Starbucks

‘Add Personal Story Here’: Starbucks Anti-Union One-On-Ones Fall Flat

April 23, 2022 Sara Mughal, Labor Notes. Strategize! Starbucks, union busting, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

The last time I wrote in Labor Notes, I described the captive-audience “listening sessions” that Starbucks corporate had attempted to use against me and my co-workers who are trying to unionize our Hopewell Starbucks in central New Jersey. (See (“How We Turned the Tables on Starbucks Union-Busters,” March 2022.) After corporate failed spectacularly in our first one, they decided to cancel the second, saying they had “no new information to share with us.” We haven’t had any since—even though many of us have requested another, as we have plenty of information to share with them. Instead, Starbucks corporate decided to skip to the next tactic in its playbook: “one-on-one” meetings between one barista and a manager—or multiple managers.

Health Concerns Are At The Heart Of New Amazon And Starbucks Unions

April 20, 2022 Alexa Spencer, The Observer. Organize! Amazon, Health Care, Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

When news broke on Friday, April 1, 2022 that Amazon workers in Staten Island, N.Y. had managed to organize the first union in the notoriously anti-union company’s 27-year history, a common refrain across social media went something like this: This is not an April Fool’s Day joke. The news was so noteworthy that the name of Christian Smalls, a 33-year-old Black former Amazon employee and the interim president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) who led the walk-out, even trended on Twitter. Did Smalls and the other employees want better pay and benefits? Absolutely. But what many people may not realize is that the drive to unionize at Amazon and elsewhere is being driven by employee concerns about health and safety at work.

Sustaining The Organizing Surge

March 25, 2022 Ellen David Friedman, Labor Notes. Organize! Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

It seems that union organizing has become both necessary and cool. Can this surge be sustained—and what will it take? Desperately exhausted, overworked, and underpaid workers—like Starbucks baristas, nurses, Amazon warehouse workers, and graduate students—are lining up for the fight of their lives (and for their lives). A certain collective excitement has lent an allure to standing up together, in a way that was last true 70 years ago. Pulsing through workers nationally is a pull towards something new, edgy, and possibly powerful—built on the compelling truth that a risk becomes less risky when you are part of a group. Seeing hundreds of people take action—people who are “just like you”—takes it from the barely imaginable to the manageable.

Overland Park Starbucks Workers Walk Out On Strike Saturday

March 20, 2022 Jack Anstine, KSHB. Resist! Starbucks, union busting, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Kansas City, Missouri - Workers at the Overland Park Starbucks location at 10201 W 75th Street walked out on strike Saturday morning. According to a release, the walk out strike was planned for Saturday at 8 a.m. to protest unfair labor practices. Workers at the Starbucks location say that management has threatened and retaliated against employees for organizing a union at the location, according to the release. “The response to our union campaign from our district manager, Sara Jenkins has been aggressive. She has cornered us one on one, sometimes with another manager to intimidate us. Forced us to decide between being demoted, resigning or changing availability that conflicts with college classes and second jobs...We want the one-on-ones to stop," Starbucks employee Hannah Edwards said in a statement.

Union Organising Is Brewing In Starbucks: 100 Stores And Counting

March 11, 2022 John McGrath, Counterfire. Organize! Starbucks, union busting, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

More union organizing is brewing at Starbucks. In December 2021, staff at a Starbucks in Buffalo, NY became the first US branch to successfully vote to form a union. Since then, 103 Starbucks branches have decided to join them by filing petitions with the National Labor Relations Board. There are roughly 9,000 Starbucks locations in the US, and the workers in Buffalo overcame an intimidation campaign by the corporation which spent a lot of resources to squash the union drive. The company was right to worry, however, as the Buffalo example has encouraged other workers of the global coffee chain to form unions in 26 states across the country. The fast-spreading unionization drive is being organized by Starbucks Workers United, an affiliation of Services Employees International Union (SEIU).

Starbucks Tries To Slow Union Elections But Misses Legal Deadline

February 24, 2022 Dave Jamieson , Portside. Organize! Starbucks, union busting, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

As more baristas around the country seek to unionize, Starbucks has used a massive legal team to slow the pace of union elections. But the coffee chain suffered a tough legal setback on Friday, all thanks to some late emails. Workers at several stores in upstate New York recently petitioned for union elections, just like the two stores in the Buffalo area that successfully unionized last year. But Starbucks, through its lawyers from the firm Littler Mendelson, has asked the National Labor Relations Board not to move ahead with the votes, arguing that elections for individual stores aren’t appropriate. The company wants all the stores within the region grouped into one big vote. With dozens of stores around the country looking to join the union Workers United, that argument has slowed down the legal process and bought Starbucks more time to run its campaign against the union.

How We Turned The Tables On Starbucks Union-Busters

February 18, 2022 Sara Mughal, Labor Notes. Strategize! Starbucks, union busting, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Let me set the stage for you: A single cheese pizza cut into sixteenths, a small group of chairs awkwardly arranged to a circle, and corporate level managers trying to chat baristas up like we were best friends. Our store had closed at noon that Tuesday, so that the company could hold four consecutive “store meetings,” each with a group of around six employees. A few weeks before, five workers had to go into isolation due to Covid and the store had barely modified operating hours—but for these meetings we could shut down for almost the entire day. These were Starbucks’ “listening sessions,” or corporate union-busting meetings workers hoping to unionize their store are forced to participate in. But we at the Hopewell store were prepared.

