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    Starbucks Union Campaign Continues Its Momentum

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    Starbucks workers have added to the momentum of a union campaign that went public in late August and has upended decades of union-free labor at the company’s corporate-owned stores.On Thursday and Friday, workers at six stores in upstate New York voted to unionize, according to the National Labor Relations Board, bringing the total number of company-owned stores where workers have backed a union to 16. The union, Workers United, was also leading by a wide margin at a store in Kansas whose votes were tallied Friday, but the number of challenged ballots leaves the outcome officially in doubt until their status can be resolved.The union has lost only a single election so far, but it is formally challenging the outcome.Since the union secured its first two victories in elections that concluded in December, workers at more than 175 other stores across at least 25 states have filed for union elections, out of roughly 9,000 corporate-owned stores in the United States. The labor board will count ballots in at least three more stores next week.The organizing success at Starbucks appears to reflect a growing interest among workers in unionizing, including the efforts at Amazon, where workers last week voted to unionize a Staten Island warehouse by a significant margin.On Wednesday, the general counsel of the labor board, Jennifer Abruzzo, announced that union election filings were up more than 50 percent during the previous six months versus the same period one year earlier. Ms. Abruzzo expressed concern that funding and staff shortages were making it difficult for the agency to keep up with the activity, saying in a statement that the board “needs a significant increase of funds to fully effectuate the mission of the agency.”Starbucks has sought to persuade workers not to unionize by holding anti-union meetings with workers and conversations between managers and individual employees, but some employees say the meetings have only galvanized their support for organizing.In some cases, Starbucks has also sent a number of senior officials to stores from out of town, a move the company says is intended to address operational issues like staffing and training but which some union supporters have said they find intimidating.The union has accused Starbucks of seeking to cut back hours nationally as a way to encourage longtime employees to leave the company and replace them with workers who are more skeptical about unionizing. And the union argues that Starbucks has retaliated against workers for supporting the union by disciplining or firing them. Last month, the labor board issued a formal complaint against Starbucks for retaliating against two Arizona employees, a step it takes after finding merit in accusations against employers or unions.The company has denied that it has cut hours to prompt employees to leave, saying it schedules workers in response to customer demand, and it has rejected accusations of anti-union activity.As the union campaign accelerated in March, the company announced that Kevin Johnson, who had served as chief executive since 2017, would be replaced on an interim basis by Howard Schultz, who had led the company twice before and remained one of its largest investors.Some investors who had warned Mr. Johnson that the company’s anti-union tactics could damage its reputation expressed optimism that the leadership change might bring about a shift in Starbucks’s posture toward the union. But the company soon announced that it would not agree to stay neutral in union elections, as the union has requested, dampening those hopes.On Monday, the same day that Mr. Schultz returned as chief executive, the company fired Laila Dalton, one of the two Arizona workers the N.L.R.B. had accused Starbucks of retaliating against in March. The company said that Ms. Dalton had violated company rules by recording co-workers’ conversations without their permission.“A partner’s interest in a union does not exempt them from the standards we have always held,” Reggie Borges, a company spokesman, said in a statement, using the company’s term for an employee. More

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    NLRB Counsel Calls for Ban on Mandatory Anti-Union Meetings

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    The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board issued a memo on Thursday arguing that the widespread employer practice of requiring workers to attend anti-union meetings is illegal under federal law, even though labor board precedent has allowed it.The general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, who enforces federal labor law by prosecuting violations, said her office would soon file a brief in a case before the labor board, which adjudicates such questions, asking the board to reverse its precedent on the meetings.“This license to coerce is an anomaly in labor law, inconsistent with the act’s protection of employees’ free choice,” Ms. Abruzzo said in a statement, referring to the National Labor Relations Act. “I believe that the N.L.R.B. case precedent, which has tolerated such meetings, is at odds with fundamental labor-law principles, our statutory language and our congressional mandate.”In recent months, high-profile employers like Amazon and Starbucks, which are facing growing union campaigns, have held hundreds of meetings in which they try to persuade workers not to unionize by arguing that unions are a “third party” that would come between management and workers.Amazon officials and consultants have repeatedly told workers in mandatory meetings that they “could end up with more wages and benefits than they had prior to the union, the same amount that they had or potentially could end up with less,” according to testimony from N.L.R.B. hearings about a union election in Alabama last year.The company spent more than $4 million last year on consultants who took part in such meetings and sought out workers on warehouse floors.But many workers and union officials complain that these claims are highly misleading. Unionized employees typically earn more than similar nonunion employees, and it is highly unusual for compensation to fall as a result of a union contract.Wilma B. Liebman, who headed the labor board under President Barack Obama, said it would probably be sympathetic to Ms. Abruzzo’s argument and could reverse its precedent. But Ms. Liebman said it was unclear what practical effect a reversal would have, since many employees may feel compelled to attend anti-union meetings even if they were no longer mandatory.“Those on the fence may be reluctant not to attend for fear of retaliation or being singled out,” she wrote by email.According to a spokeswoman, the board’s regional offices, which Ms. Abruzzo oversees, are also likely to issue complaints against employers over the meetings. One union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, has brought such a case in Bessemer, Ala., where it recently helped organize workers seeking to unionize an Amazon warehouse. A vote count last week showed union supporters narrowly trailing union opponents in that election, but the outcome will hinge on several hundred challenged votes whose status will be determined in the coming weeks.The labor board spokeswoman said the outcome of the board’s “lead” case on the mandatory meetings would bind the other cases. The case is pending but has not been identified. More

