Santa Maria’s Broadway and McCoy Starbucks won its union elections on Oct. 3 and will now begin preparations for contract negotiations with corporate, Shift Supervisor Jaylee Moore told the Sun.
“It feels really good. We put a lot of work into this, months and months of it. Finally to have that certainty of having that union is really great,” she said.
Moore began conversations with her fellow employees after seeing the Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, unionize. Now, the Broadway and McCoy location is one of 250 stores in the United States to have successfully unionized.
“I feel very accomplished that I was finally able to give back, but we still have to bargain for our contract, and that’s where the real work goes in to making our place better,” Moore said. “Luckily for us, we are not the first store undergoing contract negotiations with Starbucks.”
From watching previous negotiations, Moore said her team will break out proposals into two segments: economic, which would entail higher salary negotiations, and noneconomic, which encompasses other job benefits, dress code, and work environment-related concerns.
“While the other Starbucks [locations] are just barely beginning, there’s still a little bit of a mystery on how [corporate] is going to respond to us,” she said.
Her main concern is that Starbucks isn’t going to negotiate contracts in good faith, she said. The Buffalo Starbucks is approaching its one-year anniversary of unionization, and partners are only in the second round of negotiations.
“They have the incentive to drag this out for as long as they want,” she said. “Luckily, Starbucks seems to be more open to bargaining, but I’m ready for this to be something that will take a lot of work and a lot of time.”
Starbucks Workers United California member Fernando Hernandez said pushback against unions has been an issue that partners have been facing as more locations work to unionize.
“We’ve had setbacks where people have been fed lies or threatened,” Hernandez said. “In this case, they were able to overcome anything that was thrown at them. I didn’t have a doubt, but each election is scary.”
There have been instances where people don’t vote or change their mind, and there’s been post office issues where ballots don’t get in on time, he said.
Corporate messaging has come out saying it won’t provide benefits or won’t negotiate to scare employees out of unionizing, he added, but that was later proven untrue as more locations move forward in the process.
“We were growing, but I think across the country we took a step back battling these messages,” Hernandez said. “The next step is going to the table and negotiating these contracts.”
There were previous unionization efforts at Starbucks about a decade ago, but that quickly got stopped, Hernandez said. This time around, people have become more outspoken with their concerns and are standing up for what they believe is right.
“Now, it’s hundreds of stores and a lot of people are fed up with what’s going on. Yes, it [Starbucks] has benefits and in some places, there’s good pay, but they don’t talk about the mistreatments,” he said. “That’s why people are saying we want this change. They [corporate] may stop a few stores, but they aren’t going to stop the movement.”
Starbucks corporate office couldn’t be reached before the Sun’s deadline, but in a previous statement a spokesperson shared that they believe Starbucks is “better together as partners, without a union between us.”
This article appears in Oct 6-13, 2022.
