The Starbucks union vote is the latest test of the resurgence of US workers’ power Workers’ Rights News

On a cloudy Wednesday in December, six employees from three nearby Starbucks stores gathered in a red-brick building in Buffalo – a small town on the Canadian border in New York State, 32 miles (20 miles) from Niagara Falls. They stood under a black banner in front of a wall lined with constellations of handwritten posters, raised two fists, squeezed two images squeezing a drinking bowl, and in bold, white letters said “partner becomes a partner.”

The three stores they represent want to become Starbucks stores that will be merged into more than 8,000 corporate-owned locations in the United States. The result of their efforts will be determined when the votes of the employees are counted on Thursday, December 9th.

Workers announced their intention to unionize in late August, saying they had not received adequate risk pay for the coronavirus pandemic and that they had suffered a steady decline in working conditions over the past decade.

“It simply came to our notice then [during the pandemic]”said bartender Michelle Eison and a member of the Starbucks Workers United Organizing Committee.

“I’ve been with the company for over a decade, and I earn about $ 1.20 an hour more than the one they hired yesterday,” he said at a recent news conference. “It’s a company I’m very proud of, though. I’d like to go back to where they were when I started with them 10 years ago. “

For Eisen, this means giving front-line employees like him a voice over corporate politics through the power of collective bargaining.

“The only way to talk is for a union to negotiate a contract,” he said.

Jaz Brisa is also a member of the organizing committee. Like Eisen, he is confident that the union will prevail on Thursday, but regrets the obstacles they have faced to get to this point.

Starbucks asked the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to stop counting votes on Thursday, saying the vote should be extended to all Starbucks locations in Buffalo. The NLRB on Tuesday rejected the appeal, paving the way for the count to move forward.

“We shouldn’t have to overcome all these obstacles, all this union-breaking that is going on until the last second to get our votes,” Brisak said in a Dec. 8 election deadline. “We don’t have to be scared in our stores.”

Rossann Williams, president of Starbucks North America and other store managers and executives filled out union voter lists, held anti-union hearings and told employees that their benefits would disappear if union efforts were successful.

“Rossann Williams was in our stores on Thanksgiving Day, doing all this union breaking with a turkey hat, as it seemed to be a holiday as he stepped in to create a kind of hostile environment,” Brisa said.

Casey Moore, another member of the organizing committee, told Al Jazeera that the support of Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most important progressive politicians, has been exciting and gratifying.

Starbucks Workers United members meet at the Buffalo, New York office on December 7, 2021. [Lindsay DeDario/Reuters]

“He promised to help us as we tried to bring Starbucks to the negotiating table,” Moore said of a call from the group to Sanders.

Starbucks says it has not illegally obstructed the legal rights of its employees in their efforts to organize a union.

“We completely deny these claims,” Starbucks Corporate Communications Director Reggie Borges told Al Jazeera in an email.

Borges said Starbucks did not provide adequate compensation to employees during the pandemic, saying they were “inaccurate” and said the company had “made three different salary investments in the last two years” bringing the average bartender’s salary to $ 17 per hour.

“Compensation for permanent members has been a consistent part of our company’s history,” Borges added.

A pro-union atmosphere

Organized labor was far from its peak in 1954, when nearly 35% of U.S. workers belonged to a union.

For 2018, the unionization rate was only 10.5%. But that number has risen slightly in the pandemic, reaching 10.8 percent last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This year, labor market conditions have become decided in favor of workers as employers struggle to meet one. almost a record number of job offers offering better wages and benefits.

The political climate in Washington has also arguably not been pleasing to workers for decades, thanks to President Joe Biden’s “union-paying” work as a pillar of his Build Back Better economic policies.

Cornell University Work Action Follower It has identified more than 340 strikes in the U.S. this year.

Some of them have been involved in national blue-chip companies. From mid-October to mid-November, Deere & Co staff finally went on strike getting a better contract deal from management.

From mid-October to mid-November, Deere & Co employees went on strike before finally reaching a better management contract agreement. [File: Scott Morgan/Reuters]

Strike threats have also been headlines. In November, the health giant Kaiser Permanente approved the rejection of a proposal to a two-tier wage system that would have roughly avoided a cost-cutting strike.

But more strikes do not mean there has been a sharp rise in the creation of new unions.

“It would be wrong to say that there has been a resurgence in the organization,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of research education at Cornell University’s School of Industry and Labor Relations. “But there has certainly been an increase in strike activity.”

This year has also been a time of high-level union failures.

Employees at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama voted in April not to form a union. But they were he gave a strange second vote last month, after the NLRB concluded that Amazon had interfered with its organizational efforts.

And some efforts are taking months. Workers at Kellogg’s four plants have been on strike since early October. Kellogg said start hiring permanent replacements after the majority of employees voted against the final contract offer,

Benefits and disadvantages

For a long time, being a member of the union has been attractive to workers with the promise of better wages and job security.

The salaries of union members are, on average, 11 percent higher than those of non-union members, according to a study by the Progressive Institute for Economic Policy.

And the benefits go beyond individual employees, Bronfenbrenner said. “The strengths of stronger unions are in a more democratic society,” he said. “When you have stronger unions, you have less inequality in society. You have less discrimination. You have less abuse of business power. ”

Bronfenbrenner added that the only downside is “for those who are making money at the expense of workers in this country.”

But some economists strongly disagree that union contracts can feed inflation for U.S. consumers, and even leave workers in a worse position.

“In the private sector, if you have a union … it may be consumers who pay the bill at higher prices,” said Veronique de Rugy, a senior economist and researcher at the Mercatus Center’s Center for Libertarian Thought. George Mason University.

“Private sector unions often raise labor costs in a way that can be detrimental to workers,” de Rugy told Al Jazeera, noting that paying union dues can be a condition of employment, as long as companies can simply decide. outsourcing jobs abroad or, as Boeing did last year, jobs from union-friendly states to non-union-friendly states.

“What’s best for workers, especially low-wage workers, is the vibrant economy,” he said.