What can the Starbucks, Amazon, and others learn from the struggle of unionization? The story of Howard Schultz, the NLRB, and the 401(k)
Under its legendary CEO Howard Schultz, who returned to lead Starbucks in April, the company has taken a wide array of measures to aggressively fight the union — from blanketing employee communications with anti-union messaging, including in one-on-one meetings, to announcing raises and benefits for nonunion stores only, to firing workers identified as union leaders.
Beyond issuing complaints, the NLRB has little power to change the company’s behavior. Congress does not allow the NLRB to assess monetary penalties for unfair labor practices. Starbucks does not have to pay fines, only to make whole remedies such as back pay and compensation for medical and moving costs related to firings.
Reggie Borges said in a statement that the company respected its partners’ right to organize, but felt the best future was created by partners and not a third party.
But those complaints and others have done nothing to deter Starbucks. Since then, Starbucks has unveiled even more benefits — including financial tools aimed at helping employees build savings and manage student loan debt — again, for nonunion stores only.
Unlike many cafes and dine out restaurants,credit card machines at Starbucks don’t allow customers to add tips, which is a central issue in baristas’ demands.
“We do not have the same freedom to make these improvements at locations that have a union or where union organizing is underway,” Schultz told shareholders at the time.
All this seems to be working. Amazon workers voted not to unionize. People working at Home Depot and Trader Joe’s also did. Starbucks has 270 unionized locations where less than 3% of the company’s stores are unionized.
Gailyn Berg, who works at a unionized Starbucks in Falls Church, Va., says that workers get angry when they find out they are not getting benefits.
What can unions learn from the Starbucks, Amazon and others case? What can the new generation of activists learn from the old guard about sustaining a movement? I’m Audie CORNISH. This is the assignment. We are not ignoring the major strikes of the last few months. In Minnesota, 15000 nurses walked out of hospitals. In December the threat of rail workers striking drew attention to the president. In Staten Island, the Trader Joe’s and the Starbucks had workers who were very new to labor activism.
Berg backed away from the idea of unionizing them all. attitude they’d embraced earlier in the year. But they haven’t abandoned the fight.
“We’re scared. Jasmine Leli is a barista and union leader in Buffalo, N.Y. “We just want to go to work like everybody else and do our jobs and not have to worry [about] when the other shoe is going to drop.”
A federal judge in western Tennessee ordered the company to return seven workers to work. Starbucks argued that those fired had violated company policies.
The State of the Art and the Future of the U.S. Labor Relations: The Case for a Free-Loop Solution to the Labor Problem
Rebecca Givan, associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, says the National Labor Relations Act doesn’t serve as a deterrent because the penalties are weak. “Employers decide to break the law because they don’t think it will have dire consequences.”
Berg said that they didn’t seem to care about them at all. Howard Shultz seems to be focused on doing his thing while not really acknowledging the fact that he has lost faith in many of us.
Schultz plans to leave the company once again and is happy with how things are going. Starbucks announced that his successor Laxman Narasimhan, who officially joined the company Oct. 1, will take over as CEO next spring.
Revenue at Starbucks exceeded expectations in the third quarter. Customer loyalty — measured through the growing number of Starbucks rewards members — remains strong. The company predicted net new U.S. store growth of 3% to 4% annually over the next few years.
“We’ve been planning for months,” says Leli, who sits on the committee and has worked to gather input from thousands of employees around the country. “We want to make sure everyone feels seen and heard.”
Labor Unions Organizing Elections Worker Rights Wages during the Great Resignation: The Case for Starbucks and Staten Island
During the pandemic, you probably heard a lot about the great resignation when millions of people quit their jobs. I was also one of them. After another look at the job data, many economists were calling for a period from 2021 to 2022. The Great Renegotiation is something else. People quit their jobs for new jobs. Many people use the job market to demand more from their employers, and others are not willing to work for poor working conditions and abuse. There was a jump in worker strikes and work stoppages.
A few factors help explain that rise. Public support for unions is at a 60-year high (more on that below). Starbucks played a large part in driving up that number. Out of every five elections the union was victorious, and Starbucks was involved in 25% of them.
There were some notable union campaigns this year, among which are graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, health care workers at Kaiser Hospital and Ultium Cells, a GM owned electric vehicle battery cell plant.
The process of getting to a collective-bargaining contract to bargain for pay raises or other changes that unionized workers want is very slow.
The process hasn’t even begun at the Staten Island warehouse, where the AMAZON Labor Union’s win is still being challenged.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/27/1145090566/labor-unions-organizing-elections-worker-rights-wages
How big labor can you be? When did the railroads and other big labor unions get their raises? The case of San Francisco International Airport
Wages increased over last year. Wage growth was even faster at the lowest-paying jobs because of the high number of openings. Overall wages declined, and many workers felt like they were losing ground, despite adjusting for inflation.
