Starbucks workers added momentum to a union campaign made public in end of August and upended decades of non-union work in company-owne...
Starbucks workers added momentum to a union campaign made public in end of August and upended decades of non-union work in company-owned stores.
On Thursday and Friday, workers at six stores in upstate New York voted to unionize, according to the National Labor Relations Board, bringing to 16 the total number of company-owned stores where workers live. workers supported a union. The union, Workers United, also led by a wide margin at a Kansas store whose votes were counted on Friday, but the number of contested ballots officially leaves the outcome uncertain until their status can be resolved.
The union has lost only one election so far, but it is formally contesting the result.
Since the union obtained its first two wins in the elections that ended in December, workers at more than 175 other stores in at least 25 states filed for union elections, out of about 9,000 company-owned stores in the United States. The Labor Board will count ballots in at least three more stores next week.
The success of organizing at Starbucks appears to reflect growing worker interest in organizing, including efforts at Amazon, where workers last week voted to unionize a Staten Island warehouse by a significant margin.
Labor Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo on Wednesday announcement that union election filings were up more than 50% in the previous six months compared to the same period a year earlier. Ms Abruzzo expressed concern that funding and staffing shortages were making it difficult for the agency to keep up with activity, saying in a statement that the council “needs a significant increase in funding to carry out the mission of the agency”.
Starbucks has sought to persuade workers not to unionize by holding anti-union meetings with workers and conversations between managers and individual employees, but some employees say the meetings have only galvanized their support for unionization.
In some cases, Starbucks also sent a number of senior officials to out-of-town stores, a move the company says is aimed at addressing operational issues such as staffing and training, but which some union supporters said they find daunting.
The union accused Starbucks of seeking to reduce hours nationwide to encourage long-serving employees to leave the company and replace them with workers who are more union-skeptical. And the union says Starbucks retaliated against workers for supporting the union by sanctioning or firing them. Last month, the labor commission filed a formal complaint against Starbucks for retaliating against two Arizona employees, a step he takes after finding merit in charges against employers or unions.
The company denied cutting working hours to induce employees to leave, saying it was scheduling workers in response to customer demand, and it denied accusations of union busting.
As the union campaign gathered pace in March, the company announcement that Kevin Johnson, who had served as chief executive since 2017, would be replaced on an interim basis by Howard Schultz, who had run the company twice before and remained one of its biggest investors.
Some investors who had warned Mr Johnson that the company’s union busting tactics could damage his reputation expressed optimism that the change in management could lead to a change in Starbucks’ position towards the union. But the company quickly announced that it would not agree to remain neutral in union elections, as the union had demanded, which dampened those hopes.
On Monday, the same day Mr Schultz returned as chief executive, the company fired Laila Dalton, one of two Arizona workers The NLRB had accused Starbucks of reprisals against in March. The company said Ms Dalton broke company rules by recording her colleagues’ conversations without their permission.
“A partner’s interest in a union does not exempt it from the standards we have always maintained,” Reggie Borges, a company spokesman, said in a statement, using the term of the business for one employee.
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