Starbucks employees make a profit, a loss to the union in two New York stores Reuters

Hilary Russ and Lindsay (NYSE 🙂 by DeDario

BUFFALO, NY (Reuters) – Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ 🙂 workers on Thursday voted to join a union at a store in Buffalo, New York, but the union was relegated to a second location in the city.

Staff at a Starbucks location in Buffalo voted for Workers United, an employee affiliated with the Service Employees International Union. The counting of votes for a third store has ended without a final result as some votes are being reviewed.

Both the union and the Seattle coffee chain could challenge the election result. If the results of the first store were to hold, however, the company would achieve its first union location in the United States in decades.

“We’ve always been a Starbucks, we’ll always be a Starbucks,” Rossann Williams, president of Starbucks North America, told Reuters before the count began in a telephone interview. “By the way, what we build will be a couple relationship, and it will be the same.”

About 15 Starbucks employees who support the union gathered in a room in Buffalo to see the results. Many jumped, screamed and hugged when they realized they had enough votes to win the Elmwood Avenue store.

The vote was 19-8 in favor of joining the union.

Camp Road’s second-place bartenders and shift leaders voted 12-8 to dismiss the union.

Shares of Starbucks were down less than 1% at $ 115.76 this afternoon.

The company owned several unionized cafes and grills in the United States in the 1980s, but all eventually withdrew their certification. He struggled to organize campaigns in Philadelphia and New York, but a place in Canada was unionized in 2020.

Victory at a Buffalo store could encourage other bartenders to launch their company’s more than 8,000 coffee shop charts. Three other stores in the Buffalo area and Mesa, an Arizona store, have already applied to the National Labor Relations Committee for union elections.

“Despite the small number of employees, the results are of great symbolic importance,” said John Logan, a professor at San Francisco State University. “Workers who want to form a union in the United States are forced to take a big risk, and it helps to see others who have taken that risk and it has paid off.”

The results are closely followed when companies look at new union campaigns, amid labor shortages in the U.S., and have already brought in higher wages at most major retailers and restaurant chains.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ), an e-commerce company, is facing a new election in one of Alabama’s warehouses after the results of the previous election – which lost unions – were canceled last month.