Starbucks managed to delay the counting of ballots in a union vote at a Mesa, Arizona, store, but the company couldn’t change the result: Workers voted to unionize, 25 to three. When the workers said they were confident they would prevail after the delay, they were not joking. This is the third corporate-owned Starbucks store with a union, the first two being in Buffalo where the union won two out of three elections in December.
Workers at more than 100 Starbucks stores across the country are organizing, despite a vicious anti-union campaign from the coffee chain, which has included the firing of multiple union leaders, captive audience meetings in which managers intimidate them or barrage them with anti-union messages, and the company flooding stores at which workers are organizing with extra managers or extra employees to dilute the union vote. Starbucks has also used a lot of high-priced lawyers to maneuver for delays on votes or vote-counting—as happened in Mesa—buying the company time to continue its anti-union campaign or blunting the organizing drive’s momentum by preventing wins from being counted.
Starbucks’ biggest delay tactic, a series of efforts to get the National Labor Relations Board to call off store-by-store elections and replace them with larger consolidated elections across regions, has been rejected repeatedly, yet the company keeps trying, and scoring smaller delays as a result. Ballots at three Buffalo Starbucks stores were supposed to be counted on Wednesday, but Starbucks succeeded at delaying the counts on the very same day as the NLRB said the Mesa count should go forward. Those Buffalo votes are likely to be counted soon.
Meanwhile, a poll shows that large majorities of people nationally and of Starbucks customers specifically support the workers unionizing. The poll, done by Blue Rose Research for More Perfect Union, found that 67% of people surveyed agreed that Starbucks workers “need a union in order to have a better opportunity at higher pay and benefits, worker safety and fair schedules.” Among people who said they had been Starbucks customers in recent months, the number was 69%.
One thing that should be food for thought at Starbucks headquarters is that, as More Perfect Union’s Jordan Zakarin reports, “Demographic groups that had the most favorable opinions of Starbucks generally were also the most supportive of Starbucks workers organizing. Starbucks was viewed favorably by more than 70% of respondents who are women, Asian, Black, Latino, and/or 18-34 years old, and at least 70% of each of those groups also supported the union drive.”
Also on Friday, the NLRB mailed ballots to workers at the first Seattle store to start organizing.
