Starbucks Coffee has gained the reputation of a company that provides great benefits to its employees. It refers to its workers as “partners” and is proud of investing in them. But the idea of these partners joining a union is something the coffee giant never liked. And until recently, save a few cases in New Zealand and Chile, you have managed to avoid.
More than 383,000 people work for the Starbucks Corporation worldwide, including 245,000 in the US and 23,000 in Canada. Until June 2021, none of the North American workers in company-owned stores belonged to a union.
But last summer, some 30 employees at a Starbucks drive-thru location at Douglas and Alpha streets in Victoria, BC, changed that, making their store the only corporate-owned Starbucks in North America to unionize.
Sarah Broad, a barista at the Victoria location — one of the busiest on Vancouver Island — was the driving force behind the idea to unionize in the midst of the pandemic.
“It was the summer of 2020 and there was a lot of miscommunication and lack of communication between us and management. For example, with respect to what type of PPE we were supposed to be wearing. It felt like we weren’t being protected and we weren’t being prioritized. And we were being mistreated by customers,” Broad told me in an interview in Ottawa last month.
At dinner one night, Broad and her friends joked about unionizing and then decided to seriously look into it.
After reaching out to a few unions, the employees chose to work with the United Steelworkers (USW).
The decision caught Starbucks’ management by surprise, Broad said.
“We were receiving emails all the time about how disappointed they were in us,” Broad recalled. “We were having conversations with the district managers and staff where they were saying how bad of an idea it is because unions are just a third party that gets in the way of communication, and we would have to pay union dues and it’s not worth it. , and we wouldn’t be able to function as a normal Starbucks,” she said.
The vice-president of Starbucks Canada came to the store to speak with the employees. The workers decided to stick with their plan.
“Starbucks is a massive corporation, and we were asking them to treat us better. It was really intimidating, but it was empowering and exciting,” Broad said.
After months of negotiations, United Steelworkers (USW) announced a three-year deal that the union says better protects workers against workplace violence and aggression. It negotiated wage increases from up to $2.47 per hour based on years of service.
In a statement following the agreement, Starbucks Canada minimized the achievements accomplished by the employees. “After union dues and donations, some hourly employees in this store will earn only a few cents ($0.04 to $0.07) more per hour than other Starbucks partners in the province,” the statement reads.
However, when reached for comment, a spokesperson for Starbucks Canada said in an email that while “All claims of anti-union activity are categorically false,” the company “continues to respect our partners’ right to organize, or not to organize, and we respect the union process.”
Yet, judging by recent comments by its interim CEO it appears that Starbucks is still frightened of the idea that more of its stores will unionize. In any case, it seems like the horse has left the barn. While there is only one unionized store in Canada (a recent attempt to unionize a Calgary store was voted down), south of the border a strong momentum is building: workers at more than 200 stores are in the process of unionizing.
Starbucks has been a leader on so many fronts. From being one of the first S&P 500 firms to publish a Corporate Social Responsibility report back in 2001, to its current initiatives with respect to fighting climate change. So it’s disappointing that it seems to view unionization as a threat.
Most worrying is a report by the New York Post of comments made by Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ legendary CEO who built the company into a coffee empire during his first term as CEO between 1987 and 2000 and was called to serve as interim CEO in the beginning of April.
In a recent meeting with Starbuck employees in California, Schultz told a 25-year-old barista advocating for unionization at his store in Long Beach, “If you hate Starbucks so much, why don’t you go somewhere else?” the New York Postreported.
The Starbucks Canada spokesperson echoed a similar sentiment in her statement saying: “From the beginning, we’ve been clear in our belief that we are better together as partners at Starbucks, without a union between us.”
But the reality is that unionization simply provides a safety net for employees and shouldn’t be viewed as a threat.
With the current worker shortage, especially in the food and service industries, the bargaining power in the workforce has shifted to the side of the employees. This makes it a perfect opportunity to unionize. Workers at retail giant Amazon scored an historical first win on a vote to unionize a Staten Island warehouse giving the labor movement another tailwind.
Schultz, who built Starbucks on principles of corporate social responsibility, should know better than anyone that employees who feel supported by their company are key to the company’s success. Hopefully, he will change his anti-union attitude from him and work with his partners and not against them.
Canada has 1,400 Starbucks stores, but only one is unionized. Victoria store organizer Broad said many employees are uninformed about the process and the potential benefits of unionization. Others are simply afraid of getting in trouble, she said.
Baristas of Canada, with or without Schultz’s support, this is your moment to take action. Improving working conditions and having a union representing you is your right, and it doesn’t stand in contradiction to being loyal to the coffee company you love working for.
