Asked about the campaign, a Starbucks spokesperson provided an October open letter to employees from the coffee chain’s North America president, Rossann Williams, in which she said she recognized that workers in the Buffalo region “have not had the Starbucks experience that we work so hard to create for you,” and that she and other managers were “here to ensure that we can give them just that.” Starbucks is asking employees to vote against unionization, Williams wrote, “because we believe we will best enhance our partnership and advance the operational changes together in a direct relationship.”
On Saturday, Starbucks closed Buffalo-area stores early and paid employees to attend a gathering with its former CEO Howard Schultz, the billionaire who is its chairman emeritus and largest individual shareholder. Schultz told employees that Starbucks had already built “a different kind of company,” and that no outsiders had successfully “pressured us, maneuvered us, threatened us to do anything other than what we felt in our heart and our conscience we needed to do and should do for the people who wear the green apron.”
In a
letter to employees published on Starbucks’ website in conjunction with his visit, Schultz said he was “saddened and concerned” to hear that any employee would think they need to have “a representative seek to obtain things we all have as partners at Starbucks.”
Escorted Away
Still, Schultz was escorted away after the speech when Gianna Reeve, a pro-union employee at one of the stores slated to vote, asked him if he would support principles proposed by the union to restrict union-busting, she said.
Starbucks has said that workers already have a say in scheduling, that more senior workers already get extra pay, and that it prioritizes workers’ and customers’ safety.
The company also shared a September message to Buffalo-area employees from a regional vice president, Allyson Peck, saying that Starbucks was “bringing additional recruiters and managers to help with staffing, finalizing dedicated training plans for new baristas and repairing store issues quickly.” The steps, she said, are “actions only Starbucks can deliver on -- versus an outside third party like the Workers United union.”
On Aug. 30, after unsuccessfully petitioning Starbucks headquarters to make a deal restricting anti-union campaigning, employees moved ahead at the U.S. labor board, submitting signatures that organizers say represented at least four-fifths of the eligible staff at each of three Buffalo-area stores. The NLRB
rejected Starbucks’ argument that the appropriate voter pool would instead consist of employees at all 20 of its stores in the region and granted the union’s request to hold store-by-store votes at the three sites, boosting the organizers’ chance of success.
Since each store’s employees are voting separately, Starbucks will be legally required to negotiate if a majority of eligible staff at even one of them votes for the union.
Regional Effort
Richard Bensinger, the former AFL-CIO organizing director spearheading the Buffalo Starbucks campaign for Workers United, said it was born out of a regional effort to organize restaurants, not a national strategy to target Starbucks.
He’s found organizing Starbucks both easier and harder than he’d predicted: He thought he might find executives at the company, known for comparatively generous pay and benefits, eager to avoid a bitter struggle, along with workers who were tepid about organizing. Instead, he said, employees have proven highly motivated to seek changes but the company, as much as any other he’s gone up against, has been steadfast in seeking to defeat the drive.
The Starbucks campaign is unfolding at a moment of unusual leverage for U.S. workers. They’ve been emboldened by a
tight labor market and inspired to demand payback for the risks and sacrifices they shouldered during the pandemic, and to reverse concessions they acceded to in past years’ contract talks. Union members have recently authorized potential strikes involving over 100,000 workers in a slew of different industries, while workers in general have been quitting their jobs in record numbers.
Read more: U.S. companies are plagued by turnover
Over the past week, striking workers at farm equipment maker
Deere & Co. voted to continue a
10,000-strong work stoppage rather than accepting a tentative deal that included a 10% immediate wage hike, while unions representing over 30,000 health-care workers at Kaiser Permanente announced plans to strike starting Nov. 15.
But Workers United’s NLRB election effort remains a gamble. While U.S. law promises employees the right to collectively bargain if a majority of their co-workers cast ballots in the affirmative, the law also gives companies wide latitude to campaign aggressively against unionization. Companies generally face only minimal penalties for engaging in illegal efforts to stymie the union or obstruct negotiations once a union is victorious.
Few Victories
In recent years, NLRB election victories at the top U.S. companies in union-scarce industries have been
almost unheard of, except for where organizers could cut a deal beforehand with management to limit anti-union tactics, as the Starbucks workers tried and failed to do. The “Fight For $15 and a Union” campaign, another SEIU project, has spent about a decade organizing and mobilizing fast-food workers without ever filing for NLRB elections in any restaurants. Instead, they’ve opted for pressure campaigns targeting companies like
McDonald’s Corp. in hopes -- so far unrealized -- of securing a national agreement easing unionization.
Under U.S. law, companies can require workers to attend numerous group or one-on-one meetings about why they shouldn’t unionize, and make dire predictions about what could happen if they do. If workers are proven to be illegally fired for their union activism, the worst penalty a company usually faces is eventually being required to reinstate them with back pay, without punitive damages or personal liability for executives.
Related: U.S. workers battle to organize after being fleeced for decades
If a group of workers does vote to unionize, companies can delay the process with extensive legal challenges. If a union’s victory is upheld, management is required to hold contract talks “in good faith,” but has no obligation to concede much on the issues workers want addressed. The majority of the time, workers still haven’t reached a contract one year after voting to unionize, according to a
2009 study.
