In late November, after a landmark year in food service organizing invigorated by the efforts of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), workers at two Davis, California locations of Peet’s Coffee & Tea announced that they were filing for union election. They made their campaign public after months of organizing in close collaboration with Tyler Keeling, a Starbucks worker who helped lead a successful union drive at his location, which is now represented by SBWU.

The Davis Peet’s campaign brought together organizers working at the two leaders of first-wave coffee culture in the United States, Peet’s and Starbucks. It also intersects with another exciting recent development in the labor movement: worker organizing in the University of California (UC) system. Peet’s workers Schroedter Kinman, Molly Smith, and Trinity Salazar told Jacobin that they are excited to be a part of the larger coffee organizing movement, and to have the support of graduate workers and postdocs at UC Davis, who entered the winter quarter hot off the largest academic strike in United States history.

During the six-week-long cross-unit academic worker strike, UC Davis picketers often chanted, “Get up, get down, Davis is a union town.” Smith said that announcing their campaign amid the strike at UC Davis made Peet’s workers “feel less alone.” Smith, Salazar, and Kinman joined the picket line, where they got on the microphone to share their effort with an enthusiastic audience. Salazar, a student, remarked that “to hear that grad students, who grade my papers, are there for me is just community and solidarity.”