This afternoon Baristas at Heine Brothers sent the following message to our Headquarters Leadership Team:

Dear Mike Mays, Chuck Schnatter, Tom Jenkins, and the Heine Brothers HQ Leadership:



As Baristas of Heine Brothers, we love our jobs; we love our coworkers like family, we cherish our customers and our community, and we love making creative espresso masterpieces. But the Coronavirus outbreak has changed so much, put all of that at risk, and we need additional steps taken to protect us right away.



While Governor Beshear has not changed anything recently in his Executive Orders pertaining to restaurants, he has said that he intended for every life sustaining business (those of us staying open to the public right now) to take new precautions, every day, to protect their workers and the public.



Some of our locations have still been quite busy, with 200+ customers per day, and that number of contacts makes it almost inevitable that we will catch and spread COVID-19. As the announcement earlier today indicated, it has already come to one of our Locations, and Heine Brothers Leadership indeed expects for more of us to catch the virus in the coming weeks. And as long as we are open, many of our frequent customers will be those who are not otherwise respecting social distancing guidelines. We love our jobs, but we really do not want to be harmed or cause devastating harm because of them.



Some of us have other jobs where we work with vulnerable populations; some of us live with or take care of our elderly or immuno-compromised relatives. Most of us can not afford to quit our jobs or lose a single paycheck, even if it means risking the lives of our loved ones - and we feel trapped.



The way forward for us as a company, to keep us all safer and better protected, would be for HQ to immediately give every Barista the option to choose for themselves:

**Choose to stay on the front lines to keep our stores staffed and running, but with additional protective measures (touchless-pay only, cloth masks, no new "promotions" designed to drive extra traffic, etc) as well as appropriate hazard pay (at least $3/hour additional base pay) for working during an unprecedented pandemic.

**Choose to be “laid off due to COVID-19 outbreak” (thus enabling those that choose this option to file now for Unemployment and Medicaid coverage benefits with the State), with the option to re-join the staff when it is safe to fully operate our Locations again

Until we are given this option to choose for ourselves, we will be doing what is necessary to keep ourselves and our communities safe by staging a collective sick-out beginning tomorrow, Friday 4/3/2020.



We look forward to doing the right thing, together.







Sign this petition to show Heine Brothers Coffee that you #StandWithHBrosBaristas and demand that Heine Brothers #GiveUsTheChoice so we can ALL safely have #CoffeeNotCorona



If you want to help keep Baristas afloat while we try to keep us all safe, donate here!

https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with-heine-brothers-baristas