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    Starbucks Workers at 3 More Buffalo-Area Stores Vote to Unionize

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    Employees at three more Buffalo-area Starbucks have voted to unionize, bringing the total number of company-owned stores with a union to six, out of roughly 9,000 nationwide.The results, announced Wednesday by the National Labor Relations Board, were the latest development in one of the most formidable challenges to a major corporation by organized labor in years. Workers at two Buffalo-area stores voted to unionize in December, while a third store voted to unionize in Mesa, Ariz., last month, dealing a blow to the union-free model that prevailed at the coffee-retailing giant for decades.Since the December votes, workers at more than 100 Starbucks stores in more than 25 states have filed for union elections, in which they are seeking to join Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union.Workers in cities including Seattle, Boston, Rochester, N.Y., and Knoxville, Tenn., have begun voting or will do so this month.“These workers fought so hard for their union,” Gary Bonadonna Jr., the leader of Workers United in upstate New York, said in a statement. “We had their backs during this campaign and we’ll continue to have their backs at the bargaining table.”Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, said in a statement: “We will respect the process and will bargain in good faith guided by our principles. We hope that the union does the same.”The vote counts — 8 to 7, 15 to 12, and 15 to 12 — came as tension between the union and the company has been escalating.The union contends that Starbucks has been systematically cutting hours across the country to prompt the departure of longtime employees so it can replace them with workers who are unsympathetic to unionizing. It also has said Starbucks recently retaliated against pro-union employees in Buffalo by pressuring them to leave the company because they had limited their work availability, and by firing one over time and attendance infractions.In early February, the company fired seven Memphis employees who had sought to unionize, citing safety and security policies.“Starbucks is also using policies that have not previously been enforced, and policies that would not have resulted in termination, as a pretext for firing union leaders,” the union said in a statement, adding that it was confident that the fired workers would be reinstated.Last week, the union filed about 20 unfair labor practice charges, many of which accused Starbucks of singling out union supporters for harsher treatment.Mr. Borges said in an email that “any claims of anti-union activity are categorically false.” He said the company was not systematically cutting hours, which typically fall in the slow winter months of January and February. Starbucks generally tries to honor workers’ preferences for lower availability, he added, but it was unable to at a Buffalo store where several employees had sought to cut their availability at once. He said a worker fired because of time and attendance issues had previously been cited for instances of tardiness.Amy Zdravecky, a management-side lawyer at Barnes & Thornburg, said it was hard to imagine the union losing momentum at this point except as a result of developments at the bargaining table — for example, if the union negotiated a contract that workers considered disappointing.“Until employees see what, if anything, they’re going to get or not get in negotiations, the union has the advantage — they can go out and tell employees that we’ll do all these things for you,” Ms. Zdravecky said.Starbucks workers in Buffalo filed in an initial round of petitions to hold union elections in late August, citing concerns like understaffing and workplace safety amid the pandemic, as well as a desire to have a greater say in how their stores are run.The company soon dispatched out-of-town managers and officials to the city, including Starbucks’s president of retail for North America, whose presence union supporters have said they found intimidating and at times surreal.Starbucks has said the officials were trying to resolve operational issues like poor training and inefficient store layouts. Some emphasized the potential downsides of unionizing in meetings and discussions with workers.The company also substantially increased the number of workers in at least one of the first three stores voting, a move that the company said was to help with understaffing but that the union said was intended to dilute its support. The union later successfully challenged the ballots of some of these workers on the grounds that they weren’t actually based at the store, helping to secure its victory there.Workers at one of the locations where the union won on Wednesday, known as Walden & Anderson, said the company’s approach to their store was even more disruptive than its actions in the Buffalo-area stores that voted in the fall.Starbucks closed the Walden & Anderson store for roughly two months beginning in early September and turned it into a training facility, sending workers to other locations during that time.Colin Cochran was among the pro-union workers at the Starbucks store that was turned into a training facility.Libby March for The New York TimesLeaders of the union campaign at the store said this made it harder for them to communicate with co-workers and maintain support for the union, which had initially been high. “We just didn’t see people for the entire two months we were closed,” said one of the workers seeking to unionize, Colin Cochran. Union supporters did not have access to many of their colleagues’ phone numbers during this time.The store also added workers — from roughly 25 in early September to roughly 40 once the voting began in January. “It felt like every time we got someone on board, two new people would be hired,” Mr. Cochran said of the period after the store reopened in November. “It was like a hydra.” Mr. Cochran and a second worker, Jenna Black, said that the store held workers’ hours fairly steady in the fall and most of the winter, even as the company hired more workers, but that many employees had their hours reduced as the voting came to an end in late February and that some were now considering leaving as a result.“I was holding at 25 hours and then for the past couple of weeks I’ve been down to 16, 18 hours,” Ms. Black said. She added that while she loved her co-workers, “there is no reason to keep devoting my time and making this job a priority when I can’t live off it.”Mr. Cochran said the pattern created the impression that the store wanted the additional workers only in the run-up to the vote, to dilute union support.The union said that workers in several states, including Oregon, Virginia, Ohio, New York, Texas and Colorado, had also reported having their hours cut more than usual for the winter.Michaela Sellaro, a shift supervisor at a Denver store that is seeking to unionize, said she had been scheduled for an average of about 31 hours for the past four weeks after working an average of about 36 hours over the same weeks last year. “It feels like they are threatening our job security,” Ms. Sellaro said.Mr. Borges said that hours had been higher than normal in the fall at Walden & Anderson to provide additional training, but that hours there now reflected customer demand and that the same was true nationally. He cited the Omicron variant of the coronavirus as an additional factor in scheduling nationwide.“We always schedule to what we believe the store needs based on customer behaviors,” he said. “That may mean a change in the hours available, but to say we are cutting hours wouldn’t be accurate.” More

