Organizing Baristas in Halifax Cafes: Precarious Work and Gender and Class Identities in the Millennial Generation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2012–2015, baristas engaged in union drives at five cafes in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In a series of semi-structured interviews with participants in and supporters of these drives, it became clear that issues of gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity were critical in understanding why and how these union drives evolved: women and queer baristas experienced gender-based discrimination and marginalization at work; they were noted leaders in some of the drives and drew on activist networks to rally community support for the unionization effort. Finally, issues of gender and sexuality informed some of the baristas’ broader economic analysis. We argue that the barista union drive in Halifax illustrates a framework for understanding how gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation inform unjust experiences in precarious workplaces and strategies for confronting them. A gendered analysis of the barista union drives underscores the importance of organized labor’s outreach to young workers and, further, that engaging with workers with attention to intersectionality is an important organizational strategy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".