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Three Brothers Coffee makes the push to become one of the first unionized shops in Tennessee

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Courtesy of Paige Mccay
On March 4, Three Brothers Coffee employees delivered a letter of intent to unionize to their management.
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A coffee shop on West End Avenue near Vanderbilt University is making a bid to unionize. If successful, Three Brothers Coffee would be one of the first unionized coffee shops in the state.

The cost of living in Nashville is only getting more expensive. Workers at Three Brothers Coffee say that’s one of many reasons that they want to form a union — to negotiate benefits like higher wages, insurance or paid time off.

“We chat about things like our livelihood,” says Anfernee Welch, a worker at Three Brothers, “and seeing how fragile it is to work on a basic wage, or a fluctuating wage, and depending on tips. That was the start of the conversation.”

On Friday, Welch and other employees delivered a letter of intent to their management.

“We want to make it a place where we feel a bit more secure in our lives, and not having to jump from shop to shop,” Welch says. “So yeah, I think pretty much all of us cried.”

Welch says they’re hopeful that the owner will voluntarily recognize the union. If not, he says they have enough workers to make the push.

Paige Pfleger, Criminal Justice Reporter

Paige Pfleger covers criminal justice for WPLN News. She has investigated guns and juvenile justice as a fellow with ProPublica's Local Reporting Network, and her investigation into domestic violence and firearms dispossession won a regional Edward R. Murrow award and was a finalist for an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and a Livingston Award. She previously covered criminal justice and addiction in Ohio and was named the state's reporter of the year by the Associated Press. Her work has appeared nationally on NPR, The Washington Post, Marketplace, and PRI's The World, and she has worked in the newsrooms of The Tennessean, Michigan Radio, WHYY, Vox and NPR headquarters in DC.

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