Buffalo, NY: Starbucks Corp. employees on Thursday voted to join a union at a store in Buffalo, New York, giving the coffee chain its first unionized company-owned space in the United States. Workers in second place in Buffalo voted to reject the campaign to organize.
Employees at a Starbucks location in New York City voted to join Workers United, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union. Counting for the third store ended without a definitive result as several ballots were still under review.
The closely watched results come as Corporate America turns its attention to the new union as it organizes campaigns amid a US labor shortage, which already leads to higher wages at most large retailer and restaurant chains.
E-commerce company Amazon.com Inc. is facing a new election at one of its Alabama warehouses after the results of the last election — which the union lost last month.
Starbucks had several unionized cafes and one roastery in the United States in the 1980s, but all were eventually de-certified. It surpassed recent organizing campaigns in Philadelphia and New York City. One location in Canada was federated in 2020.
The Buffalo election involved more than 100 employees in total, a small fraction of the approximately 220,000 employees at Starbucks’ American cafes.
Still, the union’s victory could encourage other baristas to launch organizing campaigns at the company’s more than 8,000 other company-owned American cafes. Already, three other Buffalo-area stores and one store in Mesa, Arizona have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to join the union.
“I’m completely optimistic,” said barista James Schretta at one of the other New York stores to call for the polls. “We think this is what we’re doing.”
The result encouraged them to “continue an aggressive anti-union campaign to confront what we know,” he said.
According to a labor expert, Buffalo’s results were significant. “Although this is a small number of workers, the result has great symbolic significance,” said John Logan, a labor professor at San Francisco State University. “Workers who want to form a union in the United States are forced to take a considerable amount of risk, and it helps if they can see others who have taken that risk and paid for it.”
Shares of the Seattle-based company closed down about 1% on Thursday at $115.35.
‘Aggressive’ strategy
Some local baristas denounced the aggressive company strategy, including flooding Buffalo locations with executives, holding meetings with employees, and even asking ex-CEO Howard Schultz to talk to workers and ask for existing pay increases and benefits. Appreciating the qualities of.
Starbucks denies that any of its actions exposed the union.
“We’ve always been a Starbucks, we’re always going to be a Starbucks,” Starbucks North America president Rawson Williams told Reuters in a phone interview just before the countdown began. “It’s going to be a partner-partner relationship that we build, and that’s what’s going to happen.”
Both the union and the company can challenge the results. The NLRB, which conducted the election, would later determine the outcome of the third place vote.
In Buffalo, about 15 Starbucks employees supporting the union campaign gathered in a room to watch the results. Many jumped, shouted and hugged when they realized they had enough votes to win the first store to be counted on Elmwood Avenue.
19-8 votes were cast in favor of joining the Sangh.
The barista and shift supervisors from the second location on Camp Road voted 12-8 to reject the union.
Disclaimer: This post has been self-published from the agency feed without modification and has not been reviewed by an editor
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