Facing Management

by Ian V

Abel, an ex-worker at one of the stores who’s union campaign failed, spoke with the ULB about the barriers him and his coworkers faced in organizing a union at the Starbucks in the Little Cottonwood Shopping Center. Starting in the middle of 2023, Abel’s store was on the smaller side, only about a dozen workers. Despite recent wins in the valley, pro-union workers at the store faced a series of anti-union efforts from management. Immediately following their announcement of their intentions to organize a union, workers faced strict and arbitrary enforcement of codes of conduct and started to be pulled into regular “partner development” meetings with management, captive one-on-one sit-downs which targeted less-inoculated workers on the night shift that worker organizers had difficulty getting an in with. As the campaign progressed, management pushed more on the night shift workers by pulling in a supervisor from another local store which had won a hard-fought and messy union campaign. Loudly anti-union, this supervisor was able to continue the anti-union rhetoric even outside the captive meetings workers faced. Leading up to the union election, management bolstered their presence by sending an internal union buster to pass around anti-union literature, and the district manager began showing up to the store more often. By the end of their 33 day union election campaign, despite their best efforts, the pro-union workers lost out by a single vote, one of the workers, it turned out, had been flipped the night before the election after an emotionally charged conversation with management.

While Abel, one of the core organizers in the campaign, was eventually pushed out months after the union election failed, the anti-union maneuvers of management were decidedly different from the harsh, punitive measures taken against worker organizers in earlier union campaigns. Shortly after the Little Cottonwood Starbucks lost its union vote, on February 27^th, 2024 the national body of Starbucks Workers United came to an agreement with Starbucks to move forward with contract negotiations. Despite this, however, in late December 2024 several unionized stores moved forward with strike actions after an overwhelming 98% of union workers voted to authorize a strike. The Starbucks Workers United campaigns of the past few years have built up workers power across the country, and after their hard-won union victories, workers have decided that it's time for Starbucks’ Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) to end.