Starbucks workers in Western New York appear to have achieved a historic labor victory on Thursday, forming the first union inside the coffee chain's U.S. corporate-owned stores.
Starbucks Workers United won the first of three union elections held for a trio of stores in the Buffalo area, after a tally by the National Labor Relations Board. The tally at two other stores hadn't been done as of this posting, but workers voted 19-8 in favor of unionization at one store.
Starbucks may challenge the results if they are certified by the board.
Starbucks will be expected to bargain with at least a few dozen of its US workers, which it callspartners, according to the preliminary count. Starbucks workers who were part of the organizing effort celebrated at their union office.
Pro-union workers voted in favor of the duelling campaigns between them and company management. Starbucks dispatched managers and executives to the Buffalo area after the workers filed for elections. Howard Shultz tried to discourage workers from unionizing when he delivered a speech to the workers at the local hotel.
The coffee chain has roughly 9000 corporate stores in the country, none of which have a union.
The eleventh-hour efforts were lambasted by Starbucks Workers United. The company's counter-campaign didn't seem to have stopped the organizing effort in the bud. The union has filed for elections at three more Starbucks locations in the Buffalo area and one more in Mesa, Arizona, but the National Labor Relations Board has not scheduled votes for those stores yet.
Starbucks licenses out thousands more stores, some of which are unionized. The company has never had a union for the stores it operates.
Starbucks Workers United would make history on Thursday according to a barista at one of the stores. She was very critical of the company's decision to send in outside management to the stores that were considering unionization, saying it was just meant to pressure them to vote "no."
Brisack told the Huffington Post in October that he thought Starbucks liked money more than unions. I think Starbucks hates unions more than they like money.
I was a non-union worker. I'll be working at Starbucks on Saturday, the first unionized Starbucks in the US.
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December 7, 2021.
The Starbucks workers who have unionized represent a tiny fraction of the workforce, but their campaign holds more significance than the numbers suggest. Starbucks has not dealt with a U.S. union since it was founded as a Seattle coffee brand. Supporters hope that the effort to organize Starbucks will spread to other service industry giants that have been union-free.
A victory in the election would be a major breakthrough for all workers in the low- wage service industry, according to Sen.Bernie Sanders.
Union membership in the private sector has fallen while it has risen in the public sector. Starbucks has grown more aggressive in their fight against unions in recent decades. The company has denied the charges of surveilling and coercing workers.
Starbucks Workers United members meet in Buffalo, New York.
Starbucks hired a management-side law firm to fight the organizing effort. The company tried to enlarge the proposed bargaining unit by including stores in the Buffalo region, a move that may have hurt the union's support and forced it to broaden its organizing. The Starbucks legal efforts were shot down by the board of the National Labor Relations Board, which now has a Democratic majority.
If the election results are certified by the National Labor Relations Board, the workers who successfully unionized will face another battle: securing a first collective bargaining agreement. Not all workers are successful in winning such contracts. In the case of Starbucks, the company wouldn't want to give workers significant pay hikes, better benefits and other improvements if they were to unionize elsewhere.
The Fight for $15 campaign, which raised wages in fast food and other low-wage industries, was orchestrated by the Service Employees International Union and will be part of the Starbucks union. The core group of pro-union workers were advised by Richard Bensinger, a former organizing director for the labor federation.
Bensinger told HuffPost that winning at least one of the elections was important to gain a toehold inside the company and to show workers elsewhere it was possible to win.
Bensinger predicted that it was going beyond Buffalo.