Starbucks Fired Union Leaders In Memphis

February 10, 2022 Dave Jamieson, Huffington Post. Resist! Labor Law, Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Starbucks fired seven union supporters at a store in Memphis, Tennessee, on Tuesday in what the union has portrayed as a retaliatory purge of the organizing committee. The terminations mark the most significant escalation in the battle between the world’s largest coffee chain and the fast-growing Starbucks Workers United campaign. The firings made national news, but the reality is that employers fire union activists all the time – whether it’s justified or not. Labor law in the United States gives companies little to lose by ousting organizers. But due to the high profile of the Starbucks campaign, as well as recent changes at the National Labor Relations Board, this case may be different. Starbucks insists the firings were not retaliatory.

Workers Power Day – February 26, 2022

February 8, 2022 Support Amazon Workers. Resist! Amazon, Starbucks, Trayvon Martin, Worker Rights and Jobs

Starbucks workers are leading an electrifying drive to organize the major coffee chain, with one or often several stores announcing they’re joining this growing movement each day. Amazon workers from coast to coast are organizing to build power at one of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations. Workers in Staten Island recently filed to hold union elections at 2 warehouses. The majority Black Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama are engaged in their second union campaign, after the results of the first were tossed out based on Amazon’s egregious union busting campaign – which they continue in earnest in Bessemer, Staten Island, and elsewhere.

Workers At Two Philly Starbucks Stores Want To Unionize

February 2, 2022 Erin Arvedlund, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Resist! Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Starbucks workers at two Philadelphia stores took a key step in forming a union last Friday, accelerating a budding labor movement at the coffee giant that has seen employees at dozens of the chain’s locations nationwide try to organize. Baristas at the 1945 Callowhill St. and 600 South Ninth St. stores filed petitions to hold elections on union representation with the National Labor Relations Board, a first step in the process. The unionizing effort took root in December when two Starbucks stores in Buffalo, N.Y., voted to join Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. So far, workers at more than 50 stores across the country have launched the process to join the union, according to spokesperson Dawn Ang.

A ‘Gen U’ Of Starbucks Baristas Is Powering A Growing Push To Unionize

February 2, 2022 Kate Rogers And Amelia Lucas, CNBC. Organize! Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs, Youth Activism

After notching a first win late last year, two Starbucks company-owned stores have formally organized after a December vote and hearing before the National Labor Relations Board. To date, more than 30 company-owned stores from Massachusetts to Tennessee and Arizona have filed for union elections at Starbucks, according to a CNBC analysis of NLRB filings. An industry-wide labor crunch and the high-profile union push from Starbucks workers could mean more chains see their employees follow suit. “I do think, right now, this is the canary in the coal mine for the union and for the industry,” said MKM Partners analyst Brett Levy. The petitions to organize have come faster than even those involved first believed possible, according to Richard Bensinger, union organizer with Starbucks Workers United and a former organizing director of the AFL-CIO.

Starbucks Workers Agree To A Union In Buffalo

December 11, 2021 Dee-Ann Durbin and Caroline Thompson, AP News. Organize! Labor Union, New York (NY), Starbucks, Worker Rights

Buffalo, NY - Starbucks workers at a store in Buffalo, New York, voted to unionize on Thursday, a first for the 50-year-old coffee retailer in the U.S. and the latest sign that the labor movement is stirring after decades of decline. The National Labor Relations Board said Thursday that workers voted 19-8 in favor of a union at the Elmwood Avenue location, one of three stores in Buffalo where elections were being held. A second store rejected the union in a vote of 12-8, but the union said it might challenge that result because it wasn’t confident all of the eligible votes had been counted. The results of a third store could not be determined because both sides challenged seven separate votes.

Might Starbucks Soon Start Sharing The Bucks?

December 8, 2021 Sam Pizzigati, Nation Of Change. Resist! Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

The cream always rises to the top. Howard Schultz must love this folk maxim. And well he should. Understanding the ways of cream has helped make Schultz — the two-time former CEO and current chairman emeritus of Starbucks — a billionaire almost five times over. Starbucks baristas in the upstate New York city of Buffalo might beg to differ. Cream does rise, they understand. But that rising cream never achieves actual separation — physical distance — from the rest of a beverage. Schultz and his fellow Starbucks movers and shakers, on the other hand, have achieved that physical separation. The enormous wealth they’ve extracted out of Starbucks has shifted them into an entirely different sphere of human existence. The baristas of Buffalo have a better idea. At three Starbucks outlets in the Buffalo area, they’ve been organizing to become “the first corporate-owned Starbucks in the country to unionize.”

Three Starbucks Set For Vote On Union

November 2, 2021 Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Organize! Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Workers hoping to unionize Starbucks stores in the U.S. have won a preliminary victory before the National Labor Relations Board. The board said employees at three separate Starbucks stores in Buffalo, N.Y., can hold union elections in November in a new ruling. That means that workers need only a majority of votes cast at a single location to form a union. The company had argued that employees at all 20 Buffalo-area stores should vote in a single election. If the effort is successful, the stores would be the first of Starbucks' 8,000 company-owned U.S. stores to unionize. The Seattle coffee giant opposes the unionization effort. Starbucks said Thursday evening that it had just received the ruling and was evaluating its options.

Buffalo Starbucks Workers Say They Will Unionize One Store At A Time

September 1, 2021 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Organize! Starbucks, Union Organizing, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

The fast food industry, one of the most ubiquitous low-wage employers in America, has been notoriously immune to unions. For nearly a decade, the Fight For $15 campaign has been successfully working to raise the industry’s wages — but despite its slogan of “$15 and a union,” has not produced any actual unions. Now, an unrelated group of Starbucks employees in Buffalo, New York, are poised to move forward with something that has rarely been seen before: Union elections at individual fast food stores. Starbucks is America’s second largest fast food chain, with more than 15,000 stores nationwide. Their only unionized stores are a small number run by subcontractors in places such as airports.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 »

Daily movement news and resources