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    Starbucks Workers in Mesa, Ariz., Vote for Union

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    The victory was the union’s first outside Buffalo and appeared to underscore its momentum in organizing company employees across the country.First they won in Buffalo. Now they’ve scored a victory on the other side of the country.On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board announced that workers at a Starbucks in Mesa, Ariz., had voted 25 to 3 to unionize, with three challenged votes. The result brought the number of company-owned stores with a union to three, out of roughly 9,000 nationwide.The victory was the first for the union since two stores voted to unionize in Buffalo in December, but it could mark the beginning of a larger trend. More than 100 Starbucks stores across more than 25 states have filed petitions for union elections, most of them since that first victory. The next tally will probably come from three more stores in the Buffalo area, where votes have already been cast. Starbucks workers in cities including Boston, Chicago and Seattle are scheduled to vote or are likely to vote in the coming months.“This is another historic moment for Starbucks partners and service industry workers across the country,” Michelle Hejduk, a shift supervisor at the store, said in a statement. “This movement started in Buffalo, and we’ve now brought it across the country.”Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, said in a statement that the company’s position had not changed. “As we have said throughout, we will respect the process and will bargain in good faith guided by our principles,” he said, adding: “We hope that the union does the same.”Lawyers who advise companies on labor relations said Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, appeared to have considerable momentum in organizing Starbucks workers.“Clearly the work force is very sympathetic to what the union is selling,” said Brian West Easley, a management-side lawyer with Jones Day. “Right now, they probably rightfully believe they have the upper hand, given the number of petitions filed each week.”The company has generally sought to challenge the union store by store, contesting the voting pool for each election before the labor board and sending company officials to cities where workers have filed for elections, partly to share its concerns about unionizing. The challenges delayed the counting of votes in Mesa and the second round of Buffalo stores.But Mr. Easley argued that it would become more difficult for Starbucks to sustain that approach if the company continued to suffer defeats, especially as the number of stores filing for elections increases.“The bigger this gets, the more stretched resources become and the more ineffective they become,” he said. “The ability to push back is eroding as the numbers increase.”At least one prominent Starbucks investor echoed that concern, arguing that the company appeared to be wasting money in its efforts to resist the union. “The company is devoting quite a bit of time and money to putting forward these arguments in front of the N.L.R.B.,” said Jonas Kron, the chief advocacy officer of Trillium Asset Management, which makes investments to further environmental, social and governance goals and had a roughly $43 million stake in Starbucks at the end of last year. “It doesn’t feel like they’re using investor resources — stakeholder resources — that well.”Mr. Kron and Trillium have urged the company to take a neutral stand toward the union. Other labor experts suggested it may eventually be forced to do so whether it wants to or not.“I’m sure there will be a tipping point at some point,” said Amy Zdravecky, a management-side lawyer at Barnes & Thornburg. “How many losses do you have before you change strategy?”Ms. Zdravecky added that the union’s ability to win an election in a state not normally sympathetic to organized labor suggested that the campaign had staying power, and that one risk for Starbucks’s approach to opposing the union is that it could begin to alienate the company’s liberal-leaning customer base.“Fighting unions may not align with where they want to be elsewhere,” she said.Many of the issues that workers in Mesa cited in their decision to support the union were similar to those identified by workers in Buffalo, like staffing and Covid-19 safety. Liz Alanna, a shift supervisor at the store, said that customers sometimes waited 45 minutes last fall after submitting a mobile order because there were not enough baristas to handle the volume. “The lobby would be full of people waiting,” Ms. Alanna said. .The Mesa campaign had an additional subplot that raised the stakes for workers. In early October, the store’s manager, Brittany Harrison, was found to have leukemia. The company initially appeared to rally behind her, Ms. Harrison said in an interview, but its posture later changed.“I’d reach out to the district manager and it would go to voice mail or ring forever and she wouldn’t call back,” she said. Ms. Harrison, and other workers like Ms. Alanna, said that she repeatedly sought an assistant manager to help at the store but that none was forthcoming.The situation came to a head on Friday, Nov. 12, when Ms. Harrison became ill at the store, then put in her two-week notice. The workers at the store filed their petition for a union election the following week. “We really had an easy time moving forward,” said Ms. Alanna, citing frustration over how the company had treated Ms. Harrison. Mr. Borges said that the company had offered Ms. Harrison support throughout her time there, and that it had offered to provide an assistant manager if she went on leave, which she had yet to do. Starbucks’s approach to the union election in Mesa resembled its approach in Buffalo. The company sent a variety of officials to the store — including two new managers, at least two new assistant managers, a senior human resources official based in Colorado, a senior manager who had worked in California and a regional vice president based in Colorado.Workers said they felt the managers and other officials were partly there to monitor them. Ms. Hejduk said the new managers appeared to implement a policy in which at least one manager must be in the store at all times to “babysit,” as she put it.Ms. Hejduk said she had been told on a recent weekday morning that the store was closing and that her shift was being canceled because no manager was available to come in, even though she has a key and frequently worked in the store without a manager before the union election filing. She said the policy was relaxed after the union voting ended.In Mesa, as in at least one of the Buffalo stores, Starbucks also brought in several new workers after the election filing, who typically had spent a few weeks training at other stores. The union argued that the offsite training was meant to ensure that workers began their employment with no contact with union supporters and that the workers were brought in to dilute support for the union. The union, which argues that some of the new workers had not worked at the store long enough to be eligible to vote, won a challenge on similar grounds in Buffalo.Mr. Borges said the officials were addressing operational issues like staffing and soliciting input from workers and educating them about the risks of unionizing, though he said Starbucks respected the rights of its employees to unionize. He said that having a separate location focused on instructing new employees allowed the company to train them more efficiently, and that all of the workers who received ballots were eligible under N.L.R.B. rules. He said it was occasionally a policy to have one manager on at all times when there was new leadership in a store.The count in Mesa and at the three additional Buffalo-area stores had been held up by management challenges over a key legal issue: the proper voting pool for the union elections.In a rebuff to Starbucks, the labor relations board ruled Wednesday that stores could vote individually, rather than having to cast ballots with other stores in a geographic area. The board’s detailed ruling makes it more difficult for Starbucks to get its way on the issue elsewhere.Unions typically favor voting on a smaller scale to reduce the number of votes needed to secure a majority in at least some locations, but Starbucks has argued that stores in the same market are akin to a single unit because employees can work at multiple locations and because district managers oversee them as a cohesive group.One option for Starbucks in light of its recent defeats, said Mr. Easley of Jones Day, would be to resign itself to a union presence and position the company to minimize the union’s influence. He suggested, for example, that Starbucks might focus its opposition on cities where the union had already won, to make sure there weren’t several unionized stores that would provide it with greater leverage.“The next phase of this may be divide and conquer,” he said. “Make sure they don’t end up with voting blocks that could shut down business in a market.”He added, referring to the union: “If they can control market in a particular location, they have leverage to get Starbucks to do something.” More

