Starbucks Workers Are Organizing — and Management Is Worried
Starbucks portrays itself as a “community of partners,” not an average workplace. But now that workers are organizing a union drive in Buffalo, that warm and fuzzy rhetoric has vanished, replaced by coercion and union-busting.
Starbucks is desperately trying to stop its workers from organizing in Buffalo, viewing the effort as a threat to the company as a whole. (Christopher Furlong / Getty Images)
In August, three Starbucks stores in Buffalo, New York went public with their campaign for unionization. They named their joint effort Starbucks Workers United.
In a textbook anti-union strategy, the corporation responded by petitioning the National Labor Relations Board to force all other Buffalo Starbucks locations, twenty stores in total, to participate in a simultaneous vote — a move intended to catch workers at locations with no organizational presence off guard and swiftly defeat the initiative. Things aren’t going quite as the company planned, however. Starbucks Workers United has since gained further traction, with two additional stores joining the unionization campaign in September. So this week, Starbucks upped the ante by announcing the closure of two of the Buffalo stores affiliated with the organizing effort.
While these aggressive tactics are new, anti-union campaigning and messaging from the corporation is not. CEO Howard Schultz painstakingly created a culture at Starbucks with union deterrence in mind, placing a strong emphasis on notions of “partnership” and “community” as a substitute for worker solidarity. Now Starbucks Workers United is leveraging that inclusive and egalitarian language against the company. And it’s doing so at a time when the labor movement in the coffee industry is growing.
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