(Image: Starbucks Roastery)
A National Labor Relations Board judge has dealt Starbucks another legal blow in a battle over last year’s unionization vote at its centerpiece Seattle Roastery on Capitol Hill as the coffee giant fights labor organizing at its store across the country.
Starbucks used meetings with employees to illegally threaten workers, violating federal labor law as it responded to the April 2022 vote including telling workers it would reduce or end benefits if they voted to unionize and telling them the company would prioritize prioritize non-union stores, the judge ruled.
“I believe the message from [the Starbucks representative] was objectively clear, if employees unionized the company would prioritize non-unionized stores for additional upgrades or benefits over the Roastery,” NLRB judge John Giannopoulos writes. “By threatening employees that future upgrades and/or benefits could be put at risk if employees unionized.”
Starbucks has denied the allegations and says the meetings were voluntary.
Last April, workers at the popular Melrose Ave roastery voted to join the Starbucks Workers United effort and unionize the store, at the time, the second location in the company’s home city to organize.
Bloomberg reports this week’s ruling continues the NLRB’s efforts against so-called “captive audience meetings” and that the Roastery decision could be used as precedent to ban them outright.
Starbucks could appeal the ruling.
In December, CHS reported on another blow to the coffee giant as the board found the company was violating labor law by refusing to negotiate with union workers at the massive 15,000-square-foot Capitol Hill roastery.
The Starbucks Roastery stands at the corner of Melrose and Pike at the base of Capitol Hill and is a more than $30 million coffee retail marvel and the most visited Starbucks store in its home city after the Pike Place Market shop. It is also the only remaining stand-alone Starbucks store on Capitol Hill after the closure of the shop at Broadway and Denny, the first of the company’s cafes to unionize in its home city.
CHS talked with workers from the Broadway shop about the organizing efforts here a year ago. The Starbucks union activity is part of 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.
Meanwhile, the coffee giant’s presence on Capitol Hill beyond the roastery is now made up only of lightly staffed counters inside busy grocery stores and hospitals.
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So sad to see what Starbucks has become as a company. I worked for them in the 1990’s when they were much smaller, and there was a different culture back then. Now they seem to be the Walmart of coffee, with little regard for employees (aka “partners”).
How long til the Roastery closes for “Safety Issues”
It will never happen. This location generates too much cash.
Starbucks is so awful. Why are they even in our neighborhood. Indie coffee places only on the hill please!
But none of the indie places are unionized.
Yeah and the pay and benefits not as good.
Starbucks is by no means a great company. But it’s hard to reconcile this.
While it’s clear that Starbucks would rather not have unionized stores, and it’s damn near impossible to believe that this has to do with anything other than the bottom line, I don’t remember the last time anyone praised them for the great pay and benefits package that they offer their staff, many (if not most?) of whom come to the job with zero experience.
Having been here for 23 years, I’ve known a lot of people that worked for this “Walmart of coffee”. I have never heard anyone complain about what they made, the advancement opportunities, or the perks. My understanding is that Starbucks has always paid above market rate, and offered tuition reimbursement, transportation coverage, employee crisis aid, parental leave, PTO, awesome health care, 401k matching and stock incentives, and again, all of this for someone to come in, be friendly, and push buttons – no experience necessary. They’ve also done a fantastic job of hiring people of color, and haven’t avoided opening up in neighborhoods with lower income households. Someone please tell me which “indie” coffee shop does all this.
I get that corporations are tasked with a mandate to increase shareholder wealth, but ffs, Starbucks isn’t Walmart, folks. It isn’t Amazon, either. I gotta be honest, if I offered all that and my employees said “f@ck you, we need a union,” I’d probably resist as well. Sure, support small business, but I really don’t get the superlative hatred for this company.
Uh oh, Starbucks’ PR Team has entered the chat! Quick, everyone pretend you have a living wage and a primary care doctor!
Super productive, thanks.
lol you’re so right. “On the other hands” really seems like a SB bot
My understanding is that the problem workers have with Starbucks isn’t so much the pay and benefits, but their working conditions — unpredictable and fluctuating hours, short staffing, inconvenient transfers to other stores, inadequate security, favoritism, safety issues, etc. At a large corporation with multiple layers of management between the C-suite and the shop floor, there’s really no other way to address these issues other than through a union.
Thank you for answering with substance, and without hucking anonymous snark like NormalPerson. This is the first rational explanation I’ve heard of a need to unionize, not because of the issues stated, but because of the argument that it is hard to achieve any amount of change in a large corporation. I can understand why it would be hard to get changes without unionization, but it’s stil a little difficult to see the weight of some of the issues.
Favoritism? I mean, that’s a charge that could very easily be leveled at an undeserving party, and it’s a little hard to govern this, no?
Unpredictable/fluctuating hours? I can get this to some degree, though I worked at a lot of mom and pop coffee shops when I was younger and this was the norm. I mean, like it was almost never the same schedule. Nobody ever gave a shit.
Transfers? Maybe? It seems reasonable that you shouldn’t be bumped to another store without getting consent, but I dunno … if you’re gonna get all those perks, is there no trade off? I guess that transferring someone to a distant location could make an easy constructive termination case, but does that happen often enough that the case couldn’t be handled on an individual basis? Does this happen often enough that it requires a union?
Inadequate security, and safety issues? Really? Isn’t the big argument right now that Starbucks is union busting by falsely closing stores that were “too dangerous”? And then everybody said they were making that up? But they didn’t have enough security, so they should be forced to stay open and pay for (more) security? Seems like it’s taking things a little too far. If we’re talking on-the-job hazards, I can’t imagine a scenario working at a coffee shop that would really be all that unsafe, save for maybe mishandling some hot water or ground beans, but nothing seems like an extraordinary risk. Needs specificity.
Ultimately, I still find it kind of hard to sympathize, but I appreciate you explaining.
You seem to have a lot of resentments and not a lot of empathy. Just saying.