The talks with the freight railroads did not reach a deal on everything, but the rail workers got a 7 percent raise in 2022, followed by another 8.5% over the next two years, and cash bonuses every year.
Food service workers at San Francisco International Airport won a 30% wage increase over two years after striking for three days in September. They’ll see wages rise from about $17 an hour to $22 an hour by 2024. The deal also included health insurance, retirement, and a one-time bonus.
The economy is another factor. If a recession were to happen, economists say it wouldn’t affect union enthusiasm. Sometimes, when things don’t look right, workers want a union to represent their interests. Historically, though, an economic downturn is a difficult moment for labor organizing and campaigns for better pay and benefits.
And we’re fueled by a new generation of workers who, raised in the era of low union participation, weren’t so eager to latch on to traditional, big labor.
They were like, Hey, you’re struggling. I see you’re struggling. I can help you. The workers were like, Hold on, wait a second. You don’t know anything about me. I don’t need your help. I can do it on my own.
I thought that blue collar workers were the only ones who were allowed to unionize. I didn’t think baristas could unionize at any fast food chain. Period.
I wish I’m rather short to tell you the truth. We are definitely a national network of coalitions which work with community groups, faith organizations, unions and worker centers to advance the ability of everyday people to organize and bargain. The spirit of building a healthy democracy is what it is all about.
The rights for the full time workers who have a full time job. The smaller what you call shop to shop activists are not affiliated with any big union. They may be trying to unionize. What is big labor to you? What does that mean?
It’s a term that is often used by the opposition to make workers look like special interest groups when they demand respect and rights. The relationship between institutions and movements is part of the dynamic that you’re getting at. So there’s the labor movement, which is very big, which includes people who are organizing for the first time, whether they have an affiliation or not, or an organization or not, and and includes members of existing unions who are trying to negotiate maybe not for the first time. And then there’s organized labor, which is kind of what you were laying out, where there are, you know, institutions that have won recognition, have the ability to negotiate standards on their job or in their industry. And then the leaders that, you know, make decisions based on that and interact in the world based on that.
Pop culture has not forgiven the latter. Right. Like, I think Scorsese made like a couple of films just centered on the idea, yeah, that organized labor is corrupt and there’s some history there.
We are going to mess up over the course of this. That’s what the show is about. But so one of the kind of ongoing, I think, media narratives around this is that these kind of rank and file groups that establish union drives or at least push or petition for certain rights in the workplace have wielded the sort of modern levers of technology in organizing in ways that have been innovative. So to give the example, Staten Island, as you said, Amazon Labor union, they collected enough union cards to be approved for election at two warehouses. They relied on basically workers, right? There are no professional organizers. They used GoFund Me for their dues. And, you know, they were spreading the word the way we spread the word about anything, you know, these days online and social networking. Did that feel like a different moment? Because the writing around. It was labor organizers here and their activists who were quoted saying they needed to pay attention because they did something they had not been able to do against the company. Why was that a turning point when we were in this position?
What do you say to your colleagues when you decide to go to work? What do they want to hear from the union? How to contact a big union
What are the standard rules, so to speak, when when you decide, I’m at work? I am not getting any work done. We need some help. And you reach out to a big union. What are they going to say? What will be the suggestions?
Well, I mean, the best of them will ask who else within your job site is with you and encourage the employee to actually, you know, ensure that they’re talking to others. I believe that there is a myth that the first step is to reach out to a union. They’ll just start talking to their coworkers. Sometimes they have to reach out to an institution to learn about their rights when they get in trouble. The union staff person will support the committee of people and try to talk to others if they are the direction that workers go. They’ll help map the shop floor and know who else is with them, who isn’t with them, and who are the leaders within the worksite that people listen to and how to bring them along. Those are the best campaigns because they really incentivize worker to worker organizing. I think on the flip side of that.
You know, I think in the worst case scenario, those agreements are made between an existing union and a company with no worker involvement, either through a merger or through some kind of sweetheart deal where there’s just a conversation between a set of union officers or staff and an a company. The danger of that is the fact that the needs of the people in that workplace would not be addressed in that type of agreement.
