Starbucks Workers Vote to Unionize in Seattle Store

Pro-union workers at the store—a roughly 10-minute drive from the company’s headquarters—said they wanted management to allow workers to unionize, and take care of its baristas better.

Starbucks said during its annual investor meeting last week that it aimed to do more to improve the work environment for baristas and to listen to its employees. Howard Schultz, the company’s chairman emeritus and previous chief executive, will return to the company next month as an interim CEO as part of a reset.

Sydney Durkin, a shift supervisor in the Seattle store that chose to unionize, said Mr. Schultz would find a different reality in his company than during his previous tenure. Fighting the union campaign was a losing battle, she said.

“They are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history,” said Ms. Durkin, 26 years old, during a Starbucks Workers United event following the vote.

Starbucks said Tuesday in response to the Seattle vote that it would follow the NLRB vote-certification process. Overall, the company said it believes in the direct relationship it has with its employees, and will respect the unionizing process. In a letter to workers last week, Mr. Schultz said Starbucks needed to take a hard look at itself as a company and community of employees.

Since the union drive began at cafes in the Buffalo, N.Y., area last year, nearly 150 U.S. Starbucks cafes have petitioned to hold votes on whether their workers should be represented by Starbucks Workers United. Workers in seven out of eight of the stores to count ballots so far have voted to unionize. Starbucks owns and operates around 9,000 U.S. stores.

Starbucks Workers United has filed a number of complaints against Starbucks over practices they alleged are interfering in their ability to organize at stores.

Last week, the NLRB alleged that the chain retaliated against two employees seeking to unionize their store in Phoenix. The NLRB wrote in a complaint that Starbucks engaged in surveillance and other conduct that interfered with the workers’ rights to organize. The NLRB asked the company to respond to the accusations by the end of the month.

A Starbucks spokesman said that an employee’s interest in a union doesn’t prevent the company from applying long-held standards pertaining to its workers.

“We will continue enforcing our policies consistently for all partners, and we will follow the NLRB’s process to resolve this complaint,” the spokesman said, referring to Starbucks baristas.

After buying out the local Starbucks coffee outpost in 1987, Mr. Schultz helped design the company’s offerings for its baristas and other workers, offering benefits that he said went beyond most retailers. Providing those benefits would help prove the company’s worth over a union, he has said.

“I was convinced that under my leadership, employees would come to realize that I would listen to their concerns,” Mr. Schultz wrote in “Pour Your Heart into It,” his book about building Starbucks into a global coffee company. “If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union.”

The United Food and Commercial Workers union represented a group of baristas and coffee roasters in the Seattle area when Mr. Schultz first acquired the Starbucks assets in 1987. The union was decertified soon after, a development that Mr. Schultz described as a sign that enhanced benefits brought to the company had an impact.

Write to Heather Haddon at [email protected]