Tag: Starbucks Workers United

Labor breakthrough: Workers winning victories once thought impossible / by Amba Guerguerian

Labor Breakthrough (Tyrone Wallace)

Reposted from MR Online

Workers at 400 Starbucks stores across the country have won union elections. On Feb. 27, after more than two years of union-busting campaigns and stalling on negotiations, the company announced it would begin to bargain in good faith with the Starbucks Workers United union. It also promised to grant raises and benefits to the unionized shops, which it has been illegally denying.

Workers from the Starbucks on Fourth Avenue and 11th St. in Park Slope table outside their store (Amba Guerguerian)

On March 19, Starbucks said it would begin bargaining in late April with workers from the unionized stores nationally, instead of store by store. That day, workers at nine more Starbucks stores in eight states filed to have their union recognized.

The workers’ main demands include a minimum wage of $20 per hour, more consistent scheduling and increased staffing levels.

“This is amazing,” says worker-organizer Melina Carrasquillo, 26. “I had initially thought coming into this that we were going to be stuck for at least a year or two in limbo, like how it has been for the movement prior to us.” She works at a Starbucks in Park Slope that was one of 21 shops that launched their campaigns together in mid-February.

Labor historian Eric Blanc says the Starbucks campaign might be the most significant win for labor since the 1930s, because “nobody [since then] has shown it’s been possible not just to win elections, but to get to a first contract against the biggest corporations in the world in our modern economy.”

Factors that might have changed Starbucks’ calculations include that it has spent at least $240 million on union-busting lawyers that failed to stop organizing. It has faced repeated defeats at the federal National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), damage to its “progressive” brand identity, and a shareholder revolt that sought to place three union-friendly directors on the company’s board.

Brendan Lopez, a worker-organizer who was fired from a Starbucks in Farmingville, Long Island, told The Indypendent that he thinks an international boycott movement against Starbucks after the company tried to punish the union for its pro-Palestine position played a crucial role in forcing the company’s hand.

Whatever the company’s intentions were, “we have all been celebrating,” says Lopez.

They were sending lawyers to go in and then leave immediately. Lawyers would not even show up in a meeting sometimes to bargain, and if they would show up, they would just be on their phones, or not even pay attention to the meeting, and then they would just leave.

The baristas The Indypendent spoke with, however, remain wary of the company’s intentions. It recently entered, along with Amazon and Trader Joe’s, in a legal battle started by Elon Musk’s SpaceX that seeks to declare the NLRB’s power to enforce New Deal-era labor laws that protect workers’ right to form unions unconstitutional.

Regardless, this is a sign that the insurgent labor movement is maintaining momentum, says veteran unionist Eric Dirnbach.

“What is management looking for?” he asks.

They’re looking for signs that the union momentum is dissipated. If the union momentum were dissipating, they would hold out, they would not reach out for a deal. They’re seeing the opposite. They’re seeing this not going away, so they’re making a business decision.

Organizing in the City

Nitehawk workers celebrate outside the cinema with their new UAW union representative just after the victory announcement (Amba Guerguerian)

Since winning its first union election in Buffalo in December 2021, Starbucks Workers United has helped inspire a wave of organizing by younger workers in retail and service industry jobs that were long thought to be impossible to unionize.

Here in New York City, workers at Starbucks, Barboncino pizzeria, Death and Co. bar, Hex & Company boardgame cafe, She Wolf Bakery, Housing Works, Greenlight Bookstore, Barnes & Noble, REI, Trader Joe’s, Film Forum, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Lower Manhattan and Nitehawk Cinema have won union elections or begun the process of organizing a union.

Workers in service and retail jobs make up at least 46.3 million of the roughly 160 million people employed in the United States in 2023, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. These industries, whose share of the workforce grew after deindustrialization hit the U.S. in the 1970s, have some of the country’s lowest unionization rates–between 1.3% and 4.6%.

Downward mobility among millennial and Zoomer workers in the United States has also spurred unionization, as more college-educated workers are finding themselves working in service and retail jobs for years.

“People my age are seeing these jobs that we’ve been raised to think of as lesser and have low value, that we are now working because the economy is not very good, and then we can sort of get stuck in them,” says Esther, 29, a barista at Barnes and Noble.

With high turnover rates and “easily replaceable” jobs, service and retail workers have been considered nearly impossible to organize, but being hailed as “essential workers” who had to endure great risk during the pandemic helped spark a new desire to fight for their rights in the workplace. These occupations, often rife with safety and health hazards and bosses that care more about customer happiness than workers’ wellbeing, are proving to be fertile grounds for unionization.

“We are now seeing that that labor is actually incredibly valuable, that it’s really hard work, that it’s a lot of effort, and that it’s not right–not just societally–but that these companies treat us like we’re just disposable,” says Esther, who graduated from a masters program in 2020 with a degree in media archiving and preservation. Unable to find a job in her field, and having worked previously at Starbucks barista, she got a position in the cafe at the Barnes and Noble bookstore on 82nd Street in Manhattan in mid-2023.

