A second group of Capitol Hill workers has now agreed to work together to collectively bargain through the National Labor Relations Board as employees at the Broadway Crossroads Trading store announced Wednesday they have voted to unionize.

“We just won our union unanimously!,” the group’s Crossroads Workers Union Twitter account announced.

Wednesday’s vote follows the successful vote earlier this month as workers at the Broadway and Denny cafe became the first Starbucks employees in Seattle to approve unionization.

The labor efforts are part of a wave of unionization and workers rights efforts underway across the country as the economy emerges from years of pandemic restrictions.

District 3 representative and Socialist Alternative leader Kshama Sawant has been a vocal proponent of the union efforts and announced she will donate $5,000 to support a Starbucks workers strike fund. The group has also started a Gofundme to try to raise $20,000 for the fund:

Starbucks’s latest union-busting tactic, slashing workers’ hours well below what we can live on, has left many of us financially desperate. Starbucks is counting on this economic stranglehold to prevent its workers from using collective action to fight for our rights. The purpose of this fund is to provide financial relief to Starbucks workers in the Pacific Northwest for income we lose as we take the collective actions needed to win the workplace we deserve.

Sawant will also be part of a rally April 23rd in Cal Anderson Park “to demand an end to Starbucks’ union busting.”

The Broadway union pushes comes following Seattle’s push to raise the minimum wage and amid growing efforts to organize labor at some of the largest companies in the nation that experts say align with the pandemic, record job openings, and rising expectations for better pay and working conditions.

CHS reported last month on United Food & Commercial Workers Local No. 21 petition to the National Labor Board on behalf of 16 employees at the Broadway Crossroads Trading store.

The 31-year-old Crossroads chain includes nearly 40 stores across the country including two in Seattle. The Capitol Hill store replaced a Broadway grocery market in 2010. The company has not publicly responded to the Broadway unionization effort.

Around Capitol Hill, unionization and labor organizing efforts have included other smaller employers. In 2020, CHS reported on the unionization of workers at Capitol Hill’s Elliott Bay Book Company. In 2021, workers at Central District pot shop Ponder became the latest to organize in a spreading movement to unionize the state’s cannabis industry.

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