FEBRUARY 27, 2024 (prospect.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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JOSHUA BESSEX\/AP PHOTO<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Starbucks Workers United buttons from a watch party of the first union election in Buffalo on December 9, 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is what we\u2019ve always wanted,\u201d says Michelle Eisen, a Starbucks barista who\u2019s been with the company since 2010 and works at the Buffalo outlet that was the first to vote to go union, back in 2021. \u201cWe wanted Starbucks to actually be the company they always said they were.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Tuesday, Starbucks may have finally become just that. In a joint announcement<\/a> released by both Starbucks and Workers United, the baristas\u2019 union that is part of SEIU, the company agreed \u201cto begin discussions on a foundational framework designed to achieve \u2026 collective bargaining agreements for represented stores and partners.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The somewhat operatic language (\u201cdiscussions on a foundational framework\u201d) raised some questions about whether this was just more delay to a first contract. But the Prospect <\/em>has learned that Starbucks has affirmatively agreed to bargaining with workers and their representatives to craft a master contract that applies to all unionized outlets, to be augmented, if necessary, by add-on contracts dealing with issues specific to particular outlets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To demonstrate its good faith to understandably skeptical workers, the company also agreed to let them receive credit card tipping and also receive the back pay from the raises and benefits the company had given to all its employees, except those in outlets that had voted to go union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More from Harold Meyerson<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n After decades of decline, the American union movement has seen a dramatic uptick in the past couple of years, with a wave of unionizations among difficult-to-replace professional workers (university teaching assistants, hospital interns and residents); a landmark contract for unionized autoworkers; and rulings from President Biden\u2019s National Labor Relations Board that enable workers to win back some of their organizing rights. But organizing and winning contracts for the kind of workers who can be replaced, whom managers have routinely fired when they seek to join or form unions, has still presented a nearly insuperable obstacle. And as a result, union density hasn\u2019t really budged amid these victories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why Tuesday\u2019s announcement is the single most important breakthrough American workers have achieved in a very long time. Until Tuesday, workers in industries such as fast-food or other parts of the service sector appeared to be all but unorganizable, so fierce and successful (and routine) was management\u2019s opposition to such initiatives. It certainly was fierce at Starbucks so long as the company founder, Howard Schultz, called the shots. During the more than two years since the Buffalo baristas voted to go union (since followed by baristas at nearly 400 other Starbucks, out of the 9,000 that the company owns), the company has faithfully followed the union-buster\u2019s playbook, firing workers who led organizing campaigns, refusing to bargain with workers who\u2019d voted to go union (who now total roughly 10,000), and withholding raises from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite that, the workers persisted. In recent weeks, baristas at 21 outlets all filed for unionization elections on the same day, and a slate of three pro-worker notables (including Wilma Liebman, who chaired the NLRB during the Obama presidency) have been running for Starbucks board director seats at the company\u2019s annual shareholders\u2019 meeting, to be held two weeks from tomorrow. In recent weeks as well, the company, now led by post-Schultz CEO Laxman Narasimhan, released a statement suggesting it was willing to alter its course, though no tangible course alterations were apparent until Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tuesday\u2019s announcement is the single most important breakthrough American workers have achieved in a very long time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The grounds on which company and union came together was a mediation process to settle a company suit and a union countersuit over some workers\u2019 use of the word \u201cStarbucks\u201d to identify themselves during an action they took in opposition to the ongoing Gaza war. Over just the past week, that mediation broadened to include settling the underlying disputes between the company and its workers. It was only on Tuesday, however, with the release of the joint statement, that the baristas learned that a larger agreement had been reached.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur initial reaction was shock,\u201d says Eisen. \u201cAnd then tears\u2014lots of tears, of disbelief and then relief.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond the immediate factors, what really was behind Starbucks\u2019s epochal shift was a change in the zeitgeist. Unions are more popular today than they\u2019ve been in 60 years, and young workers\u2014a description that covers the vast majority of the company\u2019s baristas\u2014are overwhelmingly pro-union. Over the past two years, 90 percent of thousands of university student employees who\u2019ve participated in unionization elections have voted to go union, and I suspect we may see a similar rate at hundreds and perhaps thousands more Starbucks outlets now that the company has said it will work toward a master agreement for unionized shops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Does this change at Starbucks betoken a change in the nation at large? The UAW has just invested $40 million<\/a> in its campaign to organize the country\u2019s non-union auto and battery plants, and also on Tuesday, it announced<\/a> that more than half the workers at the Mercedes plant in Alabama\u2014Mercedes\u2019s largest factory in the U.S.\u2014had signed union affiliation cards. If the UAW can organize those plants, following on the victory at Starbucks, will that trigger the kind of wave that followed the UAW\u2019s sit-down occupation of General Motors factories in 1937, which led to the unionization of the country\u2019s largest employers? Will it spur the Teamsters to take on Amazon? Or other unions to take on Walmart?<\/p>\n\n\n\n If so, that would signal an epochal shift in the nation\u2019s political economy. Organizing private-sector workers, save only those whose special skills or knowledge meant they couldn\u2019t be fired if they sought to organize, more or less ground to a halt during the 1950s. At that time, in a world where the egalitarian effects of the New Deal continued to shape the nation\u2019s economy, and prosperity was broadly shared, unions represented about a third of the nation\u2019s workforce. Many union leaders viewed continued organizing as unnecessary. The already \u201corganized fellow is the fellow that counts,\u201d said AFL-CIO President George Meany, voicing a complacency that proved to be nearly fatal to unions\u2019 effective existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As big business managed to steadily weaken the New Deal\u2019s social contract, private-sector union growth ceased, the middle class shrank, and stratospheric levels of economic inequality came to define today\u2019s American economy. Workers have been pushing back, largely unsuccessfully, for some time now. It\u2019s only in the past few years that we\u2019ve seen some breakthroughs. None have been so hard-fought or dramatic, though, as yesterday\u2019s at Starbucks. Just how dramatic, and how historic, depends on how successfully a largely somnolent labor movement, slowly awakening to the change in climate, can roll it on.LABOR<\/a>UNIONS<\/a>STARBUCKS<\/a>SEIU<\/a>UAW<\/a>AUTOWORKERS<\/a>NLRB<\/a>CORPORATE POWER<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a historic breakthrough, Starbucks and its workers announce they\u2019ve come together. BY HAROLD MEYERSON FEBRUARY 27, 2024 (prospect.org) JOSHUA BESSEX\/AP PHOTO Starbucks Workers United buttons from a watch party of the first union election in Buffalo on December 9, 2021 \u201cThis is what we\u2019ve always wanted,\u201d says Michelle Eisen, a… Continue reading \n
HAROLD MEYERSON<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n