Esther was eager to join the union push. “Pay is a big issue for everyone, not being able to afford to live in the neighborhood where we work is something we all came together and said, ‘This is not right. Our labor is worth more than what we’re being paid,’” she told The Indy.

On March 14, 85% of them voted to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. In June, 88% of workers at the Park Slope Barnes and Nobles and 97% at the company’s flagship store in Union Square voted to join the same union. They are some of seven stores in the country that have unionized since May 2023.

Alex Dinndorf, 26, who was one of the workers who formed a union at the Barboncino pizzeria in Brooklyn last year and now is an organizer with Workers United, says another reason service workers are particularly motivated to unionize is that “the service economy is becoming more consolidated under corporate restaurant groups,” and that that is happening because “all of these restaurants are becoming so expensive to operate.”

While workers at local businesses or small chains have faced union-busting tactics, they generally pale in comparison to the anti-union campaigns at Trader Joe’s, Starbucks and REI which can afford to pay hundreds of dollars per hour to lawyers from top-tier law firms that specialize in “union avoidance.”

At Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the local owner aggressively opposed the Nitehawk Workers Union after it went public.

Workers there started organizing last August. “The workers reached out to the Barboncino Union Twitter,” said Dinndorf. He supported organizing at Nitehawk as a volunteer with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), which formed in 2020 as an organizing tool for workers to fight for better working conditions and form unions at their shops.

Nitehawk, where theatergoers are served food and drinks while they watch movies, “is an absolute factory,” Dinndorf says. “The food runners there wear earpieces to communicate,” and servers carry “trays of drinks weaving up and down stairs, crouching–the conditions are notoriously bad.”

“I had heard stories about Nitehawk and Alamo well before I started organizing anything, and it always had the reputation of a place that was really tough to work at and have no work-life balance” during major film releases, he adds. The Barbie/Oppenheimer double release proved to be “the big catalyzing incident at Nitehawk” that led to the workers’ decision to organize.

On March 17, workers voted 51-41 to join United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2179, with 90% of the staff voting.

“I’m looking forward to hearing from those 41 people that did vote no, so we’ll be able to take those grievances and work them out,” worker-organizer Lydia told The Indypendent. She said the close vote was “pretty understandable, given mistakes that were made by the organizing committee, as well as the union-busting tactics that were used against our shop.” She says that the campaign was the first union experience for “pretty much all” the worker-organizers at Nitehawk.

Nitehawk owner Matthew Viragh, Lydia says, spread misinformation about unions and what might happen at the cinema if a union were to win, as well as rumors about some of the pro-union workers. The UAW filed unfair labor practice charges against Nitehawk for threatening to fire union supporters, cut their benefits, and deny them special privileges, all illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.

Standing outside Nitehawk after the election results were announced, Dinndorf, Lydia, another worker and their new union representative from UAW Local 2179 excitedly hugged and shook hands.

The Local 2179 representative, a veteran labor organizer, said he was happy to welcome more movie theaters into the local. “This will be our third theater in a year,” he said in a strong New York accent as he smoked a cigarette. “There’s Nitehawk, Alamo Theatre and Drafthouse and another one.” He said with a sly smile meaning, ‘It’s a new campaign; we can’t tell you yet.’

“It’s incredible to be a part of this enormous mobilization of organized labor that’s been happening since the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020 with the Amazon Labor Union, as well as Starbucks and Trader Joe’s, and even smaller shops, not just in New York City, but across the entire United States,” said Lydia.

Sticking it to Corporate

Workers from the Starbucks on Fourth Avenue and 11th St. in Park Slope table outside their store (Amba Guerguerian)

At a sidewalk tabling event to collect signatures from customers and community members that support the union campaign at the Starbucks on Fourth Avenue and 11th Street in Park Slope, sometimes a queue formed as people waited to sign on one of the two devices available.

“Sure, I love you guys,” said one elderly regular, when workers asked him to sign.

“It’s so weird that it has to be location by location,” added another regular, about the fact that a union can’t be won for every franchise at once.

“I did plumbing work for a while and obviously there was a union for a good reason, and fuck these corporates,” said a young man who had stopped to sign the petition.

“We’re getting a lot more signatures than I expected today,” said Starbucks worker-organizer Victoria Blair, 24.

“I’ve been running in left-wing, trade-unionist, pro-labor circles since I was 13,” said Blair. She grew up poor in Texas, moving around from home to home, with a brother with special needs, so she had to learn to advocate for them, and through that, got involved in politics at a young age. “I didn’t know at the time that I was queer, but I knew something was different about me–so it was a burning desire to understand why marginalized people are marginalized.” That led her to critical analysis of gender and ability,

which leads into critical analysis of the socio-economic status quo, into Marxist critical analysis.

“I always have been a bit of a firebrand,” added Blair.

She moved to Brooklyn in July in part because of the “ongoing persecution of transgender people in Texas,” she said. She had tried to unionize the Starbucks she was working at in Arlington, Texas, to little avail and thought she would take another shot at it when she transferred to the Park Slope store.

