Workers at more than 100 Starbucks stores have filed petitions to unionize, and union ballots are set to be counted at three more Buffalo Starbucks stores on Wednesday—if the company doesn’t manage to get a delay. After workers unionized at two out of three stores that held elections, Starbucks has continued ramping up its anti-union campaign, using the National Labor Relations Board to delay ballot-counting at a Mesa, Arizona, store last week and pushing for delays in Buffalo as well.
In addition to delays, Starbucks continues firing union leaders in its stores. Less than two weeks after Starbucks fired most of the union organizing committee in a Memphis store, it fired a union leader at Buffalo's Elmwood store. That firing comes as part of a broader set of scheduling changes that threaten the jobs of other union supporters, but that, like the Memphis firings, look a lot like the company making creative use of rarely used policies to get rid of workers for their protected concerted activity.
In an effort to stifle the union organizing drive, Starbucks overstaffed Buffalo stores. Then, when workers like Cassie Fleischer responded to the resulting loss of hours by getting second jobs, Starbucks turned around and threatened their jobs or outright fired them for not working enough hours. “Former Starbucks store managers tell More Perfect Union that there has been no uniform minimum hours-worked policy across the company,” More Perfect Union’s Jordan Zakarin reports. “Instead, telling workers or applicants that their availability ‘does not fit the needs of the business,’ as Starbucks is telling workers in Buffalo, has been used at the discretion of managers, often to force them to quit or not apply at all.”
“Make no mistake, I will be fighting for reinstatement at Starbucks,” Fleischer said on social media. “Charges have been filed. I will not be taking this situation lightly.”
Say this for the company: It’s really not being subtle about its retaliatory firings. But why should it be? The only fine it will have to pay if it’s found to have illegally fired workers for exercising their rights is to pay them back wages, minus anything they earned at another job while fired from Starbucks.
One attempt to derail this round of Buffalo union elections failed when lawyers for Starbucks were eight minutes late submitting paperwork to the NLRB. They claimed their tardiness was because Microsoft Outlook crashed, but an NLRB regional director found “that the Employer’s failure to timely serve its Statement of Position precludes it from litigating any of the issues raised in its untimely Submission.” Starbucks was once again trying to force a single union representation election across all of its stores in the Buffalo area—something it tried and failed to get in the case of the first three Buffalo stores to vote.
But, with the ballot counting in Mesa delayed because the NLRB has not taken action, Buffalo workers are left hanging, wondering if Starbucks’ massive legal effort will succeed in at causing delay in this case, too, while Starbucks uses the delay to continue retaliating against workers for their activism and trying to intimidate other workers away from union support.
