BP—Termination Fund

We are the former employees of Barista Parlor Germantown. On Wednesday, June 14th, 2023, 6 of 9 staff members were terminated without cause. The other 3 workers quit in solidarity. This is our story.

Starting Saturday, June 10th, 2023, store hours were cut, and from Sunday, June 11th, 2023 employees were also cut from the schedule inexplicably and with less than 24 hours notice. We reached out individually to management via Slack and text for explanations regarding the lost hours and purposeful understaffing of the store. We were met with silence.

The silent tension culminated until Tuesday, June 13th, 2023, when two workers were individually called by the Germantown General Manager. They were forewarned of big changes scheduled to happen in the next 24 hours, and were told that management was closing the store Wednesday and scheduling hour-long individual meetings with the entire staff. We intuited that most, if not all, of the staff would be terminated without cause. Rather than meet individually and risk being told separate bits of misinformation regarding the state of the store and the reasons for terminations, we decided to meet with management collectively.

On Tuesday evening, some of us met with Workers Dignity United. They assisted us in crafting an opening statement which would classify our meeting as concerted activity. We read this to the three members of management a bit before 9am Wednesday. Management tried to pressure us into meeting individually, but we held our ground and they eventually conceded.

We then waited for four hours to begin the meeting. They were on and off the phone, writing letters, cutting checks, but for most of those four hours management waited around, stalling. We periodically reached out to see if we could begin and were met with either silence or curt responses similar to “We’ll update you when we’re ready.”

A little before 1pm, management finally began the meeting. We were filmed by one of the management team. Again they asked us to meet individually; we collectively refused. Then they terminated the employment of 5 of 7 employees in attendance, stating that Tennessee is an At-Will state and that the reasons for their termination were written in their employee files. We asked to see the employee files but were denied since “they are Barista Parlor company property”. We later learned that denying us our files was against company policy. None but one of the terminated employees had any write-ups on their record. The two remaining employees in attendance resigned immediately. We were told that we would be paid for only two of the four hours in attendance, despite the meeting’s delay being entirely the fault of the managers. After receiving clarification regarding when we could expect the remainder of our missing wages dating back to December 2022, the meeting adjourned. One of the missing workers was terminated via email immediately after the meeting’s end; the other resigned on Friday, June 16th, 2023. We turned in our keys, received our final paychecks and resignation letters, and walked out of the doors of our workplace for the final time.

We are the former employees of Barista Parlor Germantown. Chloe Byrd, Zach Goforth, Leslie Hernandez, Lucas Hobbs, Cameron McClure, Lydia Miller, Meg Monsor, Katte Noel, and Robert Wood. We humbly ask for whatever you can provide to help us pay our bills during this frightening time. Our goal is $14,000, which we plan on splitting evenly between the 9 of us. If this goal is met, we anticipate receiving about $1,500 after the GoFundMe fees.

Thank you in advance for sharing our story and helping us how you can.