December 10, 2021

Starbucks workers at New York store unionise in big symbolic win for labour

By ellen

NEW YORK (NYTIMES) – Employees at a New York-area Starbucks store have voted to form a union, making it the only one of the nearly 9,000 company-owned stores in the United States to be organised and notching a key symbolic victory for labor at a time when workers across the country are expressing frustration with wages and working conditions.

The result, announced on Thursday (Dec 9) by the National Labor Relations Board, represents a major challenge to the labour model at the giant coffee retailer, which has argued that its workers enjoy some of the best wages and benefits in the retail and restaurant industry and don’t need a union.

The union was leading in an election at another store but by a margin smaller than the number of ballots the union was seeking to disqualify through challenges. The challenges must be resolved by the labour agency’s regional director in the coming days or weeks before there is a result. Workers at a third store voted against unionising, according to the board, although a union lawyer contended that some ballots had been delivered to the agency and not counted.

“Although it’s a small number of workers, the result has huge symbolic importance, and symbols are important when it comes to union organising,” Dr John Logan, a labour studies professor at San Francisco State University, said in an e-mail. “Workers who want to form a union in the United States are forced to take a considerable amount of risk, and it helps if they can see others who have taken that risk and it has paid off.”

The unionised employees, who are joining Workers United, an affiliate of the giant Service Employees International Union, received inquiries throughout the campaign from Starbucks workers across the country who said they were paying close attention and were interested in unionising as well.

Workers cited frustration over understaffing and insufficient training when they filed for union elections at the stores in late August, problems that have dogged the company for years but which appeared to worsen during the pandemic. Such problems are not unique to Starbucks and have been problems for workers across the restaurant and retail industries for many years.

“We continue on as we did today, yesterday and the day before that,” Ms Rossann Williams, Starbucks’ president of retail for North America, said in a letter to employees after the vote. “The vote outcomes will not change our shared purpose or how we will show up for each other.”

Starbucks has faced other union campaigns over the years, including one in New York City in the 2000s and one in 2019 in Philadelphia, where it fired two employees involved in organising, a move that a labour board judge found unlawful. The company appealed against the ruling and a decision is still pending.

Neither of those campaigns succeeded, but workers are unionised at Starbucks stores owned by other companies that operate them under licensing agreements. And workers at a company-owned store in Canada recently unionised.