Anodyne Workers Strike Saturday
Strikers cite stalled negotiations and alleged unfair labor practices by owners.
Anodyne union strike. Photo taken June 27, 2026 by Graham Kilmer.
Anodyne Coffee workers shut down cafes across Milwaukee on Saturday in response to stalled contract negotiations and alleged labor law violations by company owners.
Workers across Anodyne’s four properties walked out of work at 7 a.m. and picketed, calling on owners — a private equity-backed company called FairWave Holdings LLC — to stop making unilateral changes in the workplace and to return to the bargaining table to finish negotiating major items in the contract.
Employees at all four Anodyne locations — Milwaukee Public Market, Wauwatosa (7471 Harwood Ave.), Bay View (2920 S. Kinnickinnic Ave.) and the Walker’s Point roastery (224 W. Bruce St.) — organized last year with the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Union (MASH).
In June last year, they won a National Labor Relations Board-supervised election. By October, ownership, a private equity-backed company called FairWave Holdings LLC, had still not recognized the union and was appealing the results, asking the NLRB to toss the election out.
In April this year, the union said FairWave would still not bargain a contract with them. Instead, the company was cutting wages and workers’ hours, union members said.
Since then, contract negotiations have gotten underway, but FairWave refuses to finish negotiating a handful of “substantial issues,” MASH President Peter Rickman told Urban Milwaukee. Recently, the company began making changes to workplace operations without first negotiating the changes with the union.
“After a union is certified, an employer is prohibited from making unilateral changes that involve or impact mandatory subjects of bargaining, so they have broken the law,” Rickman said. MASH filed unfair labor practice charges against the company on Tuesday with the NLRB.
Saturday is regularly the busiest day of the week for Anodyne. When workers in Bay View shut down the cafe at 7 a.m., vendors and visitors were streaming into the neighborhood for the widely popular South Shore Farmers Market just a few blocks away. On any other Saturday, Anodyne would have been the nearest cup of coffee to the park.
“We wanted to send the strongest message that we could,” said Marie Freres, a barista at the Bay View cafe.
The message from workers is that Anodyne can’t violate labor law and make unilateral changes that affect their jobs and livelihoods without first negotiating with the union — at least not without facing consequences. The changes had affected workers’ job duties, schedules, tipping practices and staffing, Freres said.
“Everything that we proposed in our contract was kind of no longer relevant because they had made these changes to our work duties,” Freres said.
The company responded to the strike Saturday with a statement from CEO Justin Seamonds, who said all cafes would remain closed except for the Public Market, which would operate on reduced hours.
“With just one minute’s notice this morning, MASH informed Anodyne of its intention to strike. We are disappointed by the union’s actions, which came with virtually no notice and even though we have been in constant discussions with union leadership, including eight collective bargaining sessions to date where we were making meaningful progress towards an agreement,” Seamonds said. “We are left to believe that this action is related to the introduction of a new breakfast sandwich at our cafes.”
Rickman called Seamonds’ statement disingenuous. The company was moving from prepackaged sandwiches to handbuilt sandwiches, taking baristas out of their regularly scheduled jobs to make them and affecting their compensation, which is heavily reliant on tips, he said.
“The company’s grumbling about a strike is ironic and rich; they’re the ones who broke the law,” Rickman said. “They’re the ones who denied any entry by the union to address and resolve this. Anodyne workers owe FairWave nothing when it comes to fixing the problems that FairWave created.”
The union has enjoyed strong support from the local community, and members are used to FairWave’s anti-union tactics at this point, Freres said. “It’s been a long process, and they’ve just drawn it out and made it take as long as possible, every step of the way.”
At noon Saturday, Anodyne workers and other labor movement allies had stopped picketing the cafes and MASH offered FairWave an “unconditional return to work,” which meant workers would end the strike without any preconditions, like the signing of a contract or a pay raise.
“It turns out that you can’t run a coffee business with bosses sitting in the air-conditioned offices of a private equity fund in Kansas City; you need baristas to do that, and so we expect that they will accept the unconditional return to work to conclude their unfair labor practice strike today,” Rickman said.
FairWave is owned by a Missouri-based private equity firm called Great Range Capital. Anodyne is just one of a handful of local coffee brands FairWave owns and operates around the country.
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