Union posts a rare loss at Starbucks, then roars back with five wins

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Late last week, the union organizing campaign at Starbucks suffered a rare loss—just its second in more than 20 elections—with an election in Springfield, Virginia, that went against unionizing, 10 to 8. That did not signal a reversal of momentum, though: On Tuesday, five Starbucks stores in the Richmond, Virginia, area voted to unionize.

The Richmond votes weren’t close, either. The closest was 13-8 in favor of unionizing. One was unanimous, 19-0. In between, they racked up victories at 17-1, 22-3, and 11-2. Across the five stores, that’s 82-14. For context, Virginia is a state where less than 5% of workers are in unions.

“It was jump started by the fact that a lot of us were out sick during the beginning of the Omicron surge, so we were really understaffed then,” Iman Djehiche, a worker at one of the stores, told VICE News. “And we realized exactly how strenuous it can be without the support of corporate on our side… our safety was being put second to profit, and we weren’t being treated with any sort of dignity and respect.”

Tim Swicord, an 18-year-old worker at the Springfield Starbucks, told DCist he had expected to win, but, in the wake of the vote, thinks the company’s anti-union campaign intimidated workers while turnover took a toll on support.

”Our district manager started coming in and we had these scheduled ‘connects,’ which is what corporate called them,” he said. “But they are really the same kind of one-on-ones … except ours were more frequently than not two-on-ones with our store manager and our district manager. They were saying things like, ‘you could lose your ability to transfer stores. You could lose some benefits.’”

He continued, “From what I heard, the things that were being said in these one-on-ones were definitely influencing people’s votes. And at least in my mind, I definitely felt that that two-on-one aspect was very kind of intimidating. And I really think it’s unfair.”

An 18-year-old barista being sat down by a store manager and a district manager, the latter of whom sat around the store when she wasn’t in forced two-on-ones, and told they would lose benefits? Yeah, that seems intimidating, especially coming from a company that has fired a series of union leaders among its workers, most on the flimsiest of pretexts. Meanwhile, founder and interim CEO Howard Schultz made a public speech whining that “We can’t ignore what is happening in the country as it relates to companies throughout the country being assaulted in many ways, by the threat of unionization.” Strong words from a man whose company is out here threatening teenagers as a matter of policy.

The company is also laying the groundwork to refuse to bargain in good faith as workers at the newly unionized stores seek to negotiate first contracts.

”Developing a contract that meets or exceeds what we already offer to our partners is going to be difficult for them to do,” Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesperson, was recently quoted in HuffPost. “These contracts don’t start at the baseline of the benefits that our partners get. That is the full-stop rule. The contract negotiations start at zero.” Borges quickly backtracked after Dave Jamieson’s story was published, because that very explicit threat is actually an illegal one. But it wasn’t an accident—it was in fact similar to what Swicord reported that managers are telling workers in their two-on-one intimidation sessions.

These contract fights will be long and hard and fought store by store, just as the union elections have been. Workers are planning, Jamieson reports, to develop a first contract framework that leaves significant room for workers to bargain based on the specific conditions in their stores.

By the time serious bargaining is going on across many stores, though, many more may have voted to unionize. According to a new Starbucks unionization tracker from Law360, workers at 219 Starbucks have taken steps to organize and votes have been scheduled in 82.

Starbucks workers are racking up win after win after win, despite vicious anti-union campaign

Posted in Independent News