Starbucks Union Campaign Spreads Online Beyond Buffalo

In less than three months, the effort by Starbucks Workers United, the union that has backed the Buffalo campaign, has resulted in union election petitions filed with the NLRB in Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Seattle and other cities, agency filings show.

The number of stores considering unionization remains a fraction of Starbucks’s overall total, and analysts have said the formation of the Buffalo union last month would likely have little immediate impact on the chain’s operations.

Around two dozen of Starbucks’s nearly 9,000 U.S. corporate stores have filed for individual union elections since workers at the first Buffalo stores petitioned to unionize in late August. That represents several hundred workers out of the chain’s 230,000 U.S. store employees. About 3,500 of the chain’s licensed stores in the U.S. are unionized, typically at hotels, grocery stores and travel plazas.

Starbucks said a union would interfere with the chain’s direct relationship with its workers and divide a workforce that often travels between chain stores depending on labor needs. Starbucks has said it would respect the election process and would bargain with workers in individual stores who successfully vote to unionize.

“From the beginning, we’ve been clear in our belief that we are better together as partners, without a union between us at Starbucks, and that conviction has not changed,” said Starbucks spokesman Reggie Borges, referring to attempts by baristas to organize.

Starbucks Workers United said it has received dozens of inquiries from Starbucks workers in recent weeks, and union leaders said that some stores have filed for an election within days of contacting the group.

Michelle Hejduk, a 33-year-old Starbucks barista who works at a Mesa, Ariz., location, said she reached out to union organizers in November and filed a petition to hold an election for 28 workers roughly three days later. The NLRB is overseeing a union election at her store, with ballots mailed out Wednesday, an agency spokeswoman said. Ballots are due Feb. 2.

“We were scared at first,” said Ms. Hejduk, a Starbucks worker since 2017, who said she contacted Starbucks Workers United after growing concerned about what she said was spotty staffing at her cafe. “Having that support really helped.”

Starbucks is sending regional managers to stores expressing interest in unionization to assess the concerns of workers and try to respond, the company said. Managers are at times closing stores to hold listening sessions with workers and to give them information about the company’s stance on unions. The company has also highlighted its wages and benefits, including its boost of average U.S. employee pay to $17 an hour by summer 2022. It has also pledged to fix cafe equipment and improve staffing, including through the hiring of more recruiters.

The company’s response has been especially vigorous in Buffalo, where Howard Schultz, the former chief executive, and Rossann Williams, the current North America president, traveled to meet with workers last year. Starbucks said the problems with staffing and store operations were more acute in Buffalo, necessitating a bigger company response.

“Nothing is going to change for us,” said Mr. Borges, referring to Starbucks’s approach to discussing unionization with employees. “We are learning from the feedback.”

The initial reach of the unionization campaign at Starbucks shouldn’t have a material impact on the company’s business in the foreseeable future, said Brett Levy, restaurant analyst at the investment firm MKM Partners. It could take a long time before any potential union agreements show up in Starbucks’s financials, Mr. Levy said.

“The current slate of potential union votes still appear to be largely one-offs,” he said.

So far two Buffalo-area stores have voted to unionize, and the results of a third vote remain disputed. Workers in one unionized store there recently walked out in protest of conditions they alleged weren’t safe because of Covid-19. The company said it shifted all of its operations in the metro area to takeout-only before the walkout. The NLRB is overseeing union elections in three additional Buffalo stores.

Union drives aided by digital communication tools and social media are spreading faster than traditional efforts in factories and plants that relied on in-person meetings, said Mary Kay Henry, president of Service Employees International Union, which is affiliated with Starbucks Workers United.

“Their comfort and agility in using it has made the Starbucks campaign go faster than many things that we’ve seen recently,” Ms. Henry said about technology in labor organizing.

The Starbucks campaign emerged after organizing inroads that the Workers United Upstate New York union made at other chains, including Ithaca, N.Y.-based Gimme Coffee in 2017 and Buffalo’s SPoT Coffee in 2019, organizers said.

Starbucks Workers United’s social-media accounts are now regularly amplified by local and national politicians, aiding organization efforts in other cafes.

Maggie Carter, a Starbucks barista in the Knoxville, Tenn., area, said she started following news of the Buffalo campaign in October and began reading up on unions herself. The single mom and university student, who started working at Starbucks in May 2019, said she felt that the company was far removed from its stores’ daily operations. She said that she reached out to Starbucks Workers United in November and that the cafe where Ms. Carter works filed for a union election last month.

“This is a completely new world for me,” Ms. Carter said.

Write to Heather Haddon at [email protected] and Allison Prang at [email protected]