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    NLRB Issues a Complaint Against Starbucks

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    The National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against Starbucks on Tuesday over accusations that it retaliated against two employees seeking to unionize their store in Phoenix.The workers are part of a campaign that has created unions at six stores in the Buffalo area and Arizona since December, out of roughly 9,000 company-owned stores nationwide. Overall, workers at more than 100 Starbucks locations have filed for union elections during that time.The formal complaint — something a regional office of the labor board issues after investigating and finding merit in accusations against employers or unions — is the first of the current Starbucks campaign. It contends that Starbucks issued a written warning to one employee and suspended her, and rejected the scheduling preferences of a second employee, leading to her termination, because the employees supported the union.In addition, the complaint states that the first employee, Laila Dalton, was suspended and disciplined for raising concerns about wages, hours and insufficient staffing on behalf of co-workers, and that the retaliation was intended to discourage other employees from raising similar concerns, even though it is their legal right to do so.If the regional office is successful in prosecuting the case through an administrative law judge, Starbucks will have to advise employees of their rights to engage in protected activities like complaining about wages and staffing. The company would also have to make the second employee, Alyssa Sanchez, whole for the losses she suffered as a result of her effective termination. The agency could seek other remedies as well. The company could appeal the decision to the full N.L.R.B. in Washington.“Today is the first step in holding Starbucks accountable for its unacceptable behavior during the unionizing efforts in our store and stores around the country,” Bill Whitmire, a barista at the store who is involved in the union campaign, said in a statement. “Laila and Alyssa were traumatized, and their hope is that no other partner EVER has to go through what they have gone through.”Reggie Borges, a company spokesman, reiterated previous denials of accusations of anti-union activity.The union representing Starbucks employees, Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, has brought similar charges on behalf of other workers around the country, including roughly 20 two weeks ago. More

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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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    Food Companies, Long Symbols of the West in Russia, Pause Operations

