Decertifying Starbucks Unions
Starbucks, working with the lovely people at the National Right to Work Committee, is presently figuring out ways to get workers to file decertification petitions against the unions they formed last year. It’s very clear how they are doing this–it is not changing workers’ minds. It is using the turnover in this job to screen for anti-union positions in hiring at these stores.
Jorge Franco, one of the original union organizers at the Mall of America Starbucks, quit working at the store last fall to return to school. Franco said the people he worked with have all since quit. He said he has never heard of the barista who filed the petition to get rid of the union, Rebecca Person.
In response to a request for an interview with a current barista at the Mall of America, Starbucks Workers United shared a statement from a barista at a store in New York.
“As a 12-year partner, I am disappointed to see Starbucks, a company that claims to have progressive values, align itself with extreme right-wing organizations like the Right to Work Foundation. Starbucks is providing partners with the contact information for the Right to Work Foundation to encourage them to file decertification petitions,” said Michelle Eisen, a Buffalo, N.Y.-based Starbucks barista, in a statement. “This is just union busting on top of union busting, and we are confident that these petitions will be dismissed due to the company’s own actions.”
Starbucks spokesperson Andrew Trull said in a statement that the company is prohibited from assisting workers — or “partners” in Starbucks parlance — in decertifying the union, but he noted workers at 11 other stores and the NYC Roastery have filed for decertification elections, which the company is sharing information about on its website.
“As with any NLRB petition, our focus is to ensure partners can trust their voice is heard and the process is fair,” Trull said.
Opponents of the union have seized on Starbucks Workers United’s use of “salts,” who are union organizers who seek work at Starbucks and other businesses with the goal of rallying workers to join the union.
“The deceptive tactics SBWU officials took in gaining control of multiple Starbucks locations are finally coming back to haunt them,” National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix said in a statement. “Starbucks partners nationwide are seeing how the union organizers, including those secretly paid by the union pretending to be genuine coworkers, manipulated them to do what is best for union bosses but not in the best interests of rank-and-file workers.”
The National Right to Work Foundation also supported efforts to get rid of the unions for nurses and support staff at the Mayo Clinic’s Mankato Hospital.
It’s that first quoted paragraph that tells you everything you need to know. And that is two things. First, the issue over screening for anti-union positions. We don’t actually know this but it doesn’t take a genius to see that is clearly what is happening. Starbucks is probably offering more money or something for being against the union. Sure it is illegal. So what. The NLRB has declared all sorts of things Starbucks has done illegal and it has made no meaningful difference.
Second is the fact that the worker who used to be at that store not only doesn’t know who this person is but that everyone who worked with him as quit.
This is a huge issue in organizing service work. No one is going to blame someone for quitting a Starbucks or other service job. There’s lots of reasons to do so. But this is also why unions don’t want to spend major resources–money we need to remember is the dues of its own members–to organize service work. What you need to actually win the contract is workers committed to the job itself. They have to be willing to work for years to get that contract and solidify that union. That’s why the UAW or Steelworkers succeeded. Many of those workers were there for years and knew they would be their for their whole working lives. With no one actually committed to these jobs, it creates a situation where it is very easy for the companies to just wait out the union movement, do some manipulation behind the scenes, and then defeat the union in the end.
This is why we should believe service worker can be successfully organized only at the point that it is successfully organized.
No comments:
Post a Comment