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VICTORY! – STARBUCKS STOPS OPPOSING ITS BARISTAS’ UNION  
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Harold Meyerson
February 27, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ In a historic breakthrough, Starbucks and its workers announce
they’ve come together. In a joint announcement Starbucks and Workers
United agreed “to begin discussions on a foundational framework
designed to achieve…collective bargaining agreements.” _

Image credit: The American Prospect,

 

“This is what we’ve always wanted,” says Michelle Eisen, a
Starbucks barista who’s been with the company since 2010 and works
at the Buffalo outlet that was the first to vote to go union, back in
2021. “We wanted Starbucks to actually be the company they always
said they were.”

On Tuesday, Starbucks may have finally become just that. In a joint
announcement
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by both Starbucks and Workers United, the baristas’ union that is
part of SEIU, the company agreed “to begin discussions on a
foundational framework designed to achieve … collective bargaining
agreements for represented stores and partners.”

The somewhat operatic language (“discussions on a foundational
framework”) raised some questions about whether this was just more
delay to a first contract. But the _Prospect _has learned that
Starbucks has affirmatively agreed to bargaining with workers and
their representatives to craft a master contract that applies to all
unionized outlets, to be augmented, if necessary, by add-on contracts
dealing with issues specific to particular outlets.

To demonstrate its good faith to understandably skeptical workers, the
company also agreed to let them receive credit card tipping and also
receive the back pay from the raises and benefits the company had
given to all its employees, except those in outlets that had voted to
go union.

After decades of decline, the American union movement has seen a
dramatic uptick in the past couple of years, with a wave of
unionizations among difficult-to-replace professional workers
(university teaching assistants, hospital interns and residents); a
landmark contract for unionized autoworkers; and rulings from
President Biden’s National Labor Relations Board that enable workers
to win back some of their organizing rights. But organizing and
winning contracts for the kind of workers who can be replaced, whom
managers have routinely fired when they seek to join or form unions,
has still presented a nearly insuperable obstacle. And as a result,
union density hasn’t really budged amid these victories.

This is why Tuesday’s announcement is the single most important
breakthrough American workers have achieved in a very long time. Until
Tuesday, workers in industries such as fast-food or other parts of the
service sector appeared to be all but unorganizable, so fierce and
successful (and routine) was management’s opposition to such
initiatives. It certainly was fierce at Starbucks so long as the
company founder, Howard Schultz, called the shots. During the more
than two years since the Buffalo baristas voted to go union (since
followed by baristas at nearly 400 other Starbucks, out of the 9,000
that the company owns), the company has faithfully followed the
union-buster’s playbook, firing workers who led organizing
campaigns, refusing to bargain with workers who’d voted to go union
(who now total roughly 10,000), and withholding raises from them.

Despite that, the workers persisted. In recent weeks, baristas at 21
outlets all filed for unionization elections on the same day, and a
slate of three pro-worker notables (including Wilma Liebman, who
chaired the NLRB during the Obama presidency) have been running for
Starbucks board director seats at the company’s annual
shareholders’ meeting, to be held two weeks from tomorrow. In recent
weeks as well, the company, now led by post-Schultz CEO Laxman
Narasimhan, released a statement suggesting it was willing to alter
its course, though no tangible course alterations were apparent until
Tuesday. 

Tuesday’s announcement is the single most important breakthrough
American workers have achieved in a very long time.

The grounds on which company and union came together was a mediation
process to settle a company suit and a union countersuit over some
workers’ use of the word “Starbucks” to identify themselves
during an action they took in opposition to the ongoing Gaza war. Over
just the past week, that mediation broadened to include settling the
underlying disputes between the company and its workers. It was only
on Tuesday, however, with the release of the joint statement, that the
baristas learned that a larger agreement had been reached.

“Our initial reaction was shock,” says Eisen. “And then
tears—lots of tears, of disbelief and then relief.”

Beyond the immediate factors, what really was behind Starbucks’s
epochal shift was a change in the zeitgeist. Unions are more popular
today than they’ve been in 60 years, and young workers—a
description that covers the vast majority of the company’s
baristas—are overwhelmingly pro-union. Over the past two years, 90
percent of thousands of university student employees who’ve
participated in unionization elections have voted to go union, and I
suspect we may see a similar rate at hundreds and perhaps thousands
more Starbucks outlets now that the company has said it will work
toward a master agreement for unionized shops.

Does this change at Starbucks betoken a change in the nation at large?
The UAW has just invested $40 million
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its campaign to organize the country’s non-union auto and battery
plants, and also on Tuesday, it announced
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more than half the workers at the Mercedes plant in
Alabama—Mercedes’s largest factory in the U.S.—had signed union
affiliation cards. If the UAW can organize those plants, following on
the victory at Starbucks, will that trigger the kind of wave that
followed the UAW’s sit-down occupation of General Motors factories
in 1937, which led to the unionization of the country’s largest
employers? Will it spur the Teamsters to take on Amazon? Or other
unions to take on Walmart?

If so, that would signal an epochal shift in the nation’s political
economy. Organizing private-sector workers, save only those whose
special skills or knowledge meant they couldn’t be fired if they
sought to organize, more or less ground to a halt during the 1950s. At
that time, in a world where the egalitarian effects of the New Deal
continued to shape the nation’s economy, and prosperity was broadly
shared, unions represented about a third of the nation’s workforce.
Many union leaders viewed continued organizing as unnecessary. The
already “organized fellow is the fellow that counts,” said AFL-CIO
President George Meany, voicing a complacency that proved to be nearly
fatal to unions’ effective existence.

As big business managed to steadily weaken the New Deal’s social
contract, private-sector union growth ceased, the middle class shrank,
and stratospheric levels of economic inequality came to define
today’s American economy. Workers have been pushing back, largely
unsuccessfully, for some time now. It’s only in the past few years
that we’ve seen some breakthroughs. None have been so hard-fought or
dramatic, though, as yesterday’s at Starbucks. Just how dramatic,
and how historic, depends on how successfully a largely somnolent
labor movement, slowly awakening to the change in climate, can roll it
on.

_[HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of The American Prospect
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_Read the original article at Prospect.org
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_Used with the permission. © The American Prospect
[[link removed]], Prospect.org, 2024 [[link removed]].
All rights reserved.  _

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* Starbucks
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* Starbucks Workers United
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* Starbucks workers
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* baristas
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* Workers United
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* SEIU
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* Labor Unions
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* UAW
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* autoworkers
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* NLRB
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* corporate power
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* collective bargaining
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