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    After years of cultivating the Russian market, McDonald’s, Starbucks, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola said they would temporarily close locations or stop selling products there.When McDonald’s opened its doors in Moscow’s Pushkin Square in 1990, it was welcomed by more than 30,000 Russians who happily waited hours in line, eager to spend a sizable chunk of their daily wages for a taste of America.Through burgers and fries, a food diplomacy was forged, one that flourished over the past three decades as corporations like McDonald’s and PepsiCo, private investment firms, and individuals plunged billions of dollars into building factories and restaurants to bring food, culture and good-old American capitalism to Russia. It was perestroika and glasnost sandwiched between two buns.“McDonald’s was more than the opening of a simple restaurant,” Marc Carena, a former managing director of McDonald’s Russia, told Voice of America in 2020 when the Golden Arches celebrated the 30th anniversary of its first location in what was the Soviet Union. “It came to symbolize the entire opening of the U.S.S.R. to the West.”But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed everything, and food companies and restaurant chains have struggled with how to respond. Amid mounting pressure to act, McDonald’s announced on Tuesday that it was temporarily closing its nearly 850 locations in Russia and halting operations in the country.“In the 30-plus years that McDonald’s has operated in Russia, we’ve become an essential part of the 850 communities in which we operate,” Chris Kempczinski, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement announcing the move. He noted that the company employed 62,000 people in the country.Soon after the McDonald’s announcement, other prominent food companies and restaurants followed. Starbucks said it, too, was closing all of its locations in Russia, where they are owned and operated by the Kuwaiti conglomerate Alshaya Group. Coca-Cola said it was halting sales there.And PepsiCo, whose products have been in Russia since the early 1970s, said it would no longer sell Pepsi and 7-Up there but would continue to produce dairy and baby food products in the country as a “humanitarian” effort and to keep tens of thousands manufacturing and farm workers employed.Investors, as well as social media users, have been applying pressure on businesses to pull out of Russia, especially fast-food chains, which have been criticized for lagging behind other companies with decisions about their Russia operations.For food companies that have spent decades cultivating the Russian market, the act of pausing or ceasing operations in the country is complex. It involves unwinding often byzantine local supply and manufacturing chains, addressing the fates of tens of thousands of Russian employees, and untangling close ties with Russian banks, investors and others that allowed them to flourish all these years.Russian operations make up only 3 percent of McDonald’s operating income but 9 percent of its revenue. Likewise, Russia accounts for $3.4 billion, or 4 percent, of PepsiCo’s annual revenue of $79.4 billion. The company says on its website that it is the largest food and beverage manufacturer in Russia. It owns more than 20 factories in the country.“PepsiCo has been there forever. PepsiCo was there under Nixon,” said Bruce W. Bean, a professor emeritus at Michigan State University’s law school who, as an American lawyer in Russia, worked with companies making investments there.“Obviously, PepsiCo can walk away from the business,” Mr. Bean added. “It will hurt them, but it will hurt the Russians who have picked up the business, the Russians that distribute its product — it hurts them more.”Some companies — like Yum Brands and Papa John’s, which have hundreds of restaurants bearing their names across Russia — most likely have less control over whether those restaurants close because many are owned by individuals or groups of investors through franchise agreements, franchise experts said.“It’s messy,” said Ben Lawrence, a professor of franchise entrepreneurship at Georgia State University. As long as the franchisees are meeting the requirements under their agreement and paying the royalty fees, it’s hard to tell them to shut down, he said.Yum, which owns KFC and Pizza Hut, said on Tuesday that it was suspending operations at 70 company-owned KFCs and all 50 franchise-owned Pizza Huts in Russia. (The vast majority of the 1,000 KFCs in Russia are franchise-owned and, at this time, not part of these suspensions.) Yum also said it would suspend all “investment and restaurant development” in Russia and divert any profits from the region to humanitarian efforts.McDonald’s, which has invested millions of dollars into building restaurants in Russia and is a symbol of American culture, has felt the impact of geopolitics before. In 2014, when the United States and other nations imposed economic sanctions on Russia over its annexation of Crimea, the authorities suddenly closed down a number of McDonald’s locations in Russia, including in Pushkin Square, citing sanitary conditions. The Pushkin Square location reopened 90 days later.The line of customers in Moscow when McDonald’s opened its first location in the Soviet Union in 1990.Vitaly Armand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor the better part of the last two decades, Russia has been one of the fastest-growing markets for American brands, particularly fast-food chains. McDonald’s, KFC, Subway and others thrived not only because they were a midday glimpse of Western civilization but also because they were relatively cheap places to grab a meal.The Russia-Ukraine War and the Global EconomyCard 1 of 6Rising concerns. More

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    Starbucks Is Moving to Oust Workers in Buffalo, Union Supporters Say

