Serenity Bartender's United

To our community,

We are workers from a local coffee shop located in Tallahassee, FL.

On 9/3/22, we officially went on strike, not opening the business doors until our list of demands was met.

Our bartenders are paid $6.98 hourly, the minimum servers' wage in Florida. We rely on tips from the community, which is asking a lot due to the high price of our drinks. But that's the thing; we rely on those tips to support our needs. Groceries, utilities, medical expenses, school, etc.

We went on strike due to abuse and micromanagement from the owner, who left his business to move 1,000 miles away to New York to live with our previous manager, his partner.

After our protest, in which the community gathered to listen to our story, the owner told us the doors of Serenity would never open again, which was not our intended goal. We had demands that were more than capable of being met. We demanded to be the employee-run business that we were promised. We requested a slight increase in wages for some positions. We ordered a small change in how the company was run. Yet, we were met with the permanent loss of our jobs because we used our voices to stand up for what we believe in. We are only a fraction of the small businesses run the same way in the grand scheme of things; we used our chance to be the voice for many other small business employees met with the same fate of mismanagement, mistreatment, and abuse. Yet, we were met with the unfortunate fate of the workers losing their lifeline permanently.

The owner told us in a simple text message that we had lost all of our jobs. With this, we could not seek new employment or find any other support to help us financially. We lost all of our jobs with that text message, with no warning whatsoever. This removed us all from our source of income.

The employees of Serenity are reaching out to the community to ask for help. We need help covering the employees' wages that have been lost thus far and will continue to be lost with the company's closing.

We are also asking for help so the employees can potentially open our own space, so we can continue to build the community we have been building for so long. We want more than anything to create a new space for our community. We know that the old building where we worked was only four walls, and it was us, the employees and the patrons the helped build the community we strived for. We need your help now to have a space to continue supporting one another.

We know our goal amount is large, but this has become more significant than we ever expected. We love our patrons, our regulars, and our staff so much that at the end of the day, we will try to create a new space to continue building what we have been building for the last four years.

We thank everyone for your support in this.

Cheers,

Serenity Bartenders United.