FILE PHOTO: Starbucks Workers United members meet at their office in Buffalo, New York, U.S., December 7, 2021. REUTERS/Lindsay DeDario/File Photo
December 9, 2021
By Hilary Russ and Lindsay DeDario
BUFFALO, N.Y. (Reuters) – Starbucks Corp employees on Thursday voted to join a union at one store in Buffalo, New York, but rejected the union at a second location in the city.
Employees at one Starbucks location in Buffalo voted to join Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. The vote count for a third store ended without a definitive result because a number of ballots are under review.
Both the union and the Seattle-based coffee chain could challenge the outcome of the election. If the results for the first store hold, however, the company would gain its first unionized location in the United States in decades.
“We’ve always been one Starbucks, we’re always going to be one Starbucks,” Rossann Williams, president of Starbucks North America, told Reuters in a phone interview just before the count began. “It’s going to be a partner-by-partner relationship that we build, and that’s going to be the same.”
About 15 Starbucks employees who support the union drive had gathered in a room in Buffalo to watch results. Many jumped, screamed and hugged when they realized they had enough votes to win the store on Elmwood Avenue.
The vote was 19-8 in favor of joining the union.
Baristas and shift supervisors from the second location on Camp Road voted 12-8 to reject the union.
Starbucks shares were down less than 1% at $115.76 in afternoon trading.
The company had several unionized cafes and a roastery in the United States the 1980s, but all eventually decertified. It beat back organizing campaigns in Philadelphia and New York City, but one location in Canada unionized in 2020.
The victory at one Buffalo store could embolden other baristas to launch organizing drives at some of the company’s more than 8,000 other U.S. cafes. Already, three other Buffalo-area stores and one store in Mesa, Arizona, have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for union elections.
“Although it’s a small number of workers, the result has huge symbolic importance,” said John Logan, a labor professor at San Francisco State University. “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 closely watched results come as companies eye new union organizing campaigns amid a U.S. labor shortage that has already led to higher wages at most large retailer and restaurant chains.
E-commerce company Amazon.com Inc is facing a new election at one of its Alabama warehouses after results of the previous election – which the union lost – were overturned last month.
(Reporting by Hilary Russ in New York; Additional reporting by Danielle Kaye in New York and Lindsay DeDario in Buffalo, N.Y.; Editing by Anna Driver and Matthew Lewis)
Source: One America News Network
