San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Starbucks’ losses in union battles may help the company win the war
After a year of battles between Starbucks and Workers United in the national movement to unionize the coffee shop chain’s employees, here’s a look at where things stand heading into the new year:
• Starbucks has slow-played the process, creating legal and logistical hurdles to widescale unionization at its roughly 9,000 U.S. stores. The National Labor Relations Board, though, has ruled against the company in many of those cases.
• Store-level negotiations between unionized stores already are taking place for storespecific issues.
• Collective bargaining on a national scale hasn’t begun, with each side blaming the other for delays.
A deeper look at such details shows the situation is far from settled and that, despite the union’s early successes in cities like San Antonio, its challenges are still steep. It also suggests that while Starbucks has lost many of the early battles taken to the NLRB, it may be winning the larger war.
As unionization began in Texas and around the country in the first half of 2022, baristas collected union cards and set up votes on a store-by-store basis. Roughly a dozen union cards and a dozen or more “yes” votes by a store’s employees was generally enough to be certified by Workers United, the Service Employees International Union affiliate representing Starbucks employees. Once a store voted to join the union, all employees at that store were bound to union representation, barring a future decertification of union status.
Starbucks, though, fought union certification at its stores every time for many months throughout the first half of
2022, arguing that only a Starbucks “district” — generally comprising 13 stores and upward of 300 employees — could properly vote to unionize.
In the Texas cases I reviewed, the NLRB’s regional office in Fort Worth considered this district-versus-store issue repeatedly, analyzing precedents and circumstances in depth, and found Starbucks’ argument without merit.
Starbucks, nevertheless, has repeated this argument across the country — since the first unionization effort in Buffalo, N.Y., a year ago — and has been shut down each time.
A second major tactical fight throughout 2022 was whether employees would vote on unionization in person or by mail. For most of 2022, Starbucks did not allow employees to meet and vote in their stores. But the company also argued that mail-in voting was illegitimate. Union votes had to be off premises but in person, Starbucks said, conditions that were further complicated in the first half of 2022 by COVID-related uncertainty.
In November, the NLRB unanimously found Starbucks in violation of labor laws for refusing to bargain with unionized workers at a Seattle cafe. Starbucks argued it didn’t need to bargain with its workers because they had been elected
by mail-in ballot, despite the NLRB having rejected that argument. Again, Starbucks decidedly lost, though maybe it won by running down the clock for months.
Local impacts
San Antonio Starbucks employee Parker Davis, who works at the union store at Blanco Road and Wurzbach Parkway, reports success with “effects bargaining,” referring to the union response when management has made decisions that impact activities within a union’s purview.
A drain backup and associated flooding in November at the Starbucks where Davis works shut down the store for three days. Unionized employees became concerned about lost pay, the potential of lost hours affecting their benefits and water safety.
After union members received a response from local management that did not satisfy them, Davis elevated members’ concerns and pushed for union bargaining directly with Starbucks’ legal counsel. After about three weeks and some tense negotiating, they achieved
near-total agreement on demands for back pay and a guarantee of benefits.
For 20-year-old Davis, who pushed hard for unionization his store this past summer, the process and result of bargaining was vindication of his efforts.
“It was a lot of pressure to make sure that my partners got what was due ... It was such a relief to know that partners would finally be able to get the pay they missed and that it was proof that we were able to do something collectively as a store,” he said. “After those five long hours of effects bargaining, I went over to our store and I held the effects bargaining paper up in my hands held up high. And I told my co-workers, ‘We’ve done it.’ ”
Bargaining delays
But at the national level, collective bargaining between Workers United and Starbucks — the logical next step in the story — hasn’t begun. The problem for Workers United is that after having consistently won the battle over the right to single-store unionization, the union prefers collective bargaining for stores as a whole.
But in official communications, Starbucks reminds the union that the single-store unit was the union’s choice, not the company’s, and that Starbucks is simply following through on terms set by the union.
Because the union insisted so strongly on store-by-store unionization, Starbucks would need to schedule store-by-store negotiations. A cookie-cutter, grand bargain between Workers United nationally and Starbucks was impossible.
So, in September, Starbucks sent invitations to 234 unionized stores to bargain as distinct units.
Manuel Quinto-Pozos — the Austin-based attorney for Workers United in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas — said the first major problem in responding to those invitations was that the union didn’t receive key information it sought from Starbucks, such as wages per employee, hours worked and existing benefits. Without that data and time to process it, the union can’t schedule a bargaining session.
The next problem, he said, was the union’s limited resources to respond promptly to so many individual bargaining meetings.
Starbucks spokesperson Rachel Wall said Starbucks has appeared in person for more than 75 single-store bargaining sessions since September and that more than 30 individual store contract bargaining sessions are scheduled this month.
“It is unfortunate that Workers United continues to spread misleading claims regarding our efforts to schedule and participate in the bargaining process,” she said.
Wall listed seven union stores in Texas that received invitations for collective bargaining in September and said the union had not responded as of early this month.
Quinto-Pozos acknowledged that, but said Starbucks’ lack of employment data and the union’s stretched resources have made scheduling difficult.
Starbucks’ strategy?
After listening to both sides, I think it’s possible that overwhelming the union with requests for 200-plus meetings might, in fact, be Starbucks’ strategy.
Another issue has been the parties’ failure to agree on basic rules for the 75 times Starbucks and Workers United have managed to schedule meetings and sit down face-to-face — outside Texas. In each case, Wall said, the union has insisted on videoconferencing. The union said it must do this to include members, lawyers or union representatives who cannot make it to the in-person meetings. Starbucks said that broadcasting or recording has never been agreed to and that doing so is a violation of bargaining procedure.
Each scheduled collective bargaining meeting so far has broken down on this disagreement. Starbucks has filed complaints with the NLRB about the use of videoconferencing technology without Starbucks’ consent. The issue has led to further months of delays — and no bargaining agreement to which the union can point. Delays, I presume, play to Starbucks’ strengths.
Even with less than 3 percent of Starbucks stores unionized nationally, members like Davis can claim local successes. But will local successes be enough to inspire members at other stores to vote for joining Workers United?
Starbucks may believe that if it keeps the number of union stores low in the year to come, even if the company loses some battles with the NLRB and unionized stores, it will have won the long war against unionization.