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    Some employees who back unionization efforts have been told they must increase their work availability or leave. The company cites scheduling issues.Workers at Starbucks stores in Buffalo are accusing the company of retaliating against union supporters by telling some of them they may have to leave the company if they cannot increase their work availability.At least five of the cases have arisen at a store that unionized in December, though union supporters at other Buffalo-area stores report similar conversations with managers, frequently but not always involving pro-union employees. The company denies any connection between the scheduling issues and union activities and says the matter is strictly logistical.The tensions indicate how labor relations are playing out after initial successes in unionizing company stores. None of Starbucks’s roughly 9,000 corporate-owned stores in the United States were unionized before early December, but three have unionized since then, and workers at more than 100 stores across the country have filed for union elections.One of the Buffalo workers, Cassie Fleischer, said her manager told her on Feb. 20 that she would soon no longer be employed at the store where she had worked since 2020 because she had sought to reduce her hours from around 30 to 15, a change the manager said she could not accommodate. The store was recently unionized, and Ms. Fleischer is a prominent union supporter.Kellen Montanye, who works at the same store, said the manager told him in a meeting Sunday that he would have to decide this week if he could increase his availability to 15 or 20 hours or leave the company. Mr. Montanye was also outspoken in supporting the union.“This new policy is a complete betrayal of the promise made by Starbucks to its partners, to schedule us around our other jobs or our school hours,” Starbucks Workers United, the union representing the workers, said in a statement, using the company’s term for its employees. “This is a part of Starbucks’s broader strategy to bust our union.”News that the company was asking some employees to be available to work more hours or leave was reported earlier by the labor-oriented website More Perfect Union.Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, said that the company was not firing the workers and that there was no policy requiring minimum availability. The company generally tries to honor employees’ preferences on availability, he said, but it cannot guarantee that it will do so, especially when several employees request more limited availability around the same time.Mr. Borges said that 10 people at Ms. Fleischer’s and Mr. Montanye’s store, on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, had made such requests recently, out of a total of about 27 workers there.Union supporters said they had not previously faced resistance when making such requests. Many union supporters were also skeptical that 10 workers at the Elmwood store had asked to scale back their hours in ways that posed an unusual challenge for management. A recording of a meeting between Ms. Fleischer and her manager, provided to a reporter by the union, seemed to indicate that the number was lower.“There’s your shift and a couple other people that really, with the hours that I — I just, I don’t have the quite the availability,” the manager told Ms. Fleischer. If fewer workers had sought significant reductions in availability, that would presumably be easier to accommodate.The manager appeared to acknowledge in the recording that the refusal to grant the reduction in hours was a break with her previous approach. “There’s certain things that I have to take care of as well, that maybe I didn’t do the right way before, but I have to get on board,” the manager said.Mr. Montanye, a graduate student at the University at Buffalo, said that he had worked at Starbucks since 2018 and at the Elmwood store for roughly one year, and that he had frequently adjusted his hours. He said he typically worked nearly full time during winter and summer breaks and only one or two days a week while school was in session. His managers had never taken issue with these requests, he added.But at an initial meeting on Feb. 13, he said, his manager told him that his current schedule of one day a week no longer met the store’s “needs” and that he would have to provide 15 or 20 hours of weekly availability to stay on the schedule. At a follow-up meeting over the weekend, he said, the manager told him to decide this week whether he could provide the additional availability. He may seek a leave of absence instead.The Starbucks store on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo. Union supporters were skeptical that 10 workers at the store had asked to scale back their hours.Mustafa Hussain for The New York TimesMs. Fleischer had worked at Starbucks for over four years, and at the Elmwood store since the summer of 2020. She was typically scheduled for about 33 or 34 hours a week during the second half of last year. But she began looking for additional work elsewhere to cover expenses after her scheduled hours dropped somewhat in January.She asked to scale back to 15 hours a week upon finding a second job, at which point her manager told her in an initial meeting in early February that the more limited availability didn’t meet the “needs of the business,” according to Ms. Fleischer.In her final meeting with her manager, which Ms. Fleischer recorded on Feb. 20, the manager said that she had not put Ms. Fleischer on the schedule for the next two weeks and that, after a certain number of weeks of being unscheduled, Ms. Fleischer would be “termed out” — that is, no longer employed by Starbucks. She is scheduled to meet with her district manager to discuss the issue on Mar. 7.Ms. Fleischer said she would have been unlikely to look for a second job had her hours not dropped in January. Hours at Starbucks tend to fall somewhat during the slow months of January and February, but Ms. Fleischer and Mr. Montanye said they believed the changes were also driven by the addition of several new workers to the store in the fall.The union has said the fall hiring was intended to dilute union support ahead of an election at the store; the company has said the hiring was intended to address understaffing. Mr. Borges said that a similar number of workers had left the store since then and that hours had been fairly consistent.An employee at another Starbucks in Buffalo, Roisin Doherty, said her store also cut back her hours. In late January she too took another job, then informed her manager that she would need to change her availability to weekends only. Screenshots provided by Ms. Doherty show that the manager congratulated her through a messaging app and did not indicate that the new constraints would be a problem. But in early February the manager wrote that she would need “at least four days” of availability. Workers at her store filed for a union election in between the two exchanges, on Jan. 31, and Ms. Doherty has helped lead the union campaign, though she said another worker who is not identified with the union had also been told that his availability was insufficient.Ms. Doherty said that she remained on the schedule and that she had yet to have a second interaction with a manager forcing the issue.Mr. Borges, the Starbucks spokesman, said Ms. Doherty’s hours were reduced after she was given a written warning about tardiness and attendance issues. He said managers would continue contacting employees when necessary to explain that narrow availability could lead them to go unscheduled for a few weeks, which could ultimately cause their separation from the company.“Leaders are trying to make sure partners understand that the lack of availability could lead to that,” Mr. Borges said in an email. 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