Starbucks Firing U.S. Worker-Leaders To Stop Unionization

Starbucks is waging a war on its workers. The coffee chain has brought back founder Howard Schultz to lead the effort to defeat a union drive that is still spreading across the country, and that workers allege is flagrantly violating federal law as it seeks to slow their momentum, Alex N. Press reported for Jacobin magazine.

Photo Insert: Starbucks is favoring a particular method: Firing union leaders.

Currently, 176 Starbucks locations have filed for National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections since the first union campaign at a corporate-owned store in the United States went public in Buffalo, New York last year.

Starbucks is favoring a particular method: Firing union leaders. Workers at several stores say they have been terminated in retaliation for legally protected union activities. Early allegations came in Memphis, Tennessee, in February, when Starbucks fired seven workers after they announced their union drive.

The company has said that the workers were fired on the pretext of workplace conduct violations, and while Starbucks Workers United has filed unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against the company alleging retaliation, the understaffed NLRB has yet to make a judgment, and the workers remain without their jobs.

With Schultz back at the helm, the firings have accelerated. Several union leaders in Buffalo have been fired or forced out.

Three workers have been fired in Overland Park, Kansas, where the remaining workers are now on strike. And on Monday, April 4, Laila Dalton, the 19-year-old Starbucks barista in Phoenix, Arizona, whose prior claims of retaliation were substantiated by the NLRB mere weeks ago, lost her job.

“But everything they’re doing is winning more people to the union. I think with people in my generation going through this and posting about it on social media, people are realizing that their best friends are getting treated horribly. A lot of my friends never knew Starbucks was like this. They just expect the whole food industry to be a struggle. Once I tell them how much Starbucks can give us, they realize that we shouldn’t be allowing them to treat us like this…They can afford to pay us more, to give us more benefits, and to treat us better, but they don’t because they’re greedy. That shows that they don’t care about us, that they see us as just bodies and a source of investment. So, this definitely encourages people to want to have a voice and figure out ways to have a voice, which is by unionizing,” Dalton told Jacobin.

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