“But who’ll defend the workers who cannot organize when the bosses send their lackeys out to cheat us?”
“There is Power in a Union,” Billy Bragg
On February 27, Starbucks made an astonishing announcement. The multibillion-dollar corporation made tentative commitments to sit down with Starbucks workers to collectively bargain a master contract between it and the thousands of workers employed across hundreds of unionized stores. This constitutes a remarkable about-face for Starbucks and its approach to unionized employees.
Unionized employees are represented by Starbucks Workers United (SWU), an affiliate of the larger Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The union drive began in 2021 at a single Starbucks location in Buffalo, New York. As of March 2024, SWU has won union elections at 400 Starbucks locations employing over 10,000 workers across 48 states. Despite the sustained union drive, SWU has yet to negotiate a union contract, or collective bargaining agreement, at any of the locations it represents.
The lack of a contract is not for lack of trying, however. Rather than begin good faith negotiations with unionized workers, Starbucks has instead made it its mission to stonewall any attempt by SWU to secure a contract for its members. The company has fired or cut the hours of pro-union workers, closed unionized locations, and pursued frivolous litigation against SWU for using the Starbucks logo in its union materials. In perhaps the most glaring example of anti-union retaliation, Starbucks extended certain benefits such as credit card tipping to nonunion stores while explicitly excluding unionized locations.
These actions are obvious retaliation against pro-union employees and locations under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The NLRA is the cornerstone of federal labor law. It governs the process by which workers can seek to start or join a union and, ideally, gives workers a free and fair chance to decide whether to unionize. Conduct such as firing, taking adverse employment actions against, or closing the workplaces of employees based on their attitude towards unions or working conditions in general is an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) under the NLRA and blatantly illegal.
Starbucks knows it has been committing a slew of ULPs against its unionized employees. It knows it will likely lose SWU’s challenges to such behavior purely on the merits. The point was never to win these disputes. The point was to tie up SWU in expensive litigation and drag out the negotiation process in the hopes that workers would abandon the union from either exhaustion or disillusionment. Such a bad faith strategy could only be sustained by the frankly paltry remedies offered by the NLRA against companies that commit ULPs.
But the siren is suddenly singing a different tune. Starbucks has now committed to negotiating a master contract with all of its unionized stores. As a sign of good faith, the company has even gratuitously extended the same benefits it had selectively granted nonunion stores, including credit card tipping. The company claims it wants such an agreement by the end of the year.
Why the change? There is no single confirmed cause. Starbucks did hire Laxman Narasimhan as CEO in 2023 to replace the outgoing CEO and failed presidential candidate Howard Schultz. Schultz had been a fierce opponent to the union drive. A majority of Starbucks shareholders also voted to independently audit the company’s $240 million legal bill for fighting the union to date. All this internal intrigue coincides with record public approval for unions in general and high-profile public sympathy for SWU in particular.
It's anybody’s guess whether the promised master agreement will actually materialize. This could be just another (more sophisticated) anti-union tactic to derail the union train. But there is reason for optimism. Starbucks’ cynical strategies have thus far failed to stop the unionization of additional stores. The extension of credit card tipping to union stores removes a huge disincentive for nonunion stores to join the campaign. The news is still fresh and its implications still uncertain, but for the first time in a long time a collective bargaining agreement is at least a possibility.
“But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal, and they’ll know it’s for real the hour that the ship comes in. And they’ll raise their hands sayin’, ‘We’ll meet all your demands.’ But we’ll the shout from the bow, ‘Your days are numbered.’”
“When the Ship Comes In,” Bob Dylan
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