The Ongoing Fight For a Union Contract at Starbucks
Will 2024 finally bring a contract for the 370+ unionized Starbucks, or will the company's obstinance continue? The jury's still out.
On December 9, 2021, workers at a Starbucks location in Buffalo, New York, voted to unionize. It was the first broadside of what has become a years-long battle for union representation at the world’s largest coffee chain.
The company has fought back, hard. Starbucks hired Littler Mendelson, a notorious anti-union law firm, to represent it in its dealings with Starbucks Workers United. Over the last two years, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed hundreds of unfair labor practices charges against the company, ranging from worker intimidation to wrongful termination. Of the cases that have come before a judge, Starbucks has lost the vast majority.
With over 370 stores now unionized, and more joining Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) every month, the challenge has shifted to securing a first contract. Starbucks has fought this, too. Separate negotiations must take place with each individual store, the company said, and can only be in-person—no virtual participation despite the ongoing worldwide pandemic.
In response to the company’s obstinance, SBWU staged multiple nationwide strike actions but despite this—not to mention the falling stock price and continuous bad press—Starbucks seemed unmoveable.
Or perhaps not: the coffee giant has recently indicated that it wants to restart negotiations in 2024. But considering the history, is it possible to take Starbucks at its word? And what does the future hold for the union campaign?
From a Truthful Place
On December 8, Starbucks’ Chief Partner Officer Sara Kelly wrote to Lynne Fox, president of Workers United, “in an earnest attempt to propose a path forward” and ratify contracts for unionized employees in 2024. A few days later CEO Laxman Narasimhan echoed this desire in a letter to Starbucks workers which also put the onus on SBWU to “work with us to break the gridlock.”
Jacklyn Gabel is a shift supervisor at a Starbucks in Santa Cruz, California, whose store was the first in the state to unionize in May 2022. Gabel says her store has never had a bargaining session, an experience mirrored by the vast majority of unionized locations around the country. When a bargaining session is scheduled, company representatives often arrive only to walk out a few minutes in.
The fact that Starbucks’ claims to want to negotiate is a positive sign, Gabel tells me. “I am hopeful that the intent to bargain in 2024 letters from Sara and Laxman are genuine,” Gabel says. “I imagine they are since Starbucks is losing left and right in court, experiencing a massive drop in sales and seeing intense pressure on the ground from their customers and employees. It is time that they do better, and I hope their letters are coming from a truthful place.”
However, Gabel continues, it is not something the union is necessarily pinning its hopes on. “We have seen letters similar in the past, and even though we have had bargaining meetings without our hybrid element, Starbucks has still refused to tentatively agree to a single word. It has never been about hybrid concerns for the company, and always about refusing to bargain in good faith and acknowledge our union.”
Sincere Overture or Publicity Stunt?
It’s not just the union—this skepticism is echoed by labor scholars and reporters. Cathy Creighton, director of Cornell University’s ILR Buffalo Co-Lab, told Fast Company the move seemed “more like a publicity stunt”. In a piece for In These Times, veteran labor reporter and author Steven Greenhouse questioned the sincerity of the company’s offer, noting that Sara Kelly’s letter explicitly rejects hybrid-online bargaining sessions. “That doesn’t seem like a conducive way or sincere way to resume contract talks,” Greenhouse wrote.
And as Professor John Logan, Director of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State University, points out, the company’s union-busting isn’t slowing down. “Starbucks recently announced its desire to resume bargaining and negotiate a contract in 2024, but it's not clear what that means,” Professor Logan tells me. “The company is also continuing its ferocious anti-union campaign and continuing to fight the dozens, if not hundreds, of NLRB charges against it in the federal courts.”
Just in the last few weeks, the NLRB accused Starbucks of closing 23 stores to discourage union activity, and a federal administrative law judge ordered the reinstatement of two workers who the company fired for their organizing activities. Listing the litany of union-busting allegations would take up an entire article on its own, but the labor board has hit Starbucks with over 600 unfair labor practices charges, and judges have found the company guilty in dozens of cases so far.