Melina Carrasquillo, who had been working at the Starbucks for around a year and a half, was itching for someone to start a union campaign there but was nervous to be the one to spearhead it, partially because she was hoping to be promoted to a managerial position.

One day last fall, Blair mentioned her plan to Carrasquillo, who begged her to follow through with it, promising she would help. “I realized the union was more important to me than getting a promotion,” said Carrasquillo, who grew up around organized labor because her father is a shop steward at the National Association of Letter Carriers union for postal workers.

“We thought that you show up to any company, and you have to take the rules that are in place, you have to take the injustices and discrimination,” Carasquillo told The Indy. “But we’re coming to a place in our country and generation where we’re realizing that we don’t have to accept this as the status quo.” The union election at her store will take place on March 28.

Brendan Lopez, 23, who was fired from the Farmingville Starbucks last July, was one of the first workers to participate in organizing there.

“I had just started, and someone had written ‘Start union now’ on the whiteboard in the break room,” he recalls. Lopez walked in while an anti-union supervisor was examining the note and yelled at Lopez, saying he would fire whoever was responsible. “My response was, ‘If you’re gonna yell in my face, I’m gonna go be a part of the union then.’” He started organizing with the worker who had written the note.

Despite gridlocked negotiations, Farmingville Starbucks workers continue to hold regular union meetings. Lopez and other workers also traveled around to different ­Starbucks franchises on Long Island to inform other baristas about the union efforts. After he was terminated, Lopez and his coworkers went to Starbucks’ corporate offices in Manhattan and marched on the boss for firing a key worker-organizer.

Corporate union-busting has standard tactics: firing organizing workers, threatening to demote or fire them for union activity, promoting misinformation campaigns that claim unions will result in lower pay and benefits and lost jobs, mandatory “captive audience” meetings with anti-union propaganda and veiled threats, and taking down or prohibiting pro-union literature in the break room. If a union wins an election, employers often stall or refuse to bargain a first contract and deny the unionized workers the same raises and benefits it gives other workers, as both Starbucks and REI have done. All those tactics are illegal under federal labor law, but still frequent.

At REI Soho, workers have been denied company-wide raises since they voted to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in March 2022. All the unionized workers in the United States recently found out that they would be denied end-of-year “merit” bonuses.

Carlos Angel-Barajas, 34, an actor with a master’s degree in the field, is on the REI Soho bargaining committee. After one year of bargaining, REI changed law firms and hired the notoriously anti-union Morgan Lewis. Now, two years after winning their union election, neither REI Soho workers nor those at eight other recently-unionized stores are anywhere near reaching a deal with the company.

“When we bargained with [the previous firm], there were representatives from REI on the Zoom call,” Angel-Barajas recalls. “It was a very slow, at times frustrating, process but there were things that were handled at the bargaining table because REI was present.” Now, he says, “it’s just the legal team; there are no REI representatives,” and not one additional tentative agreement has been made.

Workers at REI stores nationwide have filed more than 80 complaints with the NLRB, seeking to force the company to bargain first contracts.

At the Trader Joe’s on Essex and Delancey in Lower Manhattan, bosses approached union-busting in a more creative way. “Trader Joe’s doesn’t have to hire professional union busters to come in–they are just using the employees to do that work,” says labor lawyer Seth Goldstein.

After losing a union election in a 76-76 tie last spring, workers haven’t stopped organizing, and the boss continues to hire anti-union workers who have formed an unofficial union-busting clan, says independent union Trader Joe’s United.

Things came to a head in February when Fredd Moore, a queer pro-union worker, was fired on what the union says are trumped-up claims after being called homophobic slurs by one of the anti-union workers.

“They truly believe that if we get a union, we will lose our jobs,” said worker-organizer Jordan Pollack of the anti-union group.

The union’s legal team, Julian, Mehrer, Singla and Goldstein, has filed an unfair-labor-practice charge against Moore’s firing. It has also appealed the election results and is hoping to have them overturned under the precedent set in the NLRB’s Cemex ruling last August, which stipulates that if management illegally interfered with an election, the employer will be ordered to recognize the union, rather than having to redo the election.

Workers at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, the only unionized Amazon warehouse in the United States, faced a grueling anti-union campaign, with workers forced to sit through several captive-audience meetings before the April 2022 union election, which the Amazon Labor Union won. Amazon also fired several union leaders before and after the election. It has not yet begun to negotiate a contract.

The independent Amazon Labor Union also has internal problems. There has been a split between union president Chris Smalls and his supporters, and some of the union’s organizers who came from outside and took jobs as “salts” at the JFK8 warehouse to build support for the union. JFK8 workers recently voted to have direct elections for their leadership which will be held in the coming months. Meanwhile, the 1.3-million member Teamsters union vowed to organize Amazon after winning a strong contract from UPS last summer.

