On Feb. 3, workers at Seven Stars Bakery, a Rhode Island cafe chain, ratified a new four-year contract that will increase wages and offer additional employee benefits. United Food and Commercial Workers Local Union 328 and a committee of employees represented Seven Stars workers in the 13 sessions of collective bargaining needed to achieve the contract.
This comes just over a month since workers at Seven Stars Bakery voted to authorize a strike — which never occurred — in late December after wage negotiations with company ownership stalled.
Seven Stars Bakery CEO JJ Smith did not respond to several requests for comment.
“Our main focus for the new contract was wages and hours of work,” said Sarah Mello, a union steward at the cafe’s Point Street location who sat on the bargaining committee.
The agreement guarantees a raise for all current employees and cuts the one-year probationary period, during which new hires are paid less, to nine months, Mello said. The contract also establishes a clearer path from part-time to full-time status, raises pay on certain holidays to 1.5 times the normal rate and supplements vacation pay to compensate for the lost tips that employees would typically earn on regular shifts, she added.
Tim Melia, president of UFCW Local Union 328, told The Herald that he believes “workers overwhelmingly ratified the contract.”
Seven Stars Bakery employees first unionized in 2022, and the company voluntarily recognized the union, Mello said. Workers ratified their first contract in January 2023, and the union began negotiating this new agreement in September ahead of the existing contract’s expiration at the end of 2025, she added.
“We had a lot of things that we wanted,” Mello said, and “the company had a lot of things that they wanted, and it did take a while to come to an agreement on, mostly, the wages.”
Mello said that by January, workers were operating without a contract and had voted to authorize a strike, which “helped to put pressure on the company and also really engaged workers.”
After the strike authorization, the company “decided that they had to come up with a better economic package for these workers,” Melia said. “They did that because they knew if they didn’t, it was going to obviously lead to a work stoppage.”
Still, Mello emphasized that a strike was always a “last resort … because if we went on strike, people would be getting paid significantly less, and that’s a big risk to take.”
The agreed-upon contract runs for four years — one year longer than workers initially sought — but Mello said the tradeoff was worth it given the other gains. “The fact that we did get (the probationary period) down at all is a pretty big win,” she said, “and I think it sets us up for the future.”
She credited community support as a major factor in ratifying the contract, saying that “we had people calling and emailing the CEO, which I think really, really helped us.”
Melia added that patrons on Yelp commented that they would boycott the bakery if workers went on strike. “The pressure that was put on by the general public definitely helped in getting the company to move up their position,” he said.
Seven Stars customer Brigid Ryan said she comes to the bakery for its “open and welcoming atmosphere” and enjoys their hot chocolate.
While Ryan was not familiar with the recent negotiations, she noted that she wouldn’t patronize a business where employees are striking. “I think it is one of the few tools that people have to empower themselves against big corporations,” she added.
If “the employees are happy and the company met with the employees and came up with a compromise … I would be more likely to come here,” she said.
Laila Posner is a senior staff writer covering business and development.