That didn’t stop media outlets from reporting that Starbucks wants “to mend its strained relationship” with the union (Reuters) and that it wants “to get back to the bargaining table after a deadlock of more than six months” (New York Times), with nary a mention of why the relationship is strained or why there was a deadlock.
Gabel says that, whether the letters are a public relations stunt or not, “they’re definitely not nothing. My fellow union co-workers all feel the same and hope that the company shows up to bargain in a real way, like the workers have for two straight years.”
What Will it Take?
So what will it take for Starbucks to finalize contracts with its unionized workforce in 2024? According to Susan J. Schurman, Distinguished Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, “Starbucks will decide to sign union contracts when it becomes a better business proposition to do so than to continue refusing.”
If enough stores unionize, Professor Schurman says, Starbucks might decide that it makes sense to agree a contract that covers most of the stores. This is because “there's solid research showing that union contracts bring efficiencies that offset the higher wages that union workers receive,” Schurman tells me.
Another possibility Professor Schurman mentions is that public support grows to the point that it starts to seriously impact the company’s bottom line and reputation. This is arguably already happening—Newsweek recently reported that Starbucks’ share price had fallen nine percent in just 19 days, wiping $11 billion off its value, something the article attributes to union pressure and the growing boycott around the company’s stance on Palestine (Vox, to be fair, is less convinced).
For Gabel, customer support has been hugely important for morale within the union. “Our customers have jumped in and joined the fight with us,” she tells me. “They continue to uplift us inside and outside of our stores and really understand that union busting hurts them too.”
This was especially apparent during this year’s Red Cup Rebellion, when thousands of unionized workers went on strike during Starbucks’ busiest day of the year. “We worked to inform new customers about how Starbucks' union busting is harmful for the baristas that they love and for themselves as well,” Gabel says. “The support was overwhelming and overall was such an inspiring day. Our customers showed up for us in such a big way!”
Professor Logan is unconvinced that, based on its past behaviour, 2024 will herald a sea change from a company so vocally against unionization. “Starbucks might agree to some kind of contract covering the 360 or so unionized stores, but the real question is whether the company is prepared to negotiate in ‘real’ good faith bargaining,” he tells me. “If it doesn't agree to stop its aggressive and unlawful union busting at the non-union stores and sign the union's ‘fair election principles’, it's unlikely that any collective agreement would be worth much.”
Time is a Flat Circle
In 1985, about 120 Starbucks workers at its Seattle roastery along with six cafes voted to unionize and join United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1001. They secured a contract the next year which provided health care, vacation time, and sick leave to part-time workers. Howard Schultz bought the company in 1987 and when it came time to negotiate a second contract, he tried to expand the bargaining unit to add more stores and hopefully dilute union support—instead, the additional workers sided with the union.
Schultz was, it’s fair to say, not a big fan of unions. “I was convinced that under my leadership, employees would come to realize that I would listen to their concerns,” he wrote in his 1997 memoir. “If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union.” Schultz fought hard to remove the benefits won in the first contract negotiations, and a decertification campaign eventually removed the union before a second contract could be agreed.
In his book Schultz credits the move to oust the union to a single Starbucks barista, although organizers told Politico that Starbucks itself was behind the decertification and hired anti-union consultants to help the move succeed. “Howard was anti-union from the beginning,” Joe Peterson, then the president of UFCW Local 1001, told Politico.
Schultz is no longer CEO—he stepped down right before giving testimony in front of the US Senate in March about his company’s anti-union activities—but his shadow looms large. In October an NLRB judge ruled that Schultz had illegally threatened a pro-union worker during a “listening tour” in 2022. New CEO Narasimhan has taken a more cautious approach, writing to workers that he hopes to "reinvigorate our culture around what it means to be a partner at Starbucks” while also doing that thing CEOs like to do where he works as a barista every so often, in order to stay “close to the culture and our customers.”
Whether this will make a difference in contract negotiations over the next twelve months remains to be seen. In May when SBWU organizers tried to speak with Narasimhan and ask him to agree to respect workers’ right to unionize, he ran away.