Labor organizers and union lawyers have been sounding the alarm as the world’s richest men fight against the labor movement by attempting to destroy the NLRB’s power to enforce the National Labor Relations Act. The law, enacted in 1935, protects the rights of private-sector workers to unionize and engage in other “concerted activity.” In June, Starbucks followed Trader Joe’s and Amazon making legal filings that support SpaceX’s argument in a lawsuit claiming that the NLRB’s administrative process for hearing cases violates its constitutional due-process rights.

“This is just a blatant attack on the labor movement for their success in organizing,” says labor lawyer Seth Goldstein.

Maintaining Momentum

Workers at Hex & Company react last November after winning their union election (Moses Jeanfrancois)

“I was a socialist in the ’90s. It was very hard; there were like five of us in the meetings,” labor organizer Eric Dirnbach told The Indy. Now, he attends packed meetings full of excited young labor organizers and socialists.

New unions and militant union-support networks like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee are paving the way for effective worker-to-worker organizing, and well-established unions like the Teamsters and the UAW have been revitalized by grassroots pro-democracy campaigns.

EWOC, a joint, volunteer-run project between the United Electrical Workers union and the Democratic Socialists of America, says it has around 500 currently active organizing volunteers; that over 5,200 workers have reached out to it since its founding; and that of these, over 2,100 campaigns have been launched with some organizing activity, representing workers at over 1,500 employers.

Younger people are gaining class consciousness, after more than 40 years of declining economic conditions for workers. We are paying more than ever for higher education, housing, groceries, health care and more, while the share of wealth controlled by the richest 1% continues to grow.

“I think for our generation, a promise was made about working hard, getting an education, buying a house. We saw examples of it by our parents and grandparents,” says Angel-Barajas,

and it turned out to be empty.

Gay and transgender people, particularly those of color, face high rates of workplace discrimination and harassment. At Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, REI and Nitehawk, queer workers are leading the way.

Angel-Barajas is queer and was undocumented for much of his life. “I, along with a bunch of my coworkers, are uniquely tuned into systems of oppression, and we’re tuned into methods, tactics, for those in power to control,” they said. “And I’ve seen how powerfully folks in the store will fight for one another. It’s difficult work, but it’s also very important and transformative.

Workers are becoming aware that they cannot fix working conditions by just changing jobs. “I come from a line of horrible work experience. I have yet to find a job that has a good management, a good foundation for its workers,” says Lopez.

I know what it feels like to be an ant underneath a shoe, and it’s not a good feeling that you can be replaced by any other worker ant, and you’ll just be another squashed bug on the side of the road.

Lopez says another reason he hasn’t given up is because he has a whole new community of friends and support through the union.

I’m constantly asking everybody new I meet, ‘If you ever need a union, let me know.’

Millennials and Zoomers grew up in a time when union membership was at its lowest ebb in generations in the United States, and knowledge about unions and labor issues was slim or nonexistent. None of the workers I spoke with for this article remember being taught much of anything about organized labor and its history. We heard snippets about it during Occupy Wall Street, the Fight for $15, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns and the Chicago teachers strikes. In March 2020, when Amazon workers bucked at Jeff Bezos, then the richest man in the world, we were ready to follow suit.

Originally published in The Indypendent

Amba Guerguerian is The Indypendent’s Associate Editor.

Starbucks CEO Schultz raked over coals by Sanders in the Senate / by Mark Gruenberg

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz smugly drinks from a Starbucks mug as he is grilled by Sen. Bernie Sanders at a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee, Wednesday, March 29, 2023, in Washington. Sam Amato, left, of Buffalo, N.Y., listens in. Amato is a member of Starbucks Workers United and says he was illegally fired from Starbucks after 13 years. | All photos: Jacquelyn Martin / AP

Originally published in the People’s World on March 30, 2023

WASHINGTON—In an often-contentious 4-1/2-hour Senate hearing, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz denied, ducked and stonewalled workers’ reports and National Labor Relations Board findings of the monster coffee chain’s constant, centrally-controlled and nationwide labor law-breaking.

Senate Labor Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., led off the March 29 session by declaring of Schultz that “Even if he’s a multimillionaire, he’s not entitled to break the law.”

Things went downhill from there when Schultz was in the witness chair.

Whenever Sanders and other committee Democrats, using worker statements and evidence unearthed by the NLRB in a 218-page order banning Starbucks’s constant labor law-breaking in Buffalo and nationwide, tried to get the ex-CEO to promise to obey the law—or at least come to the bargaining table with workers of the 300 Starbucks stores who have unionized so far—he refused.

Instead, Schultz claimed his team scheduled 85 face-to-face meetings with workers at individual stores. But when workers elsewhere zoomed in, his bargainers left. Wrapping himself in privacy concerns, Schultz claimed they did so because the sessions could divulge personal information.

One late witness, after Schultz finished, former NLRB member and veteran labor lawyer Sharon Block, put the Starbucks unionization campaign, and the company’s reaction, into a national context, and not just one of fed-up low-wage workers unionizing for protection, recognition and financial improvements.

Those are all true. But Block added that in her decades of writing labor law as a congressional staffer, enforcing it at the NLRB and now teaching it at Harvard, she has never seen such widespread defiance by any company. And if Starbucks gets away with it, she warned, other firms will be even more emboldened to resist, defy and break labor law against workers.

