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Unionize coffee shop AUs
There's that tumblr post that's probably ascended to an iconique status at this point, which I only took screenshots of so will summarize thus:
If you have a problem with sex worker/customer AUs because consent issues? Well let's talk about AUs where someone is actually someone else's boss! This isn't just about whether someone can consent to the relationship itself. After 15 years in fandom I'm comfortable with lots of power imbalances in romantic relationships as long as the author acknowledges them. It's that the portrayal of the workplaces themselves are universally fun and lighthearted and do not deal with those power dynamics at all.
More than anything else, workplace AUs, especially service industry ones, seem to be a fantasy of a universe where work is, if not always fun, at least partly fun. And I get that -- I want to live in a world where I'm friends with my coworkers. I've even been there.
Actually, let me tell you a story about that.
I worked for a couple of years at a small tech startup that never grew beyond 10 total employees. I had taken some time off after my first job, which I'd been in for four years, through starting at a smaller company and its acquisition by a juggernaut and slow dismantling of everything good about our product and workplace culture. When someone I'd known from that first company contacted me about a startup he was the CTO of, it seemed cool. We had a 30 minute conversation over coffee and I was offered a job. I took a pay cut over my previous position, and got stock options for 1/400th of the company (at the time; as they raised more investment money, my options got smaller and smaller).
I worked with some really cool guys. Two of them who were there almost the entire time I was were former coworkers, too, who I'd worked with more directly before. We went to the cafe across the street together multiple times a day for coffee, where we knew everyone and they gave us "free refills" when we brought our to-go cups back hours later. It was interesting work, getting to build something from scratch, having to figure out how to do everything and how to create something useful for prospective customers. For a while, it was just five of us on the software team. One guy was BFFs with our CTO, and none of the rest of us liked him as much: he was an ultra-stylish tech bro who moved up from the Bay Area. What I can say for him is that at one point he got a puppy -- a boutique poodle cross, of course -- and he'd bring it to work and it was cute as fuck. Anyway, the other four of us got coffee together and went to the ridiculously popular pasta place that was only open for lunch. And at one point we decided to share our salary information with each other. We were pretty close, it seemed reasonable to us. We found out that the three of them, all white men, were making the same, and I was making less.
I didn't know what to do about that, so I didn't do anything. Within a month, we all got raises. Of course, I was still making less, but I'd been bumped up to what they had been making before, so I didn't feel like I could complain. In retrospect, I'm sure one of the other guys brought it up to the CEO.
A few months later, we got a new "employee handbook" and it said our salaries were confidential information and we couldn't share them. I told the CEO that was illegal.
Later, they hired a product manager. This guy was tall and loud and annoying and incompetent and I realized recently that I literally cannot remember his name. That's apparently how annoyed I was at him. Anyway, we were in this open office where only the CEO had a private space, on the second floor of an old building overlooking a busy public plaza. There was no air conditioning, and in the summer we'd have to keep all the windows open and have the added distractions of whatever was going on outside including city-sponsored buskers for two hours a day.
(by the way, I now have a least favorite busker in Seattle. His name is Pasquale and he plays the electric violin over pre-recorded backing tracks)
So one day we're complaining about the heat and Tall Product Manager says, "we could get an air conditioner but to afford it, we'd have to lay off krytella."
That was uncomfortable, but I didn't know what to say. Or if I could say anything, or should. Yeah, I was the only woman at the company. Yeah, I was paid the least. But was it about that? Or was I just being oversensitive?
That night, one of my coworkers called me and asked if I was okay. Told me he thought it was unfair and sexist that Tall Guy said that. We talked for like an hour. I'd never had someone stand up for me like that.