Some of the biggest barriers are in trying to both protect the needs and expand the standards, so as not to erode the standards of existing members, who are truly the resources and power of the institutions. So, like, you know, if I were a union president, I want to make sure that the next contract I negotiate, if it doesn’t improve on wages and benefits and at least doesn’t roll them back, given the downward pressure that’s happening in nonunion segments of that industry. I think the other thing is that as a black person, I’m thinking about where union membership is the lowest. The last census shows that the majority of blacks and migrants still live in the south and southwest. And so, you know, this idea that you have to now invest in what could be a fairly high risk in terms of the political economy of those states, but in fact, is maybe one of the most militant bases of the labor movement. It is traditional to first stand in line to get equality and dignity and try to win it. There’s tension about how to invest in it. In Bessemer, the organizing is very different from the one in Staten Island. And we have to figure out how to support that and comfortably accept that risk.
I want to ask about one more area of tension, which is generational. Is there a way for Gen Z to make something out of their work? That comes into play or can create tensions in this environment of activism. The labor movement has traditionally been about worker conditions, but also wages, benefits, etc. A new generation is asking about diversity and inclusion. Do those things come into tension? Is it possible for corporations fighting unions to exploit that dynamic?
What types of tensions are created as a result? I can remember being in a union where the younger person would say that we can’t solve the problem because there’s not enough money, and you would hear someone say we don’t have enough money. We’re not going to end racism in this negotiation. We are trying to get back our cost of living increase.
It’sVisceral. Yeah. You are describing like every household. There’s this debate. There are people who are against it. We’ve tried we tried it back in 1968. There’s always a gap between generations. This moment is interesting, not only because it’s young people that are taking to the streets, but also because it’s some of the older people that are taking to the streets. I’ll call it that if they’re young or old. The ones that are winning are the new generation. It’s saying something to those people who’ve been skeptics in the past. The magic of this moment, and why as anxiety can be for a lot of us is why it feels like we’re on the verge of a win.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/83a04bce-7a06-4eda-ba8f-afa9016be2b0
“Naturabretta” Hardin: The Barista from Memphis, Tennessee, for Starbucks Workers United and the Memphis Seven, a collective of workers unlawfully fired
That is the executive director of Jobs with Justice. She came from New Jersey. Nabretta Hardin is the barista from Memphis, Tennessee for Starbucks Workers United.
Nabretta Harden is a student and barista. You are aware of her work if you don’t know her name. She helped unionize her Starbucks in Memphis. She and her coworkers were dubbed the Memphis Seven. So, Nevada Harden, you’re only 23. I didn’t know that. And you are Starbucks Workers United Union leader and member of the Memphis Seven, which was a collective of workers who were unlawfully fired. A federal judge made Starbucks hire you back. How weird has it been being back at work?
Really weird. I was worried because of the high turnover rate in my store. Since I had been gone. I was gone for almost nine months. I had to get to know them all again after I came back, because it was basically a different group of people. So it was like it was a little awkward for me at first.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/83a04bce-7a06-4eda-ba8f-afa9016be2b0
What do you think about Buffalo? A question you might ask me about your school, my roommate, or what I’ve read about it, and what I can do about it
One day, she came to me and asked if I knew anything about Buffalo things. I’m not a full time student and I don’t know anything about that. What is that about? She, of course, you know, explained it to me as like, Hey, they’re just trying to do a lot of things that we are already thinking that we know our workers need. The person can benefit from this. And it’s hard to believe that these are things they are working for. Like, what do you think our store do that? I was like yes. I think for sure my store is a huge family. I chat to my roommate all the time. We communicate with each other on the phone. Every day we chat in a mass group for hours. I thought that it was easy to do. We have so many connections and relationship with these workers. I don’t think it’ll be very hard at all to convince them that this is something that could help them out in the long run.
The workers are similar to the organizers of the Starbucks campaign. We are the organizers. We’re the ones doing all the work. We do everything from start to finish. Everything that you see is done by the workers. It’s not the union organization doing it, it’s the workers. So I don’t think they had like a really big issue because they knew me, they trusted me, they knew I was a worker. I had been working there for up to a year before I got fired. They were aware that they could trust me. They knew I had their backs and they in turn had my back. They had a lot of trust in me on that.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/83a04bce-7a06-4eda-ba8f-afa9016be2b0
Erica Smiley: Executive Director of Jobs with Justice, Leader in the Movement and Activist in the Oppenheimer-Stokes Era
Nabretta, this is Erica Smiley. She’s the executive director of Jobs with Justice, a leader in the movement and an activist. It’s because we’ve talked about pros and cons of internal or external organizing, that Erica is looking at you with stars in her eyes.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/83a04bce-7a06-4eda-ba8f-afa9016be2b0
Nabretta: Doing the real the real work. What am I going to have to deal with when I’m going to get frustrated?