Before that, Schultz kept denying every single labor-law breaking charge thrown at him by the workers and the NLRB. So far, there are more than 500 charges, formally called unfair labor practices. And Schultz kept returning to Starbucks’s supposed reputation as a caring company. The Starbucks workers, testifying later, refuted him.

Operating from the grass roots

The workers, operating from the grass-roots but aided by Starbucks Workers United, have won union recognition votes at more than 300 Starbucks stores nationwide, and triumphed in 83% of all elections. They’ve also had to file more than 1,200 labor law-breaking complaints to the NLRB.

“You cannot be pro-people and anti-union,” Tennessee worker Maggie Carter said.

Carter and Jayson Saxton, an illegally fired worker from Augusta, Ga., testified after Schultz’s 3-1/2 hours in the witness chair. They told quite a different story of company pursuit of profits, low pay, lousy working conditions and severe discipline, all of which and more drove them to unionize.

Now ex-CEO Schultz, who’s worth $3.7 billion and who made $21 million in total compensation last year, dismissed their charges, along with those in the NLRB’s ruling, or denied knowing anything about them. When one Republican asked him how much top Starbucks execs made, he ducked.

Meanwhile, Carter and Saxton brought walking, talking evidence of how Starbucks mistreats its “partners,” as the company calls workers, when they try to unionize to protect and better themselves.

It was a tale of forced captive audience meetings, discrimination in hours and transfers between stores, benefits offered to non-union store workers but denied to those in unionized stores—using labor law as an excuse—minimum wages until last May and no health coverage through an already expensive company policy if you worked fewer than 20 hours a week.

And there were arbitrary cuts in hours, too, Saxton said. In one three-week period, a worker could go from 25 hours—qualifying for coverage—to five hours to 15.

Single mom Carter told senators Starbucks retaliated against her union organizing by holding up her transfer request from Jackson, Tenn., to Knoxville, Tenn., for three months. She had to quit while awaiting a decision, and that denied the health benefits she needed for her child. Carter wanted to transfer to Knoxville so she could go to college part-time.

Pro-union workers “were getting disciplined for minor violations” like dress code variations, she added. When the union won the Jackson vote—its first win in the South—on March 29, 2022, Starbucks retaliated “by walking out after 30 minutes” of their first bargaining session. “And on May 3, they said we wouldn’t get any” benefits that were promised to non-union store workers.

Schultz’s reason, repeated over and over to senators? Labor law, he claimed, bans additional benefits during an organizing drive—even when the union waives its right to contest those increases.

And Starbucks’s “captive audience” meeting in Jackson had an extra twist due to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Such meetings, which feature anti-union harangues by bosses, union busters or both—and discipline if you don’t attend—are common.

Worked from Day 1 of pandemic

“I worked—we all worked—from Day 1 of the pandemic” in Jackson, Carter explained. “It was the only one that stayed open” despite the spreading modern-day plague. She was paid $8.35 an hour. This past May, Starbucks raised all baristas to $17.50, an outcome one speaker said was due to the union drive.

“They brought in a manager from outside we had never seen before” for a captive audience meeting, she said. “We weren’t told we didn’t have to attend.” Schultz says Starbucks prefers “direct communication” with workers—a common employer argument.

“This manager gave us Covid. We had to shut the store down for five days.”

Saxton, an illegally fired Starbucks worker from Augusta, Ga., and a partially disabled veteran, said even before the firm canned him for organizing its store there, it cut his hours so much he lost its already costly health insurance. That retaliation meant he had to go back to the local Veterans Administration clinic for his care, but also left his wife and child without coverage.

After the firm fired an Augusta manager for being too sympathetic to the workers, it brought in an anti-union manager “who moved everything around every day. Then she wrote down names” for discipline when disoriented workers couldn’t find the new locations of the machines.

“They were definitely engaging in anti-union activity,” Saxton said.

If Starbucks beats the unionization drive by dragging it through the board and the courts, using its wealth to produce interminable delays to wear down the grass-roots workers and their union backers, Starbucks Workers United, that sends a message to rest of the corporate class, said Block.

“What has happened” at Starbucks “is not just a collection of individual violations. It is a coordinated company campaign that shows the company has the will, the stamina and the resources” to defeat any union organizing drive.

“What will other workers around the country think of when they see Starbucks can do this?”

Her answer: “Workers rights” in the U.S. “are as weak as a Starbucks coffee cup.”

Video of the hearing is at https://www.help.senate.gov/hearings/no-company-is-above-the-law-the-need-to-end-illegal-union-busting-at-starbucks.

Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but a holy terror when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.El galardonado periodista Mark Gruenberg es el director de la oficina de People’s World en Washington, D.C. También es editor del servicio de noticias sindicales Press Associates Inc. (PAI).

Info-Picketing Starbucks Stores for Valentine’s Day / by CP Maine Staff

Today, Starbucks workers and their allies were out in front of over one hundred stores across the nation, explaining to customers that union-busting not only hurts workers, but customers too.

