What Starbucks Taught Me About Union-Busting |
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What Starbucks Taught Me About Union-Busting
A new labor nonprofit called Union Now is trying to help workers weather firings, delays, and first-contract battles. We could’ve used their help in our Starbucks campaigns.
Picket signs are raised during the “Fight Starbucks’ Union Busting” rally and march in Seattle, Washington, on April 23, 2022.
“Howdy, y’all, I’m Steve Buckley, I work at the REI store down in Soho, New York, and in 2022, me and my coworkers formed the first union in the history of REI.”
A cheer erupted throughout the hall. I was among a large crowd of labor organizers and activists assembled in a New York City venue for the launch of a nonprofit called “Union Now,” spearheaded by union leaders Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, and Faye Guenther, who heads UFCW Local 3000. Buckley was one of many worker-organizers—from campaigns ranging from Delta to Amazon to Microsoft—speaking to the urgent need for a union and the challenge of getting one, at a rally bookended by speeches from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Buckley ran through a quick history of the campaign: Shortly after he and his coworkers won their union, 10 more stores across the country followed their lead, spurred by the challenges of working through the pandemic and dealing with harassment from customers.
“Since then, we have experienced a unique type of violence: a constant surveillance and harassment of union leaders, targeted terminations, mass layoffs with no reason, but we’ve not stopped organizing, we’ve not stopped fighting. I am here standing four years after we first unionized, without a first contract. I was part of the worker delegation that announced our union, and I’m still standing here before you today, because we deserve dignity and respect at work, and it’s not going to come unless we keep fighting for it.”
The other worker-organizers’ speeches echoed Buckley’s: Some were currently trying to organize a union; others had already organized only to face continued opposition. Union Now’s goal is to shift the balance of power in organizing campaigns away from corporations by raising funds to provide grants directly to workers—those organizing, those illegally fired for trying, and those striking for recognition or a first contract. Listening to the speakers discuss the obstacles they’ve faced in their efforts, I thought back to the early days of Starbucks Workers United and the organizing wave coming off the height of the pandemic and how Union Now could have filled a critical need.
“Starbucks won’t fire you,” I promised back in summer 2021. Cassie Fleischer, my coworker and the person who had trained me as a barista, looked at me dubiously from across the dining table. “I’ve seen things happen,” she said. I insisted: “You’ll be more protected the more public you are, and there’s so many of us doing this that they won’t be able to single any of us out.”
At the time, I believed every word of what I was saying—and I would repeat the line to nearly everyone I spoke with over the coming weeks: We were going to keep each other safe by moving quickly and announcing a strong organizing committee across the city and gathering union cards before the company had time to put together a response. The impression I had gotten was that the company fired workers when there were a couple of identifiable leaders; they would have a much harder time firing the burgeoning organizing committee, which had grown from 50 workers to more than 100........