Starbucks Is Breaking Ground as One of the Worst Union Busters in Recent Memory
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz appears willing to go to extraordinary lengths — even being prepared to risk destroying the company he created in order to break the union — to maintain unilateral control of the workplace. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
Starbucks and its union-busting law firm are pulling out all the stops in Seattle in an attempt to destroy the union push that has swept the country.
by JOHN LOGAN
The Starbucks Workers United union campaign has now won over 164 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections, and over 300 stores have petitioned for NLRB elections. But since the campaign first went public in August of last year, Starbucks HQ and its union-avoidance law form, Littler Mendelson, has mounted a blistering anti-union campaign to try to stop workers from self-organizing: it has fired workers, threatened them with loss of benefits, closed stores, reduced workers hours to get them to quit, promised rewards to those who agree to oppose the union, spied on pro-union workers and subjected them to endless hours of coercive group and, especially, individual anti-union meetings. Starbucks’s is one of the worst, most brutal, most mean-spirited anti-union efforts of recent decades.
Now, in the company’s hometown of Seattle, Starbucks is restructuring its operations in an effort to create a multiple-store bargaining unit – a “Heritage District” of three stores – which would undermine organizing activity at one of its most prized stores. But just as has happened at other pro-union stores — in Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Boston, Buffalo, Ithaca, Richmond, Virginia, Overland Park, Kansas, Columbia, South Carolina, and elsewhere — Starbucks workers at one of the proposed Heritage District stores, which has already petitioned for a NLRB election, are striking to protest management’s unlawful anti-union practices.
Few corporations are associated as closely with their home cities as Starbucks is with Seattle. The company’s first store, which opened in March 1971 in Pike Place Market, plays an important role in the Starbucks’s history and folklore. Today, the store is a tourist destination (customers regularly queue up to get in) that sells an enormous amount of company merchandise. The second important Pike Place store, located at First and Pike — the store that appears on countless photos of the iconic market — is also critical to its corporate identity, and Starbucks HQ would be loath to allow workers at either of these two stores to vote union.
Freed From Management’s Watchful Eye, Starbucks Workers Go Union
ne reason that Starbucks union drive has been so successful is its stores’ relative lack of managerial supervision. Store managers don’t often work on the floor, which means baristas have plenty of time to talk union. When they are left to decide for themselves, they overwhelmingly choose to unionize, even in some of the most conservative parts of the country.
Starbucks’s original Pike Place Market store, on the other hand, has three to four store managers — and mostly long-term workers, many of whom identify closely with management. The First and Pike store is standard-sized (the average size of bargaining units has been twenty-six) and has two store managers — one of whom was flown to Buffalo for the anti-union shock-and-awe campaign last fall — and one assistant store manager.
Despite this significantly higher number of management personnel, organizing at the First and Pike store started in April and was given an added impetus by the abrupt Heritage District announcement. As in other stores that have organized, workers endured several group and individual captive-audience meetings. Yet in the first week of June, fifteen of its twenty-three employees signed union cards, and the store petitioned for an NLRB election. If Starbucks gets its way, these workers may never get to vote for a union.
Moreover, workers in the other stores are equally unhappy, with one worker from the original store posting a long, critical comment on the reorganization plan on Reddit. She subsequently reached out to the union. The worker at the original Pike Place Starbucks store wrote, “Another big reason behind this I think is to prevent the spread of unions. Our stores are so close to unionizing but to prevent it from spreading to other districts they cut us off from the rest of the company.”
Starbucks Believes Multistore Bargaining Units Would Kill the Organizing Campaign
tarbucks has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, tried to get the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to sanction multistore bargaining units, in the belief that this would undermine organizing. One big union-avoidance firm wrote, “Had Starbucks prevailed in that argument, it may have been able to get more baristas who were not in favor of a union to participate and change the outcome.” Another stated, “Starbucks knows it has the votes if you include all of the stores that it seeks to include.” Union-avoidance law firms have long sought to manipulate bargaining units to undermine worker organizing, usually by padding the unit with employees they believe will vote against the union.