Biddeford Maine Starbucks | twitter.com/MaineSBWU

They informed customers about the impact of the company’s reduction of labor hours on customer service and working conditions. This, they explained, was the reason for the longer wait times customers are experiencing. They asked customers for their support, requesting that they sign the “No Contract, No Coffee Pledge.”

Customers received flyers that stated, “Starbucks thinks there are too many workers making your order, so they are cutting labor and you are paying the price. Same cost to you, but double the wait times, and less time connecting with our community.”

Handing out flyers outside the Starbucks store on Congress Street in Portland, Maine, Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) supporters said that their interactions with customers and other passersby were overwhelmingly positive.

Valentine’s Day may be all about “sharing the love,” but today Starbucks workers and allies decided to share with the people “the love they lack from the company whose profits are soaring.”

“Starbucks is cutting labor hours despite record breaking profits year after year,” according to a recent SBWU statement, “[t]his causes workers to be financially stressed and overworked, and it causes customers to experience significantly longer wait times. We’re asking customers to stand with the over 7,000 baristas who have joined Starbucks Workers United as we fight this retaliation.”

The SBWU is making good on its promise to increase its efforts to enlist the company’s customers as allies in its nationwide organizing drive.

The SBWU is asking supporters to sign this pledge:

https://crm.broadstripes.com/ctf/SJID0H

Starbucks Workers United

Maine News: Biddeford Starbucks Workers File to Unionize / by Andy O’Brien

Credit: Libby March for the Washington Post via Getty Images

Starbucks workers at a store location in Biddeford announced their intent to unionize last week, joining hundreds of Starbucks employees at 260 of the company’s stores across the country who have filed for union elections.

In a letter to Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz, the workers at Store #48490 said the decision “comes from a love for our store and communities.” However, they pointed that while Starbucks’ profits are soaring, the employees are overworked, underpaid and “burnt to the core.” The letter reads in part:

We are tired. We’ve continued to make every moment mean something, even though our hours have been cut drastically, our income threatened and our benefits taken away. Starbucks has decreased training hours significantly over the past few years. It is unrealistic to support incoming partners with such a short span of time, on top of the insufficient staffing. We are struggling daily on a mental, emotional and physical level. We’ve had to pick up second jobs to provide for ourselves and our families. Our pay rates fail to compete with the rising costs of living.

The Biddeford workers also complained that the company is putting them and their customers at risk for COVID exposure by forcing employees to come into work sick.

“It’s become clear to us that Starbucks has chosen to put profits over its partners,” they wrote.

By unionizing, they said said they hope to “rebuild the company that once valued us as partners.”

“We want empathy, respect and transparency. If you insist on calling us partners, then treat us as such,” they wrote. “We are the face of Starbucks. We deserve a seat at the table to have our voices heard and dignified. We demand that Starbucks recognize our legal right to unionize and refrain from underhanded , illegal anti-union tactics at our store. Enough is enough.”

The letter was signed by Starbucks employees Ash Macomber, Preslee Jennings, Chloe Hoecker, Chloe Corral, Ashley Tomah, Stephanie Elliot and “others who wish to remain anonymous.”

Andy O’Brien is the communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO.

Maine AFL-CIO Weekly Update, May 19, 2022, https://maineaflcio.org/news/

Starbucks Workers Have Filed to Unionize 200 Stores / by Sharon Zhang

Picket signs are pictured at a rally in support of workers of two Seattle Starbucks locations that announced plans to unionize, during an evening rally at Cal Anderson Park in Seattle, Washington, on January 25, 2022 | Jason Redmond – AFP via Getty Images

This week, Starbucks workers hit a milestone of 200 stores filing to unionize. The union has doubled the number of filings in just over six weeks, with more stores joining the movement at a remarkable pace.

As noted by More Perfect Union, the milestone marks an acceleration in the union drive. The first 100 stores filed for unionization over the course of about 172 days; the second 100 stores took only 48 days. Stores are now filing at an average of more than two stores a day, and have filed in 30 states. Union filings cover over 5,000 workers across the country.

The milestone also comes as Starbucks Workers United has doubled the number of stores that have successfully formed a union. Just about a month ago, six stores had voted to unionize; as of yesterday, 13 stores had voted to form a union, with more elections in the pipeline.

Three stores in Rochester, New York, won a union after their votes were counted on Thursday, marking the first stores in Rochester to unionize. There are now unionized stores in New York, Arizona, Washington and Tennessee, including the company’s flagship roastery in New York City.

“My heart is so full. I couldn’t be more proud of the strength, patience, and perseverance our team demonstrated throughout this very difficult transition,” said Michaela Wagstaff, a shift supervisor and union organizer at a suburban Rochester store, at a press conference. “To others who wish to begin this journey, it’s real and it’s possible. To those who paved the way, thank you for allowing us to learn from you and rely on you.”

