First they won in Buffalo. Now they have won a victory on the other side of the country.
On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board announced that workers at a Starbucks in Mesa, Ariz., had voted 25 to 3 to join a union, with three contested votes. The result brought the number of unionized owned stores to three, from about 9,000 nationwide.
The victory was the union’s first since two stores voted to unionize in Buffalo in December, but it could be the start of a bigger trend. More than 100 Starbucks stores in more than 25 states have petitioned for union elections, the most since that first win. The next count will likely come from three more stores in the Buffalo area that have already voted. Starbucks employees in cities such as Boston, Chicago and Seattle are expected to vote or are likely to vote in the coming months.
“This is another historic moment for Starbucks partners and service industry employees across the country,” Michelle Hejduk, a shift chief at the store, said in a statement. “This movement started in Buffalo and we’ve now taken it across the country.”
Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesperson, said in a statement that the company’s position had not changed. “As we have said all along, we will respect the process and negotiate in good faith based on our principles,” he said, adding: “We hope the union does the same.”
Lawyers advising companies on labor relations said Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, appeared to have significant momentum in organizing Starbucks employees.
“Obviously, the workforce is very sympathetic to what the union is selling,” said Brian West Easley, a management attorney at Jones Day. “At this point, they probably rightly think they have the upper hand, given the number of petitions filed each week.”
The company has generally tried to challenge the union on a store-by-store basis, challenging the polling pole for every labor council election and sending company officials to cities where workers have applied for elections, in part to share its concerns about unionization. The challenges delayed the counting of votes in Mesa and the second round of Buffalo stores.
But Mr. Easley argued that if the company continued to suffer defeats, it would become more difficult for Starbucks to maintain that approach, especially as the number of stores running for election increases.
“The bigger this gets, the more resources are stretched and the more ineffective they become,” he said. “The ability to push back decreases as the number increases.”
At least one prominent Starbucks investor echoed those concerns, arguing that the company appeared to be wasting money in its efforts to oppose the union. “The company is spending significant time and money making these arguments for the NLRB,” said Jonas Kron, the chief advocacy officer of Trillium Asset Management, which makes investments to advance environmental, social and governance goals and said: an approximately $43 million stake in Starbucks last year. “It doesn’t feel like they’re using investor resources — stakeholder resources — that well.”
Mr. Kron and Trillium have urged the company to take a neutral stance towards the union. Other labor experts suggested it could eventually be forced to do so, whether it likes it or not.
“I’m sure there will be a tipping point at some point,” said Amy Zdravecky, a management attorney at Barnes & Thornburg. “How many losses do you have before you change strategy?”
Ms. Zdravecky added that the union’s ability to win elections in a state not normally sympathetic to organized labor indicates that the campaign remains in power, and poses a risk to Starbucks’ approach to oppose the union is that it could alienate the liberal party from the company. – agile customer base.
“Fighting unions may not align with where they want to be elsewhere,” she said.
Many of the issues workers in Mesa cited in their decision to support the union were similar to those identified by workers in Buffalo, such as staffing levels and Covid-19 safety. Liz Alanna, a shift manager at the store, said last fall customers sometimes waited 45 minutes after submitting a mobile order because there weren’t enough baristas to handle the volume. “The lobby would be full of people waiting,” Ms. Alanna said.
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The Mesa campaign had an additional subplot that raised the stakes for workers. In early October, the store manager, Brittany Harrison, was diagnosed with leukemia. The company initially seemed to rally behind her, Ms. Harrison said in an interview, but attitudes later changed.
“I would contact the district manager and it would go to voicemail or ring forever and she wouldn’t call back,” she said. Ms. Harrison, and other employees such as Ms. Alanna, said she repeatedly sought an assistant manager to help in the store, but none came.
The situation came to a head on Friday, November 12, when Ms Harrison fell ill at the store and then went on to serve her two-week notice.
The shop workers filed their petition for union elections the following week. “We had a really easy time moving forward,” Ms. Alanna said, citing frustration with the way the company had treated Ms. Harrison.
Mr Borges said the company had provided support to Ms Harrison during her time there and had offered to supply an assistant manager if she went on leave, which she had yet to do.
Starbucks’ approach to the union election in Mesa was similar to that in Buffalo. The company sent several officials to the store, including two new managers, at least two new assistant managers, a senior human resources officer in Colorado, a senior manager who had worked in California and a regional vice president in Colorado.
Employees said they felt that the managers and other officials were partly there to control them. Ms. Hejduk said the new managers appeared to be implementing a policy in which at least one manager must be in the store at all times to “babysit,” as she put it.
Ms Hejduk said she was recently told on a weekday morning that the store was closing and her shift was canceled because no manager was available to come in, even though she has a key and often worked in the store without a manager. filing union elections. She said the policy was relaxed after the union vote ended.
In Mesa, as in at least one of the Buffalo stores, Starbucks also brought in several new employees after the election filing, who had typically spent a few weeks training in other stores. The union argued that the off-site training was intended to ensure that workers entered employment without contact with union supporters and that the workers were brought in to tone down support for the union. The union, which argues that some new employees hadn’t worked in the store long enough to vote, won a challenge on similar grounds in Buffalo.
Mr Borges said the officials raised operational issues such as staffing and asking for input from employees and educating them on the risks of unions, although he said Starbucks would protect its employees’ rights to join. respected a trade union. He said a separate location focused on instructing new employees allowed the company to train them more efficiently, and that all employees who received ballots were eligible under NLRB rules. He said it was occasionally a policy to always have one manager on when there was new leadership in a store.
The count in Mesa and at the three additional Buffalo-area stores was held up by management issues over a key legal issue: the correct polling pole for the union elections.
In a rejection of Starbucks, the labor relations council ruled Wednesday that stores could vote individually, rather than having to vote with other stores in a geographic area. The board’s detailed ruling makes it more difficult for Starbucks to get its way elsewhere.
Unions typically prefer smaller-scale votes to reduce the number of votes needed to secure a majority in at least some locations, but Starbucks has argued that stores in the same market are comparable to a single unit because employees work in multiple locations. can work and because district managers oversee them as a cohesive group.
An option for Starbucks in light of its recent defeats, said Mr. Jones Day’s Easley, would be to resign himself to a union presence and position the company to minimize union influence. For example, he suggested Starbucks could target its opposition to cities where the union had already won, to make sure there weren’t several union stores that would give it more leverage.
“The next phase of this could be divide and conquer,” he said. “Make sure they don’t end up with voting blocks that can shut down companies in a market.”
He added, referring to the union, “If they can control the market in a particular location, they have leverage to get Starbucks to do something.”