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    Starbucks Strategy for Responding to Union Elections Is Dealt a Setback

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    The National Labor Relations Board dealt a blow to Starbucks’s legal strategy in response to a growing union campaign on Wednesday, rejecting the company’s argument that workers seeking to unionize in a geographic area must vote in a single union election.In a ruling involving an election in Mesa, Ariz., the board noted the longstanding presumption that a single store is an appropriate unit for a vote — as union supporters have insisted.Starbucks workers at more than 100 stores nationwide have filed for union elections and workers at two stores in Buffalo have already unionized.Unions typically prefer smaller elections, which tend to increase their chances of winning, albeit on a smaller scale. Workers United, the union seeking to represent Starbucks employees, has complained that Starbucks has repeatedly resisted store-by-store elections despite gaining little traction on the issue as a way to delay votes and stop the union’s momentum.Starbucks has argued that the elections should be marketwide because employees can work at multiple locations and because the stores in a market are managed as a relatively cohesive unit. It has made this case in its requests to appeal labor board decisions ordering elections on a store-by-store basis in Buffalo and Mesa, and in other filings related to union elections around the country.Before Wednesday’s ruling, the board had been unmoved by the company’s argument in Buffalo as well. But unlike the request for an appeal in Buffalo, which the board rejected on an ad hoc basis, the action in the Arizona case sets a binding precedent and will most likely make it more difficult for Starbucks to successfully raise such objections in the future.Nonetheless, the company indicated it would still press the issue. “Our position since the beginning has been that all partners in a market or district deserve the right to vote on a decision that will impact them,” Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, said in a statement, using the company’s term for its employees. “We will continue to respect the N.L.R.B.’s process and advocate for our partners’ ability to make their voices heard.”Workers in Mesa and at three Buffalo-area locations have voted in store-by-store elections, but the board postponed those vote counts while resolving Starbucks’s appeals. In the short term, the board decision means that a vote count at a Starbucks store in Mesa can go forward after being postponed last week.In a statement Wednesday, the union criticized both Starbucks and the labor board for the delays in counting ballots. “Partners are confident in our ability to stand strong, but justice delayed is justice denied, and we will continue to push for our right to organize without delay,” the statement said. More

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    Starbucks fires Memphis workers involved in unionization efforts.