Starbucks Workers United has won all but one of its union elections so far, despite a harsh union-busting campaign from the company, which appears to be escalating its tactics as the union secures more wins. The company has been firing pro-union workers in attempts to quash union efforts; though retaliating against workers for unionizing is illegal, labor charges can take months or years to investigate, meaning that the union vote could be compromised even if the company is later found to have been breaking the law.

Recently, Starbucks fired union organizer Laila Dalton, a worker in Phoenix, Arizona, who the labor board found was previously illegally retaliated against by the company. Dalton, the only Black person at her store, was threatened by managers and Starbucks HR, who interrogated her over her union organizing and asked if she had made false accusations of racism.

The union has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over Dalton’s firing, saying that her firing was a violation of labor laws. The NLRB previously found the firing of another Phoenix union organizer, Alyssa Sanchez, to be illegal.

Meanwhile, the company has spent likely millions of dollars on its anti-union efforts. It recently fired its top general counsel Rachel Gonzalez, who received $5.3 million in compensation last year, according to Bloomberg Law. The termination is likely related to the union-busting drive, which interim CEO Howard Schultz appears to be planning to escalate.

In a town hall with workers on his first day as interim CEO on Monday, Schultz said that companies like Starbucks are “being assaulted in many ways by the threat of unionization.” He referred to unions as “outside organizations” that are driving a wedge between management and employees — even though union organizers have repeatedly insisted that the workers themselves make up the union, and that the only party creating division is management.

Workers have repeatedly asked Schultz and former CEO Kevin Johnson to sign onto their “Fair Election Principles,” which outline non-interference guidelines for the company.

“We know that this is a victory and we will celebrate it as such, but we won’t feel true success until Starbucks signs the Fair Election Principles to allow others the room to truly engage in an unbiased election,” said Maggie Carter, an organizer in Knoxville, Tennessee, when the Knoxville store won their union last week. “This company can do so much better for us, and we can’t wait to show the entire country exactly what that looks like.”

Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout.

Truthout, April 8, 2022, https://truthout.org/

How the Starbucks Worker Organizing Model Can Accelerate Unionization Across the Country / by Shuvu Bhattarai

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez meets with Starbucks Workers United members who are working to unionize their store in Astoria, Queens, New York, on March 27, 2022. (Starbucks Astoria Blvd / Twitter)

A Starbucks union drive is sweeping across the country. In an industry that has been all but impossible to unionize, these baristas have created an organizing model that can be replicated at similar corporate chains everywhere.

The Starbucks Workers United campaign, having secured National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election victories at six out of seven stores, with well over 150 stores filing for an NLRB election as of last week, is one of the most invigorating labor campaigns in recent US history.

The Starbucks workers currently spearheading the SB Workers United drive have charted a way forward for organizing corporate chain stores. Their strategy should be carefully studied and implemented across other corporate chains and adjusted according to context.

The story of SB Workers United begins in Elmwood Park, Buffalo, in 2019, when some Starbucks workers, many of them inspired by the Bernie Sanders campaign and affiliated with socialist organizations, reached out to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)–affiliated union Workers United to talk about unionizing.

After over a year of underground organizing, the campaign went public on August 23, with the workers posting a declaration of the intent to unionize to Starbucks Corporate on Twitter through their own account. The workers chose to call themselves Starbucks Workers United and created a website with basic educational resources for Starbucks workers across the country about why they should form a union, as well as contact information for workers seeking to organize.

With their declaration made public, the union drive drew the coverage of various corporate media outlets and entered into public consciousness. Interest in unionizing Starbucks was sparked across the country, with workers reaching out to Starbucks Workers United and Starbucks customers directly talking to workers about the importance of unions.

With the victory of the first NLRB election at the Elmwood Park store on December 6, 2021, the first Starbucks store in the United States was unionized. This generated enormous media attention, and Starbucks Workers United received a flurry of unionization requests from workers around the country. The media attention of the union effort generated mass interest from workers, and the website allowed for this interest to be converted to action.

After the NLRB ruled on February 26 in a decision involving the Mesa, Arizona, Starbucks that organizing a union in a single store is appropriate, SB Workers United’s particular method of organizing through rapid NLRB elections was legitimized, paving the way in the short term for similar drives to take place. This must be exploited.

Baristas Take the Lead

From its beginning to the present, the SB Workers United union campaign has been a worker-driven project. The union staff of Workers United, the union which SB Workers United is seeking to join, have played a critical but supporting role during this drive. Workers United is given the leads of workers seeking to unionize by Starbucks Workers United. The staff organizers set up meetings with the union-interested workers, taking them through the process of charting their stores, preparing themselves for management backlash, and filing for a union election.

In stark contrast to some other union campaigns in fast food in which the staff organizers handle the bulk of organizing activity, in the case of Starbucks Workers United, the staff function as an educational resource for the Starbucks workers. The primary organizers of the SB Workers United campaign are the Starbucks workers themselves.

As of this writing, workers in only six stores are members of the Workers United union, but all of the Starbucks workers who have filed NLRB petitions and many more who have begun the process of organizing are all members of SB Workers United. SB Workers United is independent of Workers United. While not legally recognized, SB Workers United is already a union with over a thousand members across the country.