(reader, within two months we were dating. We kissed for the first time at a Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert. It was a great relationship that made it for over two years before we got incredibly boring, possibly due to being too similar as people. I still think of him fondly and wish him and the woman he later married who had a daughter the same age as his the best)
Our direct boss, the CTO — let's call him Bob, though that was not his name — he'd been fine as a coworker back at the first company. He was kind of a bro, and people took him too seriously because he was tall and blond and blandly attractive in an everyday kind of way, but a perfectly nice guy. I haven't changed the details about people's appearances, by the way. Bob and Bro Coworker and Tall PM were all 6'4". This has no bearing on the story but it is weird. Every person who worked there was tall except like one rotating below-average guy, first Pyotr and then Onyi [names changed to protect the innocent]. So Bob was a perfectly nice guy except that he was our boss and knew he had to be our boss. He'd occasionally disagree with us on things he should've deferred to workers on when he wasn't the expert. One time we made a decision together while he was on vacation and he came back and was mad about it. He even asked me afterwards if there was anything he could be doing better as a manager and when I brought it up he just spent the whole time defending how he was right.
So, story over. There isn't a clear conclusion here but I'd love to see a workplace AU where the canonical villain is cast as the owner. Or even where characters have to deal with the dynamics of a manager they like as a person, who wants to be friends and hang out, but who also is in the position of disciplining them. Dealing with the manager wanting to be friends with everyone when what the workers need is time to hang out without them there, to talk about the real stuff before they confront their boss with what they'd like to see changed.
And I'm biding my time for the right juggernaut fandom to come along for me to write the story about the characters unionizing their coffee shop.
[Screenshot of an ao3 comment]Ever since then I've been noticing when I read workplace AUs (which I like, in general, since I'm the kind of person who has gotten into serious relationships with coworkers in real life... thrice even) is how rife they are with boss/employee relationships. If not outright romantic relationships, managers and business owners are treated on an equal level with workers. Sometimes things about the job suck, and most of the time the things that suck are customers which, realistic, and occasionally businesses are struggling to get by but this is always a struggle for the owner character. What's strikingly missing here is the real power dynamics of a workplace: that we as workers need jobs to be able to eat, we don't just do it for fun. And of course people who own businesses are people, just like everyone else, but they also are taking on a role in our economy that not just means having control over whether someone else will eat, but being incentivized to use that power to their advantage if they want to succeed.
My husband was reading over my shoulder and snorted when he saw, chapters divided in sfw / nsfw / exceptionally nsfw
He says, "What? Does that mean Steve and Bucky hanging out in a coffee shop / Steve and Bucky having all the butt sex / Steve and Bucky organizing a labor union?"
[Comic]
Steve, in uniform, in front of a counter, with Bucky behind it in a green apron. Steve is saying, "you make HOW much an hour?"
Next panel: Steve in a different outfit walking away with coffee, saying over his shoulder, "we have nothing to lose but our chains." Bucky replies, "steeb pls."
[Reply] UNIONIZE 👏 COFFEE 👏 SHOP 👏 AUS 👏
If you have a problem with sex worker/customer AUs because consent issues? Well let's talk about AUs where someone is actually someone else's boss! This isn't just about whether someone can consent to the relationship itself. After 15 years in fandom I'm comfortable with lots of power imbalances in romantic relationships as long as the author acknowledges them. It's that the portrayal of the workplaces themselves are universally fun and lighthearted and do not deal with those power dynamics at all.
More than anything else, workplace AUs, especially service industry ones, seem to be a fantasy of a universe where work is, if not always fun, at least partly fun. And I get that -- I want to live in a world where I'm friends with my coworkers. I've even been there.
Actually, let me tell you a story about that.
I worked for a couple of years at a small tech startup that never grew beyond 10 total employees. I had taken some time off after my first job, which I'd been in for four years, through starting at a smaller company and its acquisition by a juggernaut and slow dismantling of everything good about our product and workplace culture. When someone I'd known from that first company contacted me about a startup he was the CTO of, it seemed cool. We had a 30 minute conversation over coffee and I was offered a job. I took a pay cut over my previous position, and got stock options for 1/400th of the company (at the time; as they raised more investment money, my options got smaller and smaller).