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    Starbucks on Tuesday fired seven employees in Memphis who were seeking to unionize their store, one of several dozen nationwide where workers have filed for union elections since December.A Starbucks spokesman said the employees had violated company safety and security policies. The union seeking to organize the store accused Starbucks of retaliating against the workers for their labor activities.The firings relate at least in part to an interview that workers conducted at the store with a local media outlet.Reggie Borges, a company spokesman, said in an email that Starbucks fired the workers after an investigation revealed violations. He cited a photograph on Twitter showing that store employees had allowed media representatives inside the store to conduct interviews, in which some of the employees were unmasked and which he said had taken place after hours. “That is a clear policy violation, not to mention the lack of masks,” Mr. Borges wrote.Among the violations, Mr. Borges said, were opening a locked door at their store; remaining inside the store without authorization after it had closed; allowing other unauthorized individuals inside the store after it had closed; and allowing unauthorized individuals in parts of the store where access is typically restricted.He also wrote that one employee had opened a store safe when the employee was not authorized to do so and that another employee had failed to step in to prevent this violation.Two of the terminated employees said that some of the supposed violations were common practices at the store and that employees were not previously disciplined over them. They said, for example, that off-duty employees frequently went to the back of the store to check their schedules, which are posted there. Mr. Borges said that this was uncommon when a store is closed.One of the former workers, Beto Sanchez, said he was the employee accused of opening a store safe without authorization. He said that as a shift supervisor, he was normally authorized to open the safe and that he had done so to help a colleague on the evening of the media interview, when he was not on duty. He wondered why he had been fired over the violation rather than disciplined some other way.In a statement, Starbucks Workers United, the union that represents workers at two stores in Buffalo and that is helping to unionize Starbucks workers across the country, said, “Starbucks chose to selectively enforce policies that have not previously been consistently enforced as a pretext to fire union leaders.”The union said on Twitter that the company was “repeating history by retaliating against unionizing workers.”A judge for the National Labor Relations Board found last year that Starbucks in 2019 and 2020 had unlawfully disciplined and fired two employees seeking to unionize a store in Philadelphia. Starbucks has appealed the ruling.A petition filed with the labor board seeking a union vote at the store says 20 employees there would be eligible for membership.Wilma Liebman, who headed the labor board under President Barack Obama, said that to prove that the firings constituted unjust retaliation, the board’s general counsel would have to show that the workers were engaged in union activity and that the union activity played a “substantial or motivating” role in the decision to fire them.One question in resolving the latter issue is whether Starbucks typically fires employees, whom it refers to as partners, over similar infractions.Mr. Borges, the spokesman, wrote: “We absolutely fire partners who let unauthorized people or partners in the store after hours and/or violate policies like letting others handle cash in the safe when not authorized to do so. This is a common, understood policy by partners as it brings an element of safety and security risk that crosses a number of lines.”He did not immediately provide data on the number of employees fired for such violations in a typical year. More

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    Architects at a prominent New York firm drop their unionization bid.

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    Less than two months after seeking to form the only union at a prominent U.S. architecture firm, workers at SHoP Architects, in New York, have formally ended their effort.“We never imagined we would have to write this statement, but after a difficult unionizing attempt that was met with a powerful anti-union campaign, we have decided to withdraw our petition,” the group, which calls itself Architectural Workers United, said in a statement on Thursday.The statement did not provide examples of anti-union activity, but added: “We have seen how the fear of the unknown, along with misinformation, can quickly overpower individual imaginations of something greater than the status quo.”SHoP, in a statement, said the group’s decision to withdraw an election petition filed with the National Labor Relations Board “reflects our staff’s clear desire to determine our collective future together as an employee-owned firm.” The company said that “any allegations of bad faith campaigning are unfounded and an attempt to undermine the strong majority of SHoP employees who made their views known.”The organizing campaign was a response to long-simmering tensions in the architecture profession, where workers often accumulate tens of thousands of dollars in debt in college and graduate school but earn modest salaries while working long hours.The campaign also appeared to reflect a growing interest in unionizing among white-collar professionals, such as tech workers, doctors, journalists and academics, who have formed unions during the past decade as a way to address a loss of professional autonomy in addition to low wage growth and job security.At SHoP, a high-profile firm of about 135 employees that is known for work on such projects as the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and a Manhattan luxury building once known as the Steinway Tower, several employees said they worked 50 hours a week on average and 60 or 70 hours a week every month or two when a big deadline loomed.Typical of the industry, many who worked these hours over the past few years were junior architects earning $50,000 to $80,000 a year — higher than average for all workers, but low given the profession’s schooling requirements. According to a report last year from the American Institute of Architects, an industry group, few architects have annual salaries above the $100,000-to-$120,000 range, and many make less, a decade or more into their careers.The organizing campaign at SHoP appears to have been touched off by the economic uncertainty introduced by the pandemic, as well as the toll on employees of working long hours remotely. “Many of us feel pushed to the limits of our productivity and mental health,” employees wrote in a letter to the firm’s leadership announcing the union in December.Among other changes, supporters had hoped that a union could help rein in the practice of uncompensated or undercompensated overtime, which is common in the industry. But skeptics within the profession warned that such changes could backfire, raising labor costs that rival firms could undercut when bidding on a project.In response to the initial union announcement, SHoP indicated that it was sensitive to workers’ concerns about pay and hours, saying it had recently turned down several projects that it did not believe would generate enough revenue to staff appropriately. The firm also said it preferred to employ architects on a long-term basis rather than to staff up and down as projects came and went, as some competitors seek to do.Even employees favoring unionization said the firm’s labor practices were better than average for the industry — noting that the firm pays its interns, for example.The effort to organize prominent architecture firms does not appear to have died with the union drive at SHoP. Workers at two other prominent architecture firms were in the process of organizing when workers at SHoP went public in December, said David DiMaria, an organizer with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, with which the SHoP architects had hoped to affiliate.In an interview this week, Mr. DiMaria said that those efforts were continuing, and that workers at five other firms had reached out to the union and begun organizing since then.“This has started a conversation around the value of architectural work, and the realization that without leverage, there will never be value,” Mr. DiMaria said of the SHoP campaign. “The organizing is going to continue because it’s the only way to fix these problems.” More

