Posts tagged with "Starbucks Workers United"

Above, Starbucks store manager Kim. (Photo source: Starbucks/Instagram)

Starbucks committed ‘egregious’ violations in battling union, judge rules

March 3, 2023

Starbucks committed “egregious and widespread” violations of federal labor law while trying to halt union campaigns, ruled a federal administrative law judge, who ordered the coffee giant to reopen closed stores and reimburse back pay and damages to employees who launched a nationwide organizing drive at the company, reports The Washington Post.

Starbucks showed “a general disregard for the employees’ fundamental rights,” Judge Michael A. Rosas wrote in a 220-page order released on Wednesday, March 1.

In resolving an extensive case that combined 33 unfair labor practices charges from 21 stores in the Buffalo area, Rosas held that the company retaliated against employees affiliated with Starbucks Workers United as they began a union drive in 2021. Since then, 268 of the roughly 9,000 company-owned U.S. stores have voted to unionize, and Starbucks’s interim Chief Executive Howard Schultz has drawn the ire of liberal political leaders.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said Wednesday that he would force a vote to subpoena Schultz as part of a hearing about unionization efforts at Starbucks.

“To order a company to reopen stores that it’s closed should be embarrassing for Starbucks,” said Rebecca Givan, an associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University.

Rosas’s order requires Starbucks to halt a sweeping list of behaviors that include:

Retaliating against employees for unionizing;
Promising improved pay and benefits, if workers renounced the union;
Surveilling union-supporting employees while on-site;
Refusing to hire prospective employees who back the union; and
Relocating union organizers to new stores to halt the group’s activity, while overstaffing stores ahead of union votes.

Starbucks, the judge said, must reopen stores it closed as union momentum swelled among workers, rescind dozens of disciplinary actions taken against Buffalo-area employees, pay “reasonable consequential damages,” and offer to reinstate terminated workers to their jobs.

Rosas’s order also calls for Schultz and Denise Nelson, the company’s senior vice president of U.S. operations, to read a 14-page notice that explains workers’ rights and how the company violated the law.

That same notice must be posted in each of the company’s stores, Rosas ruled, and shared digitally with employees. He also ordered Starbucks to begin negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with Buffalo-area workers.

The judge wrote that the company exhibited “widespread union animus” that colored supervisors’ decision-making, an accusation that Starbucks has repeatedly denied.

“When workers launched their organizing campaign in the summer of 2021, we never could have imagined the lengths Starbucks would go to try to stop employees from exercising their legal right to organize,” Gary Bonadonna Jr., manager of the Workers United Rochester regional joint board, said in a statement.

“This ruling proves what we have been saying all along: Starbucks is the poster child of union-busting in the United States. We are thrilled that the company is being held accountable for their actions and we will continue to fight until every Starbucks worker wins the right to organize.”

Starbucks spokesman Andrew Trull said the company believes the judge’s ruling and order are “inappropriate given the record in this matter.”

Starbucks is considering “all options to obtain further legal review,” Trull said.

The company said workers were terminated after violating company policies and not in retaliation for engaging in union activity. The judge did not accept that explanation.

Research contact: @washingtonpost

Photo source: HuffPost

Controversy: Starbucks fires union leaders In Memphis

February 10, 2022

Starbucks has fired several workers in Memphis, Tennessee, who were part of the growing unionization effort that’s spreading quickly throughout the coffee chain, reports HuffPost.

The campaign, Starbucks Workers United, said on February 8 on Twitter that the company had canned “virtually the entire union leadership in Memphis”—calling it a case of retaliation for their union support. The group said the total number of firings came to seven, or about one-third of the workers at the store.

“The arc of Starbucks’ union-busting is long, but it bends toward losing,” the campaign wrote.

Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesperson, said the company did not fire workers for organizing, but for violating safety and security protocols. He said workers opened the locked store after close of business without permission and let nonemployees in.

Several workers recently gave MWC-TV, the NBC affiliate in Memphis, an in-store interview about the union campaign.

Richard Bensinger, a longtime organizer involved in the Starbucks campaign, said on Twitter that the workers were fired “for talking to local TV reporters in their store!”

Borges said he wanted to make it “unequivocally clear” that the company didn’t fire the workers for talking to the media. “To suggest that is to completely ignore the clear violations of known policies that these partners openly acknowledged they were aware of as part of this investigation,” he said in an email.

But Nikki Taylor, a shift supervisor at the store, said in a statement through the union that she was “fired by Starbucks today for ‘policies’ that I’ve never heard of before.” She called the firing a “clear attempt by Starbucks to retaliate.”

The Starbucks workers have been organizing with the union Workers United, which plans to file unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board over the firings. The union would argue that the workers were illegally targeted because of their union support.

In a statement, Starbucks Workers United called the firings the “most blatant act of union-busting yet.”

Research contact: @HuffPost

Above, Starbucks employees and supporters react during an union-election party in Buffalo, New York. (Photo source: @bsxphoto/#starbucks /Instagram)

Starbucks workers at Buffalo, New York-area store vote in favor of unionizing

December 13, 2021

Baristas at a Starbucks cafe in Buffalo, New York, have voted to form the first labor union at one of the coffee giant’s own U.S. locations in its 50-year history, as workers across the country push companies for better pay and benefits in a tight labor market, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The result is a victory for cafe workers, who petitioned in August to vote on forming a union to have a direct channel of negotiation with the company—and a blow to Starbucks, which spent months appealing to Buffalo-area baristas to vote down a labor body.

“We’ve done it, despite everything the company has thrown at us,” said Michelle Eisen, a Buffalo Starbucks barista who works at the store that voted to unionize and who helped organize the campaign, called Starbucks Workers United.

In the three separate store elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday, December 9 , the federal body said that one store voted for unionizing, one voted against it, and results in the third weren’t conclusive. The labor board said it will review challenges from both sides in that store election.

Pro-union workers said they would immediately push the company to bargain with them over the issue of pay and other matters. Union leaders said they intended to challenge the results of the second store’s vote against unionizing, citing ballot irregularities.

Starbucks spokesperson Reggie Borges pointed to the election’s split results and said the company values all of its workers. “We will continue to focus on the best Starbucks experience we can deliver for every partner and our customers,” he said.

Some other unions Thursday pointed to the victory as a sign of the growing power of labor advocacy in the U.S. In September, popular support for unions hit a high last documented in 1965, according to Gallup.

Research contact: @WSJ