Workers at a popular New York City bakery, renowned for its chocolate babka, have thrust the chain into the debate over Israel’s response to the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
A group of employees are pressing an effort to unionize the company, Breads Bakery, and making several demands, including an unusual one: that the company cease to “support the Israeli occupation” of Gaza.
That position has drawn attention to the small company, which has been credited with starting the “babka boom” in the United States. Customers have been lining up to buy baked goods in solidarity with the managers of the company, which has roots in Israel. Other supporters have taken to social media to argue that the workers have overstepped normal workplace bounds, with many calling for them to quit or be fired.
In the middle is one of the nation’s most powerful labor unions, the United Auto Workers. Organizers from a union local based in suburban Pelham, N.Y., have been working with the Breads employees, but have not waded into the geopolitical debate.
William Bobrowski, an official of Local 2179 of the United Auto Workers who is helping to organize the workers, declined to discuss the matter last week and did not respond to subsequent requests for comment.
A group of employees calling themselves the Breaking Breads Union have laid out their complaints and demands in posts on Instagram, which have garnered several hundred likes and expressions of support.
The organizers have declined to discuss the situation with The New York Times. In a phone call, a person who said they were a representative of the group declined to answer questions from a Times reporter because of what they characterized as the news organization’s “support for genocide.”
In an Instagram post over the weekend, the group listed a dozen demands, including higher wages, overtime pay and additional pay for working on holidays, including Jewish holidays. They also asked for “guaranteed hours every week” and weekly work schedules provided at least three days in advance.
The chain has four stores in the city and nearly 300 workers. The union group said in one post on Instagram that more than 30 percent of the workers had signed cards indicating their desire to form a union, the standard threshold for seeking a unionization vote. The group confronted Gadi Peleg, an owner of Breads Bakery, and Yonatan Floman, the chief executive, with its plan at the chain’s flagship store near Union Square in Manhattan in late December, according to that post.
“Since then, the delicate crust of their power has cracked into a million small crumbs,” the post reads. “We look forward to securing our union, and taking what we know we deserve.”
In a subsequent post, the group said: “Since our announcement, the bosses have attempted to placate us by fixing equipment that was long overdue a repair and giving us company issued sweaters months into the winter season. We know that these items are simply a result of our pressure.”
Executives of Breads Bakery have declined since last week to discuss the situation.
Jennifer McPartland, a spokesperson for the company, provided a statement that said: “Breads Bakery is built on love and genuine care for our team. We make babka, we don’t engage in politics. We celebrate peace and embrace people of all cultures and beliefs. We’ve always been a workplace where people of all backgrounds and viewpoints can come together around a shared purpose, the joy found at a bakery, and we find it troubling that divisive political issues are being introduced into our workplace.”
On Friday, Breads received a surge of support from customers who lined up at its location near Lincoln Center to buy babkas, rugelach and other baked goods, images posted on social media showed. That groundswell was reminiscent of the lines that formed in November 2023 outside Caffè Aronne, a coffee shop on the Upper East Side, after its owner said his employees had walked out to protest the company’s support for Israel during the early stages of its war with Hamas.
By Monday, the political swirl around Breads appeared to have cooled. The chain’s Upper West Side shop was serene, with just a few customers talking quietly over coffee and sweet rolls and employees ringing up purchases with no hint of tension.
Harry C. Katz, a professor who teaches about collective bargaining at Cornell University, said on Monday that unions sometimes take political stances.
For example, in December 2023, the United Auto Workers called for a cease-fire in the war in Gaza and a group of the union’s members formed UAW Labor for Palestine, which called for the union to divest from Israel Bonds.
And in 2023, Starbucks Workers United, the growing union representing workers at hundreds of Starbucks stores across the country, took a public stand in solidarity with “the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.” (Starbucks and the union sued each other over the union’s use of company imagery in a pro-Palestinian social media post.)
But, Mr. Katz said, taking positions is quite different from making demands in the workplace.
“It’s not legitimate” to insist on ending support for Israel’s occupation of Gaza as part of a labor contract, he said. “If the union were to win representation rights and were then bargaining with management, that is neither a mandatory nor permissive subject of bargaining.”
Mr. Katz also said that the nascent effort to organize at Breads was a long way from creating a union.
Getting at least 30 percent of the workers to sign authorization cards was the bare minimum needed to petition the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election, he said. Union organizers usually insist on much more support, as much as 70 percent of a work force, before seeking a vote because so many signers change their minds or leave their jobs before the vote is held.
High turnover in retail and other service jobs makes those workers “very hard to organize,” Mr. Katz said.
The politicization of bakery fare was distressing to Alexandra Bellak, a longtime customer of the Breads shop near Union Square who favors its coffee cake babka.
“I know the founders are Israeli, but I was only ever interested in the taste of their amazing babka,” Ms. Bellak said. She said she supported unions and workers’ rights and had found the employees at Breads to seem happy and engaged.
“I don’t know when babka became such a political issue,” Ms. Bellak said. “It’s supposed to bring joy and happiness and fulfillment.”
Stella Raine Chu contributed reporting.
Patrick McGeehan is a Times reporter who covers the economy of New York City and its airports and other transportation hubs.
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