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    Unionizing Starbucks, Inspired by Bernie Sanders

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    The liberal workers the company has long attracted are expanding a union campaign to other cities after a landmark victory in Buffalo.Maggie Carter, a Starbucks barista in Knoxville, Tenn., is a warm and reassuring presence who says she is keen to “go the extra mile” for customers.She may also be a nightmare for Starbucks executives.As a union organizing campaign that began in Buffalo and produced the company’s only two unionized U.S. stores spreads to other cities, it is being driven by workers like Ms. Carter: young, well educated, politically liberal.Ms. Carter, who began circulating union cards at her store not long after the results of the Buffalo elections were announced last month, studies broadcast journalism at the University of Tennessee. She is passionate about climate change, fighting racism and labor rights. And her political hero is Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent.“Bernie Sanders is my everything,” Ms. Carter said. “I love him more than anything.”Perhaps more disconcertingly for Starbucks as it tries to contain the union campaign, Ms. Carter appears to be representative of the kinds of people the company has hired over the years to reinforce its progressive branding.Labor experts say that in seeking such employees Starbucks may have built a work force that is more inclined to unionize and to be energized by the Buffalo campaign.“If you think about the kinds of employees they have, the stereotype of people that work there seems to be true — a lot of young people, Bernie supporters, D.S.A. types,” said John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America. “These are the kinds of people who can take this and run with it. It could be in Knoxville and Arizona just as easily as in San Francisco and Manhattan.”A Starbucks spokesman, Reggie Borges, said that the company was not anti-union but “pro-partner,” as it refers to employees, and that it had historically made changes in response to input from workers, making a union unnecessary.With more than 230,000 employees at roughly 9,000 company-operated stores across the country, Starbucks employs plenty of older workers, conservative-leaning workers and those with a high school diploma or less. Some who were heavily involved in the Buffalo campaign had never been to college.But at least compared with other food and retail establishments, Starbucks customers tend to be liberal and well educated, and the company’s hiring appears to reflect those demographics. The company’s annual report plays up its employees as “significant contributors to our success as a global brand that leads with purpose.”Starbucks allows employees who work at least 20 hours a week to obtain health coverage, more generous than most competitors, and has said it will increase average pay for hourly employees to nearly $17 an hour by this summer, well above the industry norm. The company also offers to pay the tuition of employees admitted to pursue an online bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University, helping it attract workers with college aspirations.The Status of U.S. JobsMore Workers Quit Than Ever: A record number of Americans — more than 4.5 million people — ​​voluntarily left their jobs in November.Jobs Report: The American economy added 210,000 jobs in November, a slowdown from the prior month.Analysis: The number of new jobs added in November was below expectations, but the report shows that the economy is on the right track.Jobless Claims Plunge: Initial unemployment claims for the week ending Nov. 20 fell to 199,000, their lowest point since 1969.Such people, in turn, tend to be sympathetic to unions and a variety of social activism. A recent Gallup poll found that people under 35 or who are liberal are substantially more likely than others to support unions.Several Starbucks workers seeking to organize unions in Buffalo; Boston; Chicago; Seattle; Knoxville, Tenn.; Tallahassee, Fla.; and the Denver area appeared to fit this profile, saying they were either strong supporters of Mr. Sanders and other progressive politicians, had attended college or both. Most were under 30.“I’ve been involved in political organizing, the Bernie Sanders campaign,” said Brick Zurek, a leader of a union campaign at a Starbucks in Chicago. “That gave me a lot of skill.” Mx. Zurek, who uses gender-neutral courtesy titles and pronouns, also said they had a bachelor’s degree.Len Harris, who has helped lead a campaign at a Starbucks near Denver, said that “I admire the progressivism, the sense of community” of politicians like Mr. Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. She said that she had graduated from college and that she was awaiting admissions decisions for graduate school.And most union supporters have drawn inspiration from their colleagues in Buffalo. Sydney Durkin and Rachel Ybarra, who are helping to organize a Starbucks in Seattle, said workers at their store discussed the Buffalo campaign almost daily as it unfolded and that one reached out to the union after the National Labor Relations Board announced the initial results of the Buffalo elections in December. (The union’s second victory was announced Monday, after the labor board resolved ballot challenges.)Ms. Ybarra said the victory showed workers it was possible to unionize despite company opposition. “The Buffalo folks became superheroes,” she said. “A lot of us spent so much time being afraid of retaliation — none of us could afford to lose our jobs, have our hours cut.”Since three Buffalo-area stores filed for union elections in late August, workers have filed for elections in at least 15 Starbucks stores nationwide. At least 10 of the filings came after the union victory in Buffalo. “It was the day Buffalo announced they had a won a union that I said, ‘I’m going to try to unionize my store,’” Ms. Harris recalled.More than 15 stores in 10 cities have filed for union elections.Audra Melton for The New York TimesMr. Logan, the labor studies professor, said this pattern might be turning the conventional wisdom about labor organizing on its head. Unions have traditionally preferred to aim at companies with a relatively small number of large workplaces because unionizing these sites creates economic leverage: Striking at one of a dozen large factories can disrupt a company’s operations, while striking at one out of 9,000 stores makes no difference to a company’s bottom line.But over the past few decades, victories at large, high-profile job sites have been less common — unions have lost elections at Boeing, Nissan, Volkswagen and Amazon facilities, though the labor board later overturned the Amazon result and called a new election. The Starbucks campaign shows that focusing on small workplaces at a high-profile company may be more effective, because a victory can build momentum nationwide.“In terms of creating a moment for unions, if you organized 100 stores it would be the biggest thing that happened in 50 years,” Mr. Logan said. Even if the direct economic impact on Starbucks is minor, he added, the media attention and political pressure on the company could be enormous.Richard Bensinger, who oversees Starbucks organizing for the union representing its employees, Workers United, said in an interview that the goal of the campaign was to build support among workers nationally, to rally public opinion and ultimately to pressure the company to stay neutral so that any store whose employees wanted a union could easily get one.“The real question is getting the country to stand up for David, not Goliath,” Mr. Bensinger said. “Every day we’re getting more people — it’s getting stronger.”Further benefiting the union are the economics of organizing workers versus the economics of persuading workers not to unionize. The costs of seeking an election at another store — like legal filings whose arguments the union’s lawyers have already refined — are relatively modest. Starbucks workers themselves are the boots on the ground.By contrast, if the company were to replicate its Buffalo approach, that could mean bringing in 10 or more out-of-town officials over a period of months. Starbucks has dispatched a few out-of-town officials and area managers to a store in Mesa, Ariz., the only city beyond Buffalo where the labor board has set an election date. The company said that some officials there were addressing operational issues and that others were educating employees about what unionizing would entail, as in Buffalo. Some workers in both cities said they found the presence of these officials intimidating.Len Harris has helped lead a campaign at a Starbucks in the Denver area.Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York TimesStarbucks has no shortage of cards to play in resisting unionization. While companies must bargain in good faith with N.L.R.B.-certified unions, they are not required to agree to a contract, and negotiations could drag on for years. The company can also afford to spend large sums to discourage union organizing.But the image-conscious company could eventually decide that risking an anti-union reputation is costlier than a more accommodating posture. “You don’t want to antagonize your customer base,” said Steven M. Swirsky, a management-side lawyer at Epstein Becker & Green. “They have created a brand with certain mystiques around it. You have to be sensitive to how to maintain that, not undermine it.”Starbucks may also conclude that what it spends opposing unions is not money well spent. “When you’re making a resource commitment at some point you have to realize there is a reason this is happening, and it may not be a reason you’re going to be able to fix soon enough to make a difference,” said Brian West Easley, a management-side lawyer at Jones Day.Complicating the challenge is that the workers involved in organizing appear to be less interested in addressing specific problems like staffing and pay — though those are certainly concerns — than in having more input at work. David Pryzbylski, a management-side lawyer at Barnes & Thornburg, said that of over 100 campaigns he has handled, the union typically failed to even qualify for a vote when there was a specific economic issue driving the organizing, but tended to get much further when “employees don’t feel like they have a voice.”Several Starbucks workers said that unionizing was not merely a means to improve their work lives but a goal in itself and that they supported a union as a matter of principle. “One of the main things we want to have a union for is to establish the right to have a union — it’s a little circular,” said Ms. Ybarra, in Seattle. “They’re trying to discourage folks from creating any communal organization.” More