The SB Workers United union has its own national steering committee and various working groups that direct the strategy of the campaign. Through the creation of a space that encourages the creative talents and energies of enthusiastic workers, SB Workers United has been able to create a wealth of material, including community support guides, various social media outlets, and pro-union artwork, to build a highly resilient and capable movement that only continues to grow.

Though SB Workers United represents a small minority of all Starbucks workers, it has enough of a force to compel Starbucks to spend millions of dollars in its growing anti-union campaign, announce wage increases to try to head off the threat of a union contract, and even force former CEO Howard Schultz out of retirement. With a recent strike in Denver and the organization of rallies around the country in defense of fired pro-union workers, SB Workers United has already demonstrated that it can use weapons like strikes and community mobilization to win its demands.

A Reproducible Method

If we boil the SB Workers United Campaign down to its essentials, we’re left with a worker organizing method for corporate chains that can be sparked by any organization with sufficient labor and resources. The SB Workers United organizing history is summarized as follows:

  • A core group of class-conscious workers reaches out to a local union to take steps towards winning legal union recognition.
  • Workers create a separate, independent, and informal union called Starbucks Workers United, which handles media strategy and creates a central point of contact (a website) to which inspired workers around the country can reach out.
  • SB Workers United goes public with the notice of NLRB elections, which draws media attention.
  • Each victory is highly publicized, drawing in new worker leads through the SB Workers United website, which then sends them to professional union staff for training and support in organizing local stores.

The key to the success of SB Workers United is that they have built an independent organization of workers seeking to unionize, so that the workers themselves are the ones who lead the campaign. The critical role of outside organizations (Workers United) is to provide the Starbucks workers with the strategic advice and the technical tools necessary to win.

How can their strategy be utilized to spark strong union campaigns for other corporate chains?

The answer to this question is that a method must be developed to build a core of class-conscious and militant workers across the corporate chain and to develop those workers to be effective organizers and leaders of the campaign. The greatest barrier to organizing chain stores is that class-conscious workers are isolated from one another. For this reason, developing a central point of contact should be the first step to unionizing, so that the workers who have the greatest interest in organizing will reach out to the central organizing body.

The method to organize corporate chains is as follows:

  • Build a central point of contact that workers seeking unionization can reach out to (like a website, email address, and social media accounts).
  • Focus on worker education, arming workers with knowledge of the steps to form a union and methods of creating support for unions within their workplace.
  • Having gathered and developed a core group of worker-organizers, connect the workers to each other to create the formation of a union outside the bounds of legality. At this stage, the workers must be prepared to take leadership of their union.
  • Build methods of public outreach for the new union group. Every chance to increase the visibility of the campaign, such as high-profile NLRB election victories, must be seized so that the most militant and inspired workers begin to reach out to the newly formed union.

With these basic steps, a new union will be birthed into existence. The nuances of the organization — its strategy, its ultimate mission, its leadership, its working groups — must be decided democratically by the workers themselves and are always subject to change depending on the changing conditions of the campaign.

Workers Themselves at the Helm

There are practical reasons why workers must be the ones driving and leading the unionization drive. For one, they are the ones who best understand and feel the numerous ways they are exploited by their management and thus are best able to develop tactics to use their shared conditions as a point of unity. Second, the common driving factor for workers seeking unionization is a lack of agency, which manifests itself in numerous forms: management abuse, poor pay, and unstable schedules. By creating a space where the workers are able to exert control over their workplace, through leadership of their unionization campaign, a space of empowerment is created that can bring forward the best from every worker. To create a force of highly motivated worker-organizers, worker control over strategy is an absolute precondition.

The SB Workers United drive is a clear reminder of what a union is in its essence. A union is formed not when the state recognizes it, but when the workers recognize it. A union is formed when workers have connected with each other and created an organization that reflects their collective will.

It is important to note that Workers United has only a handful of staff to help assist the Starbucks workers. With the ongoing success of the SB Workers United drive, volunteer- and resource-rich organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) could take it upon themselves to apply this model to other unorganized chains. Through initiatives like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and numerous successful electoral campaigns, as well as DSA’s presence throughout the United States, the organization’s skilled members could help create a central point of contact for aspiring pro-union workers, provide education for the workers to organize and protect themselves from retaliation, fundraise for the workers, help workers with legal issues, and use its media expertise and connections to make sure the workers’ voices are heard far and wide. DSA could thus help workers organize across corporate chains, as EWOC has already begun to do.

The stunning growth of the SB Workers United movement has attracted support from labor unions, socialist organizations, community activists, and progressive forces throughout the country and has inspired numerous workers to challenge their bosses and reclaim their dignity. As this movement gains momentum, we can and should put our foot on the gas. Who knows where it could lead?

Shuvu Bhattarai is a Nepali-American labor organizer and a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America in Queens.

Jacobin, March 28, 2022, https://jacobinmag.com/2022/03/sb-workers-united-labor-organizing-corporate-chains