Employees at another Starbucks in the Buffalo area voted to unionize, causing the total number of own shops with a union to four, out of about 9,000 in the entire country.
The result, announced Wednesday by the National Labor Relations Board, was the latest development in one of the most formidable challenges facing a large corporation from organized labor in years. Workers at two stores near Buffalo voted to unionize in December, while a third store in Mesa, Ariz., voted to unionize last month.
The votes in two more stores in Buffalo would be counted Wednesday afternoon.
Since the first ballot, employees at more than 100 Starbucks stores in more than 25 states have run for union elections to join Workers United, a subsidiary of the Service Employees International Union.
Workers in cities such as Seattle, Boston, Rochester, NY and Knoxville, Tennessee have started or will vote this month.
The number of votes comes at a time when tensions are mounting between the union and the company.
The union says Starbucks has systematically shortened hours across the country to encourage the departure of old workers so it can replace them with workers who are not sympathetic to unions. It also said Starbucks recently retaliated against union workers in Buffalo by pressuring them to leave the company for limiting their work availability, and by firing one for time and attendance violations.
In early February, the company fired seven Memphis employees who had attempted to unionize, citing its safety and security policies.
“Starbucks is also using policies that have not previously been implemented and policies that would not have resulted in layoffs as a pretext to fire union leaders,” the union said in a statement, adding that it was confident the fired workers would be fired. . recovered.
Last week, the union filed about 20 charges for unfair labor practices, many of which accused Starbucks of targeting union supporters for harsher treatment.
Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesperson, said in a statement that “all claims about anti-union activity are absolutely false.” Mr Borges said the company did not systematically cut hours, which he says typically falls during the slow winter months of January and February. Starbucks generally tries to respect employees’ preferences for lower availability, he added, but it was unable to at a Buffalo store where several employees had tried to reduce their availability in one go. He said an employee who was fired due to time constraints and attendance issues had previously been cited for late arrivals.
Starbucks employees in Buffalo filed a first round of petitions to hold union elections in late August, citing concerns such as understaffing and workplace safety during the pandemic, as well as a desire to have more say in how their stores are run. .
The company soon sent out-of-town executives and officials into the city, including Starbucks’ president of retail for North America, whose presence union supporters said they found intimidating and at times surreal.
Starbucks has said the officials were trying to fix operational issues, such as poor training and inefficient store layouts. Some emphasized the potential drawbacks of unions in meetings and discussions with workers.
The company also significantly increased the number of employees in at least one of the first three stores to vote, a move the company said was intended to remedy understaffing but which the union said was intended to tone down its support. The union later successfully challenged the ballots of some of these workers on the grounds that they were not actually based in the shop, helping to secure victory there.
Workers at one of the locations whose votes were due to be counted Wednesday, known as Walden & Anderson, said the company’s approach to their store was even more disruptive than the actions at stores in the Buffalo area that voted in the fall. .
Starbucks closed the Walden & Anderson store for about two months in early September and turned it into a training facility, sending employees to other locations during that time.
Leaders of the in-store union campaign said this made it more difficult for them to communicate with colleagues and maintain support for the union, which was initially high. “We just haven’t seen people in the two months we’ve been closed,” said Colin Cochran, one of the workers who wanted to join a union. Union supporters at the time did not have access to many of their colleagues’ phone numbers.
The store also added workers – from about 25 in early September to about 40 when the vote started in January. “It felt like every time we got someone on board, two new people were going to be hired,” said Mr. Cochran on the period after the store reopened in November. “It was like a hydra.”
Mr Cochran and a second employee, Jenna Black, said the store kept working hours fairly stable in the fall and most of the winter, even though the company hired more employees, but many employees had reduced their working hours when the recession hit. mood came. expired at the end of February and that some were therefore considering leaving.
“I kept it at 25 hours and for the past few weeks I’ve been at 16, 18 hours,” said Ms. Black. She added that while she loved her colleagues, “there’s no reason to waste my time making this job a priority if I can’t live off it.”
Mr Cochran said the pattern gave the impression that the store only wanted the extra workers in the run-up to the vote, to tone down union support.
The union said workers in several states, including Oregon, Virginia, Ohio, New York, Texas and Colorado, also reported that their work hours were cut more than usual for the winter.
Michaela Sellaro, a shift chief at a Denver store seeking to unionize, said she’d averaged about 31 hours in the past four weeks, after working an average of about 36 hours in the same weeks last year. “It feels like they threaten our job security,” said Ms Sellaro.
Mr Borges said there were more hours than usual at Walden & Anderson in the fall to provide additional training, but the hours there now reflected customer demand and the same was true nationally. He cited the Omicron variant of the coronavirus as an additional factor in national planning.
“We always plan what we think the store needs based on customer behavior,” he said. “That could mean a change in available hours, but to say we’re working fewer hours wouldn’t be accurate.”