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    Amazon Reaches Labor Deal, Giving Workers More Power to Organize

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    The agreement’s national scope and its concessions to organizing go further than any previous settlement that the e-commerce giant has made.SEATTLE — Amazon, which faces mounting scrutiny over worker rights, agreed to let its warehouse employees more easily organize in the workplace as part of a nationwide settlement with the National Labor Relations Board this month.Under the settlement, made final on Wednesday, Amazon said it would email past and current warehouse workers — likely more than one million people — with notifications of their rights and give them greater flexibility to organize in its buildings. The agreement also makes it easier and faster for the N.L.R.B., which investigates claims of unfair labor practices, to sue Amazon if it believes the company violated the terms.Amazon has previously settled individual cases with the labor agency, but the new settlement’s national scope and its concessions to organizing go further than any previous agreement.Because of Amazon’s sheer size — more than 750,000 people work in its operations in the United States alone — the agency said the settlement would reach one of the largest groups of workers in its history. The tech giant also agreed to terms that would let the N.L.R.B. bypass an administrative hearing process, a lengthy and cumbersome undertaking, if the agency found that the company had not abided by the settlement.The agreement stemmed from six cases of Amazon workers who said the company limited their ability to organize colleagues. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.It is a “big deal given the magnitude of the size of Amazon,” said Wilma B. Liebman, who was the chair of the N.L.R.B. under President Barack Obama.Amazon, which has been on a hiring frenzy in the pandemic and is the nation’s second-largest private employer after Walmart, has faced increased labor pressure as its work force has soared to nearly 1.5 million globally. The company has become a leading example of a rising tide of worker organizing as the pandemic reshapes what employees expect from their employers.This year, Amazon has grappled with organizing efforts at warehouses in Alabama and New York, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters formally committed to support organizing at the company. Other companies, such as Starbucks, Kellogg and Deere & Company, have faced rising union activity as well.Compounding the problem, Amazon is struggling to find enough employees to satiate its growth. The company was built on a model of high-turnover employment, which has now crashed into a phenomenon known as the Great Resignation, with workers in many industries quitting their jobs in search of a better deal for themselves.Amazon has responded by raising wages and pledging to improve its workplace. It has said it would spend $4 billion to deal with labor shortages this quarter alone.“This settlement agreement provides a crucial commitment from Amazon to millions of its workers across the United States that it will not interfere with their right to act collectively to improve their workplace by forming a union or taking other collective action,” Jennifer Abruzzo, the N.L.R.B.’s new general counsel appointed by President Biden, said in a statement on Thursday.Amazon declined to comment. The company has said it supports workers’ rights to organize but believes employees are better served without a union.Amazon and the labor agency have been in growing contact, and at times conflict. More than 75 cases alleging unfair labor practices have been brought against Amazon since the start of the pandemic, according to the N.L.R.B.’s database. Ms. Abruzzo has also issued several memos directing the agency’s staff to enforce labor laws against employers more aggressively.A sign encouraging workers to cast a ballot in a union vote at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Ala., in March.Charity Rachelle for The New York TimesLast month, the agency threw out the results of a failed, prominent union election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, saying the company had inappropriately interfered with the voting. The agency ordered another election. Amazon has not appealed the finding, though it can still do so.Other employers, from beauty salons to retirement communities, have made nationwide settlements with the N.L.R.B. in the past when changing policies.With the new settlement, Amazon agreed to change a policy that limited employee access to its facilities and notify employees that it had done so, as well as informing them of other labor rights. The settlement requires Amazon to post notices in all of its U.S. operations and on the employee app, called A to Z. Amazon must also email every person who has worked in its operations since March.In past cases, Amazon explicitly said a settlement did not constitute an admission of wrongdoing. No similar language was included in the new settlement. In September, Ms. Abruzzo directed N.L.R.B. staff to accept these “non-admission clauses” only rarely.The combination of terms, including the “unusual” commitment to email past and current employees, made Amazon’s settlement stand out, Ms. Liebman said, adding that other large employers were likely to take notice.“It sends a signal that this general counsel is really serious about enforcing the law and what they will accept,” she said.The six cases that led to Amazon’s settlement with the agency involved its workers in Chicago and Staten Island, N.Y. They had said Amazon prohibited them from being in areas like a break room or parking lot until within 15 minutes before or after their shifts, hampering any organizing.One case was brought by Ted Miin, who works at an Amazon delivery station in Chicago. In an interview, Mr. Miin said a manager had told him, “It is more than 15 minutes past your shift, and you are not allowed to be here,” when he passed out newsletters at a protest in April.“Co-workers were upset about being understaffed and overworked and staged a walkout,” he said, adding that a security guard also pressured him to leave the site while handing out leaflets.In another case on Staten Island, Amazon threatened to call the police on an employee who handed out union literature on site, said Seth Goldstein, a lawyer who represents the company’s workers in Staten Island.The right for workers to organize on-site during non-working time is well established, said Matthew Bodie, a former lawyer for the N.L.R.B. who teaches labor law at Saint Louis University.“The fact that you can hang around and chat — that is prime, protected concerted activity periods, and the board has always been very protective of that,” he said.Mr. Miin, who is part of an organizing group called Amazonians United Chicagoland, and other workers in Chicago reached a settlement with Amazon in the spring over the 15-minute rule at a different delivery station where they had worked last year. Two corporate employees also settled privately with Amazon in an agreement that included a nationwide notification of worker rights, but the agency does not police it.Mr. Goldstein said he was “impressed” that the N.L.R.B. had pressed Amazon to agree to terms that would let the agency bypass its administrative hearing process, which happens before a judge and in which parties prepare arguments and present evidence, if it found the company had broken the agreement’s terms.“They can get a court order to make Amazon obey federal labor law,” he said. More

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    Buffalo Starbucks Workers Vote for Union at 1 Store

