Starbucks workers hoping to unionize their stores in Buffalo, N.Y., say there’s no workplace issue or aggravating chain policy that’s rallied them to organize. And that, say union experts, is why restaurants of all types and sizes should be nervous about what’s happening at three units of a single chain competing in a lone industry segment.
“This is not an anti-Starbucks campaign,” says Casey Moore, a barista who’s one of 100 Buffalo employees who’ve pledged to participate in the organization drive. “I love Starbucks, I’ll say that right off the bat. But we really deserve to have a voice. A union will make sure we have a voice.”
That’s not a cover story for demanding higher pay and better benefits, says Franklin Coley, the partner specializing in labor issues for Align Public Strategies, a government-affairs watchdog for a variety of corporations.
“Wages aren’t even part of this discussion,” says Coley. “The labor market has largely addressed the wage issue.”
What’s happening at the Starbucks stores in Buffalo or the four-unit Darwin’s café chain in Cambridge, Mass, says Coley, is an insistence from young employees that the social activism they’ve embraced in their personal lives not be halted when they punch in for a shift. They want the same empowerment they feel in pursuing social causes like racial or gender equality to extend into their jobs, and they’ve learned how to organize and demand it.
That’s why much of the recent union activity in the industry has focused on café chains, Coley says. “The employees working in these types of places are more likely to have been involved in the social-justice causes we saw during the pandemic.”
“You can’t overestimate how social-justice activism and workplace activism are converging,” he says. “Unions are actively seeking to mix in social justice with their activism.”
Indeed, Moore and her pro-union colleagues point to the inability of a Starbucks worker in Buffalo to support a family, or the disappointment workers feel when decisions are imposed from above, with no input from the people who have to function under those edicts.
“We want to address things like understaffing and scheduling and having a greater say in our workforce,” says Moore. “I think the union is the only way to do that. It’s the only way that Starbucks will have to sit down and talk with us.”
Coley traces the demand for an active role to the social wars that erupted during the pandemic. The 18-month health crisis was also a time of intense racial strife, triggered by George Floyd’s murder, and such political flashpoints as locking immigrant children in cages.
Health concerns and social disruptions triggered by the pandemic added considerable topspin, Coley is quick to add.
“There’s a dynamic here that we can’t ignore. It goes to all of hospitality, any place where the public is coming in and interfacing directly with employees, and that is their health and safety concerns,” he explains. “That’s giving workers very legitimate concerns about their workplace.”
“On top of that, there were complications from the pandemic in their personal life—things like not having childcare,” Coley continues. “Issues like paid sick leave or scheduling flexibility that have been bubbling up for a long time became very acute issues affecting workers in a very serious way.”
Plus, he says, “when the pandemic started, many restaurants were forced into the unfortunate position of laying off workers. Now we’re bringing back workers. There’s kind of a broken trust there.”
For those reasons, “this is probably the most opportune labor organizing opportunity we’ve seen in decades,” Coley says.
Right now, he notes, most of the organizing efforts directed at restaurants have been “organic,” a matter of a few employees pushing to unionize with the help of a big labor group. Those larger parties have ranged from the International Workers of the World, in the case of Burgerville, to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, in the instance of Colectivo Coffee, to the Service Employees International Union in Buffalo.
“I would be surprised if we don’t see the big unions uniting to make this more of a national organizing effort,” he says.
Starbucks’ situation in Buffalo could provide some topspin. . This is the first time we’ve seen this explosion in labor organizing jump to a major chain,” says Coley. “For that reason alone, it is significant.
“If the [labor] organizing committee there should win, it will generate headlines and create momentum,” he continues. “Win or lose, they’re going to create buzz and momentum.”
Members of Starbucks Workers United, the organizing group in Buffalo, know their campaign could inspire similar actions throughout the industry.
“If we’re successful here, we have a real chance to change what it means to be a barista, change what it means to be a bartender, change what it means to be waitstaff,” barista William Westlake said in a video posted on YouTube by another labor group, Workers United Upstate.
“Organizing one store would be a huge victory,” says Moore.