I worked with some really cool guys. Two of them who were there almost the entire time I was were former coworkers, too, who I'd worked with more directly before. We went to the cafe across the street together multiple times a day for coffee, where we knew everyone and they gave us "free refills" when we brought our to-go cups back hours later. It was interesting work, getting to build something from scratch, having to figure out how to do everything and how to create something useful for prospective customers. For a while, it was just five of us on the software team. One guy was BFFs with our CTO, and none of the rest of us liked him as much: he was an ultra-stylish tech bro who moved up from the Bay Area. What I can say for him is that at one point he got a puppy -- a boutique poodle cross, of course -- and he'd bring it to work and it was cute as fuck. Anyway, the other four of us got coffee together and went to the ridiculously popular pasta place that was only open for lunch. And at one point we decided to share our salary information with each other. We were pretty close, it seemed reasonable to us. We found out that the three of them, all white men, were making the same, and I was making less.
I didn't know what to do about that, so I didn't do anything. Within a month, we all got raises. Of course, I was still making less, but I'd been bumped up to what they had been making before, so I didn't feel like I could complain. In retrospect, I'm sure one of the other guys brought it up to the CEO.
A few months later, we got a new "employee handbook" and it said our salaries were confidential information and we couldn't share them. I told the CEO that was illegal.
Later, they hired a product manager. This guy was tall and loud and annoying and incompetent and I realized recently that I literally cannot remember his name. That's apparently how annoyed I was at him. Anyway, we were in this open office where only the CEO had a private space, on the second floor of an old building overlooking a busy public plaza. There was no air conditioning, and in the summer we'd have to keep all the windows open and have the added distractions of whatever was going on outside including city-sponsored buskers for two hours a day.
(by the way, I now have a least favorite busker in Seattle. His name is Pasquale and he plays the electric violin over pre-recorded backing tracks)
So one day we're complaining about the heat and Tall Product Manager says, "we could get an air conditioner but to afford it, we'd have to lay off krytella."
That was uncomfortable, but I didn't know what to say. Or if I could say anything, or should. Yeah, I was the only woman at the company. Yeah, I was paid the least. But was it about that? Or was I just being oversensitive?
That night, one of my coworkers called me and asked if I was okay. Told me he thought it was unfair and sexist that Tall Guy said that. We talked for like an hour. I'd never had someone stand up for me like that.
(reader, within two months we were dating. We kissed for the first time at a Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert. It was a great relationship that made it for over two years before we got incredibly boring, possibly due to being too similar as people. I still think of him fondly and wish him and the woman he later married who had a daughter the same age as his the best)
Our direct boss, the CTO — let's call him Bob, though that was not his name — he'd been fine as a coworker back at the first company. He was kind of a bro, and people took him too seriously because he was tall and blond and blandly attractive in an everyday kind of way, but a perfectly nice guy. I haven't changed the details about people's appearances, by the way. Bob and Bro Coworker and Tall PM were all 6'4". This has no bearing on the story but it is weird. Every person who worked there was tall except like one rotating below-average guy, first Pyotr and then Onyi [names changed to protect the innocent]. So Bob was a perfectly nice guy except that he was our boss and knew he had to be our boss. He'd occasionally disagree with us on things he should've deferred to workers on when he wasn't the expert. One time we made a decision together while he was on vacation and he came back and was mad about it. He even asked me afterwards if there was anything he could be doing better as a manager and when I brought it up he just spent the whole time defending how he was right.
So, story over. There isn't a clear conclusion here but I'd love to see a workplace AU where the canonical villain is cast as the owner. Or even where characters have to deal with the dynamics of a manager they like as a person, who wants to be friends and hang out, but who also is in the position of disciplining them. Dealing with the manager wanting to be friends with everyone when what the workers need is time to hang out without them there, to talk about the real stuff before they confront their boss with what they'd like to see changed.
And I'm biding my time for the right juggernaut fandom to come along for me to write the story about the characters unionizing their coffee shop.