Look, let me just say, Nabretta is doing the real the real work. When we’re discussing small, like what Nabretta is talking about, right? So when unions and institutions are at their best because Workers United is an existing union that is supporting the formation of Starbucks Workers United, right. And what she’s describing is a nimbleness where they’ve made a decision, where they are investing in new organizing and not just in existing contracts, and then at their best, again, making sure that the organizers are workers, that there’s not a false divide between leaders and organizers or workers and staff, and that is unions at their best. That is a good thing. But the thing that I feel like is important here when we say small, right, is that there’s a small to get big, right? Because if Nebraska and her coworkers are successful around the country, Starbucks Workers United will be a giant membership union. Now, does that mean that they have to have a giant staff? Well, that’s the debatable, right? I don’t necessarily think they do. Nabretta believes that they don’t need a huge staff that is doing all sorts of things. But, you know, that’s a decision that the workers will ultimately make at that point. I mean, that’s a lot of workers at Starbucks around the country. It’s still very big.
I think Nabretta is aware of the fact that she has gone through at least one of these growing pains according to a federal judge.
What other things are you going to have to deal with when you first get involved with this work? Because it’s possible that ERICA LYSMIC has advice.
Yeah. Nabretta, I’m sure you’ve had some moments, where you’re like “what have I gotten myself into?” And in those moments, what are the things that trigger that thought?
It was so important when I got fired. I was like, kind of. What did I get myself into? Like, I’ve never been fired from a job before. I’ve always been one of the best workers in every company I’ve worked for. And that’s just like, come from my family values. My family is very hard workers. They work multiple jobs. So when that happened, I was just like, What did I get myself into? Like, I’ve I’ve messed up my record. Like, this is going to go on my job thing. This is going to ruin me. But also I had to think about I wasn’t just doing this for myself. I was doing it for others. And so I kind of like struggle in that aspect.
I have spent a lot of time and effort in my personal life in support of the union campaign. I didn’t expect that, I thought I would have a decent balance. I thought, Oh, I can like organize my store and like, do it kind of like locally, and that would be it. And I could still go to school and into work, not me knowing that it would blow up as big as it had nationally. I’m being told to help with the national campaign instead of local in Memphis.
I’m enrapt. I mean, I could learn from you just as much, but you could be describing the same conversations that I had around the table, around the value. There’s value in work and working, and I think there’s a dominant narrative that makes it look like people who are out here demanding more fighting for the unions that they don’t like to work. There is a lot of talk about your generation liking to be lazy, not wanting to work, but there are so many positives to work for. So I appreciate you lifting that up. It could be that this is not advice, but just reflections on how hard it is to fight, to have dignity in work and to be respected, both, in terms of what you’re describing. And it takes a lot of time. And there really is often a generational divide as those who are younger or those who are, say, older and children have moved out, have more time to dedicate to this type of work as opposed to those who have active children in their house or taking care of senior relatives and things like that. It’s critical for our movement that we are patient with those who might be slower to act, since losing a job means that your children don’t eat for months at a time.
No, I think you’re correct. Where organizing does get hard is trying to find a way to accommodate everybody and where they are in their life. I experience that a lot not just locally but nationally. There are things happening with people’s families, their health, friends, life in general. And I mean, it affects how we organize and how they organize and seeing if they’re wanting to be active in the union and all if they want to just pull back completely all together. It’s difficult to keep people engaged and active. Yeah.
And this is why we define like workers as whole people when we talk about organizing. Because you’re not just a worker, right? You have a chance to live. You might be a Presbyterian, maybe you play soccer. I don’t know, like you have all of these identities and we want you to have dignified lives. Like this is why I said earlier in our conversation, Audie, like the purpose of organizing the purpose of movements isn’t just to win a particular issue or a particular right. It’s to have the ability to engage in decision making for all aspects of your life forever. It’s like being a part of a movement is a lifetime commitment, even if you think this may be exciting or terrifying.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-assignment/episodes/83a04bce-7a06-4eda-ba8f-afa9016be2b0
The Assignment I: An Acoustic Mixing/Sound Mixing Production Company for CNN Audio (with a Guest Editorial by Natalie Cornish)
That’s it for this episode of The Assignment. Every Thursday there is a new episode, so if you enjoy the show please listen and follow. And if you like the show, please leave us a rating and a review.
One more thing. If you have an assignment for us, you could give us a call, leave us a voicemail, send us an email, or record a voice memo and let us know when it’s over.
The assignment was for CNN Audio. Our producers are Madeleine Thompson, Jennifer Lai and Lori Galaretta. Our associate producers are Isoke Samuel, Allison Park and Sonia Htoon. Haley Thomas and MattMartinez are our senior producers. Rina Palta is our editor. Mixing and sound design by David Schulman. Dan Dzula is our technical director. Abbie Fentress Swanson is our executive producer. Thanks to one of our friends, Katiehinman. I’m Audie Cornish. Thank you for listening.