. I enjoyed the work, but even if I had wanted to, there was no way to make it a career—the pay was just too low. And yet, it was one of the most difficult jobs I’ve ever had. There is so much skill needed to consistently make a long list of complicated drinks, while also interacting with a stream of customers, all of whom have different needs, for many hours in a row.

It’s the same in many other related service industries, of course. As anyone who has ever worked at a fast-food restaurant—or in retail, or in any other sector reliant on “unskilled” labour—will tell you, the wages and benefits don’t match the job’s actual difficulty. 

Today, frontline coffee work is still undervalued (unless you’re in Italy, where it’s generally considered a good career). The understanding is always that baristas will move on, working up to management; into another part of the coffee industry, like roasting (which is what I did); or onwards to a better-paid career. In fact, that assumption probably helps to keep wages low, as companies rely on the entry-level perception—and constant staff turnover—to resist giving raises.

Baristas, along with farmworkers, coffee pickers, sorters, warehouse workers, production roasters, kitchen staff, and numerous other roles, are the truly essential members of the industry. Without them, no coffee gets harvested, processed, shipped, roasted, packed, or brewed. All of those jobs are skilled, and they all deserve more respect—not to mention a bigger slice of the profits that the industry produces.