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    Employees at a Buffalo-area Starbucks store have voted to form a union, making it the only one of the nearly 9,000 company-owned stores in the United States to be organized and notching an important symbolic victory for labor at a time when workers across the country are expressing frustration with wages and working conditions.The result, announced on Thursday by the National Labor Relations Board, represents a major challenge to the labor model at the giant coffee retailer, which has argued that its workers enjoy some of the best wages and benefits in the retail and restaurant industry and don’t need a union.The union was leading in an election at another store, but by a margin smaller than the number of ballots the union was seeking to disqualify through challenges. The challenges must be resolved by the labor agency’s regional director in the coming days or weeks before there is a result. Workers at a third store voted against unionizing, according to the board, though a union lawyer contended that some ballots had been delivered to the agency and not counted.“Although it’s a small number of workers, the result has huge symbolic importance and symbols are important when it comes to union organizing,” John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University, said in an email. “Workers who want to form a union in the United States are forced to take a considerable amount of risk, and it helps if they can see others who have taken that risk and it has paid off.”The unionized employees, who are joining Workers United, an affiliate of the giant Service Employees International Union, received inquiries throughout the campaign from Starbucks workers across the country who said they were paying close attention and were interested in unionizing as well.“I don’t think it will stop in Buffalo, whatsoever,” Alexis Rizzo, a worker at one of the stores and a leader in the organizing campaign, said at a news conference after the vote.Workers cited frustration over understaffing and insufficient training when they filed for union elections at the stores in late August, problems that have dogged the company for years but which appeared to worsen during the pandemic. Such problems are not unique to Starbucks and have been problems for workers across the restaurant and retail industries for many years.“We continue on as we did today, yesterday and the day before that,” Rossann Williams, Starbucks’s president of retail for North America, said in a letter to employees after the vote. “The vote outcomes will not change our shared purpose or how we will show up for each other.”The election occurred through mail ballots that were due Wednesday. In November, workers at three more Buffalo-area stores filed the paperwork needed to hold union elections, but it was unclear when votes would take place for those outlets.Starbucks responded to the union campaign with a sense of urgency. Throughout the fall, out-of-town managers and executives — even Ms. Williams — converged on stores in Buffalo, where they questioned employees about operational challenges and assisted in menial tasks like cleaning bathrooms.In a video of a meeting in September viewed by The New York Times, a district manager from Arizona told co-workers that the company had asked her to go to Buffalo to help “save it” from unionization.Several workers who support the union said they found the presence of these officials intimidating and, at times, surreal. They also complained that Starbucks had temporarily closed certain stores in the area, which they found disruptive, and said Starbucks had excessively added staff in at least one of the three stores that held elections. The workers said this had diluted support for unionization at the store.“As of today we’ve done it in spite of everything that the company has thrown at us and we all know it has been an extensive anti-union campaign by Starbucks corporate,” Michelle Eisen, a barista at the Buffalo location that unionized who also helped lead the campaign, said at the news conference.Former National Labor Relations Board officials have said that these actions by the company could be interpreted as undermining the “laboratory conditions” that are supposed to prevail during union elections and that they could serve as grounds for throwing out a result. Workers involved in the union campaign and a union lawyer indicated that they might challenge the result at the store where workers voted down the union.A regional director of the labor board recently overturned a union election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama on similar grounds.Starbucks has said that it dispatched out-of-town officials and temporarily closed stores to help solve staffing and training problems and to remodel stores to make them more efficient. The company said that it added staff to deal with an increase in the number of workers calling in sick and that it had taken such steps across the country since the spring, when coronavirus infection rates dropped and stores became busier.Ms. Williams, the North America president, said in an interview on Wednesday from Buffalo that she did not feel that the run-up to the vote had been especially contentious and that she had spent much of her time there this fall listening to employees (partners, in the company’s words) and addressing “the conditions that partners had pointed out.”The key issue at the store whose vote was unresolved, near the Buffalo airport, was whether several workers who cast ballots were actually employed at the store. The union argues that they were employed at another store in the area and worked at the airport store for only a short period of time. The company said they were eligible to vote under the labor board’s rules.The outcome could be important for determining the union’s leverage when it seeks to negotiate a contract. Under the law, an employer is obligated to bargain with a union in good faith, but there is no requirement that it actually agree to a contract, and the consequences of failing to bargain in good faith are limited.“The incentives to resist bargaining are significant for the employer,” said Kate Andrias, a labor law expert at Columbia Law School. “If workers are able to win a good contract, it sets a precedent.”Professor Andrias said that the ability to win a contract in such situations often hinged on the amount of economic pressure the union can exert, and that having a second unionized store could help in this regard.Ms. Eisen, the worker at the store that unionized, said at the news conference that the workers would like to “offer the olive branch to the company and say, ‘Let’s put this behind us.’” She added: “Now is the time, let’s get to the bargaining table as quickly as possible.”Starbucks has faced other union campaigns over the years, including one in New York City in the 2000s and one in 2019 in Philadelphia, where it fired two employees involved in organizing, a move that a labor board judge found unlawful. The company appealed the ruling and a decision is still pending.Neither of those campaigns succeeded, but workers are unionized at Starbucks stores owned by other companies that operate them under licensing agreements. And workers at a company-owned store in Canada recently unionized.A handful of the company’s early stores in Seattle appear to have had a union and were represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers in the 1980s. The union was later decertified. More