For underpaid, overworked and bullied staff, Starbucks coffee is sour with the taste of union busting. In the US, November 13 marked the beginning of a national strike campaign by unionized Starbucks workers affiliated with Starbucks Workers United, and in Canada the United Steelworkers, which has successfully organized some Starbucks outlets here, issued a statement, reading in part: “Today marks Red Cup Day, and excitement continues to brew across Ontario and Canada. Let’s remember the workers behind every cup – and stand with them in their fight for fairness and respect. Learn more and get involved at imaginebetter.work/starbucks and usw.ca/baristas-of-steel.”
Starbucks has been condemned by many critics, including US Senator Bernie Sanders, as one of the most anti-union companies in America. A document published by Sanders’ Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee spells out why. It says in part: “Starbucks has become the most aggressive union-busting company in America. Since the first Starbucks union was certified by the NLRB more than 450 days ago, Starbucks has refused to bargain a first contract in good faith. Since the first store voted to unionize in December 2021, in Buffalo, New York, workers at more than 360 stores across nearly 40 states have held union elections. More than eighty percent of these elections have resulted in a union victory leading to nearly 300 unionized Starbucks coffee shops throughout the country, despite an aggressive and illegal anti-union campaign waged by Starbucks under the leadership of Howard Schultz.”
There are indications that Starbucks is pursuing a similar campaign of intimidation and misinformation against its Canadian workers, with a recent BC Labour Relations Board finding that the company had threatened a union activist at a BC outlet that “things would get messy” for her if she continued her organizing at the coffee shop.
According to the CBC, United Steelworkers Local 2009 made a labour practice complaint against Starbucks for closing a Dunbar St. shop less than a year after its workers had been unionized and for disciplining an employee at a second BC shop for “wearing a union T-shirt.”
Jef Keighley who was a Canadian Auto Workers staffer when his union conducted an organizing drive among Starbuck’s workers in the mid 2000s, told The Tyee in 2023 that he didn’t believe it’s a coincidence the company had closed the Dunbar store so soon after it unionized.
“It’s their standard operating procedure,” Keighley said. “Basically, they do everything possible to erode the perceived benefits of a union.”
In this case and in testimony before the Sanders committee, Starbucks management denies any illegal union busting efforts.
A company sponsored web site, One.Starbucks Canada posted this typical statement last April: “No Starbucks partner has been or will be disciplined or separated for supporting, organizing, or otherwise engaging in lawful union activity. Starbucks respects the rights of our partners to freely associate and bargain collectively. However, all partners, regardless of their affiliation or involvement with a union, are expected to adhere to established company policies that support our operating standards.”
Reader, if you find this protestation of corporate innocence plausible, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
That bridge might be a better investment than Starbucks these days. This September, Starbucks told Global News that the firm operates over 18,000 shops across the US and Canada. In the same month, the CBC, reporting on Starbucks closures in Ottawa, noted that the stock value of the coffee behemoth had recently fallen by 25 per cent, a paper loss that Moshe Lander, an economist at Concordia, attributed to “over extension.”
Some observers, however, suggest that Starbuck closures are tied in some cases to an attempt to quash union organizing. In 2023, for example, The Tyee reported that Starbucks was closing their only Vancouver shop with unionized staff, (the Dunbar shop mentioned above.) In an earlier interview with The Tyee
Frédérique Martineau, the 20-year-old barista who led the organizing drive at the Dunbar shop, said that when management caught wind of her organizing efforts, the local district manager was at the Starbucks along with other senior staff and sat down co-workers one by one and grilling them about the union bid.
Scott Lunny, Director of the United Steel Workers District 3, (Western Canada) told rabble.ca in an email interview November 14 that “There are a dozen organized stores (union) in Canada, all USW-certified. There are five stores in Ontario (USW District 6) with Collective Agreements. We have seven stores under a single certification in BC (one was just closed) that do not have a Collective Agreement, and we have two stores in Alberta that do have Collective Agreements.”
He went on to say that “Starbucks is a large corporation that does not want to freely cede any of its control over the workplace to its workforce.”
He said that Starbucks workers in Canada are in contact with US unionized workers at the chain and supported their strike.
“The U.S. union has been building up the number of stores they represent and seems to be in a good position to put pressure on Starbucks to negotiate a good Collective Agreement. We are working to build in the same way, although just in BC, to put pressure on Starbucks to come to the table and negotiate a contract that truly meets the needs of the workers,” he said. However, he indicated that the Starbucks workers represented by his union were not currently in a position to take the kind of strike action currently being conducted by the US union.
Organizing precarious workers at retail outlets like Starbucks and retail product delivery operations like Amazon is difficult, but not impossible, as evidenced by the modest but real gains reported in this column. Workers and friends of workers need to pay attention to these struggles, and find ways to support these organizing drives in every way possible.
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