Mill Valley teenager Ella Clark will have checked off her to-do list before she even graduated from high school and called a big company that doesn’t believe in the value of organization. Then she considers studying constitutional law.
Clark is why the burgeoning Starbucks unionization movement is taking hold in the Bay Area. Because she has reached out to Starbucks Workers United, a collective of Starbucks workers in the United States who are negotiating for better working conditions, a local National Labor Relations Board election will be held soon.
It all started when 17-year-old Clark saw the company respond to a union campaign by a group of workers in Buffalo, New York. After submitting their voting cards, employees are said to have been voted anti-union.
“I’ve seen Starbucks respond to the union forming and petitioning at other stores. I was frustrated that (the company) didn’t respect his right to organize,” said the Tamalpais High School junior. “I sent an email and said, ‘Hey, I love my job. I don’t know if organizing is best for us, but how can I help support it?’”
As it turns out, the organization works at the Strawberry Village location. According to Clark, out of 17 voting members, more than half have signed union cards for the June 6 election. The interest is there – especially from Clark’s colleague Emma Orrick, also 17.
“We were some of the youngest employees here when we got hired about a year ago and we connected straight away,” Orrick said of Clark. “So Ella spoke to me about the organization and we met with the local representative from Workers United. He prepared us for what our managers would try.”
The representative was spot on. Though Orrick hopes to focus on medicine after college, her passion for advocacy burned even hotter when she and her friends took on the challenge head-on, she said.
“In the background were posters about what a union is, ‘a third party is trying to get in,'” Clark said. “We also had one-on-one meetings with the store manager.”
The high school juniors, who aligned with another teen in a group chat they call “Union Babes,” have a clear vision of what they want: access to credit card tips and mobile ordering cut off, pay increases, bigger COVID pay and more sustainable health plans.
“We can do this because we are high school students. We can afford to stretch our heads, lose hours, or get fired because we don’t need that job,” Clark said, reflecting on how little $16 an hour can stretch in Mill Valley. “We learn about unions at school, campaigning against big national stores. But this is our business and it will be tailored specifically to our needs.”
A growing movement
The teenagers are part of the growing movement among workers at the coffee chain.
Workers at two Santa Cruz stores voted last week to become the first unionized Starbucks in California.
Clark and her comrades are ready to follow suit, even if the first step is to wait until the election for better terms.
“We’re listening and learning from the partners in these deals, as we always do across the country. We made it clear that as partners, we’re better off together without a unity between us,” said Starbucks spokeswoman Sarah Albanesi.
The strategy of listening and learning has lost the company more than 60 elections.
San Francisco’s union roots run deep—so deep that tracing its origins would strike gold. However, union campaigns happening near and far bring a new energy to organizing, argues Professor John Logan of San Francisco State University.
“I think the change will happen here. Starbucks Workers United is really strong across the country, but it has particular strength in college towns like Ithaca, Ann Arbor… It’s now starting to expand faster and reach big stores, even the Seattle store and the New York City roastery, ” he said.
Logan, growing up in Scotland in the 1980s, never found unions so interesting. Where he grew up they were common; both parents were union members.
“If you look at what has happened to unions over the last few decades, there has been a decline in the United States,” the professor added. “There are two main reasons: relatively weak legal protection of (one’s) rights to join a union and strong opposition from employers.”
This is what the young people who run the campaigns face. Logan says the NLRB voting system is heavily weighted in favor of the employer, as various court decisions over the past few decades have supported employer property rights and freedom of expression about workers’ rights.
“Employers may threaten workers with dismissal if they do not attend anti-union or captive meetings. They expose them to endless, non-stop anti-union propaganda during a campaign,” Logan said. “You obviously have the resources.”
Amazon spokeswoman Barbara Agrait said employees had a choice about whether to join a union, and they always did.
“As a company, we don’t believe that unions are the best solution for our employees. Our focus remains on working directly with our team to continue making Amazon a great place to work,” she said.
NLRB General Counsel Jen Abruzzo has spoken out against captive audience meetings, Logan pointed out in his own article on the Labor and Working Class History Association blog. But there are new techniques: About two weeks ago, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that union members would receive substantial pay rises, while union members would receive none, the New York Times reported.
“It really only costs about an extra dollar an hour,” Clark said. “Starbucks knows exactly what it’s doing.”
Abruzzo and its partners seem unwilling to allow such practices. A week ago, the Times reported that allegations that both Amazon and Starbucks had engaged in anti-union behavior and violated labor laws, particularly in Staten Island and Buffalo.
Clark and Orrick indicated that workers at another nearby location might start organizing, but would not say where.
A customer presented a $20 bill to Clark and Orrick, who wished to donate to the campaign, after seeing their pro-union shirts. They threw the money into the tip jar for their shiftmates, a box not far from a new sign announcing the benefits of working at Starbucks.
“We’re not trying to fight Starbucks. We don’t try to fight our manager or deputy store manager or anything like that. We just want to help Starbucks be the best company it can be,” Clark said.
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