I started with Starbucks back in August of 2010.
I am in the arts in the United States of America.
And so I needed some way to get health benefits.
And Starbucks was a company that had touted that
they were very progressive.
And one of the things that they offered was benefits for part time employees.
It was really the company it professed to be at the beginning of all of this.
And unfortunately, in the last few years, we've started to see that that slide.
And so it was time to make some changes.
Across the U.S., The pandemic has spurred service workers
to protest workplace conditions and fight for better treatment and wages.
Some, like Michelle, have tried to form a union.
In the United States, that can be a daunting task.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2021
15.8 million wage and salary workers were represented by a union
with only 1.6% of members belonging to the food and drinking service industry.
I had made the decision
after having worked through this pandemic for a year and a half that I was done.
I was tired.
I was overwhelmed and overworked.
And I was watching my coworkers struggle to pay their rent
and put groceries in their fridge while working a full time job.
I'm certainly fighting this for myself, but I'm also fighting it for my coworkers
and for future workers in the service industry.
This is Michelle Eisen.
She's a theater artist, stage manager, and organizing member of Starbucks
Workers United.
After working for Starbucks locations in the Elmwood neighborhood of Buffalo,
and on the island of Oahu in Hawaii as a barista for 11 years
and experiencing the perils of COVID 19, Michelle believes she was seeing
a troubling shift in the company's culture.
The catalyst for where we are now certainly was the pandemic.
We were called on to be essential workers in the middle of this pandemic
and told us that it was essential for us to be there serving
coffee to our communities.
And on top of that, we were told that our company
was making record breaking profits in the middle of this pandemic.
You know, we have a CEO
who's bragging about the level of profits that have been raked in by this company.
And none of that is being passed down to the workers.
And so that was the moment
when we really sort of started to evaluate the company we worked for
and who they profess to be and realize that something had to change.
In August of 2021, a coworker approached Michelle, inviting her for a cup of coffee
and presented her with the idea of forming the union.
She went point by point and laid out sort of what had been happening around me
is that several baristas from several different stores in
Buffalo had been talking and they were is exhausted as I was and as overwhelmed
and underappreciated and had decided that things needed to change.
And this looks like an option and I said, "Okay,
I'm on board." "What do you need from me?" In August of 2021, Michelle got to work.
She and other members of Starbucks Workers United
prepared to file petitions with the National Labor Relations Board
to hold union elections for three Starbucks locations in Buffalo.
Once the union is recognized by the NLRB, a union contract or collective
bargaining agreement is negotiated between workers and management.
The contract sets forth the pay,
benefits, policies and working conditions at the company.
We filed the first three petitions August 30th, and from that point on
it has been nonstop corporate presence and interference in this campaign.
Starbucks, however, says there's a misconception
around the idea that they're fighting unionization.
Reggie Bores, the director of corporate communications and inclusivity
and Diversity Communications said: "We just don't believe
a union is necessary at Starbucks." Once the union petitions were filed,
Starbucks began sending executives to the Buffalo locations.
Bores said that company leaders visit stores all the time to help
and support employees not to spy on or intimidate them.
They started showing up at these stores, particularly
the ones that had filed petitions saying they were only there to help.
They were there totally coincidentally, and it just happened to fall, you know,
three days after these petitions filed.
They also assigned what they called support managers.
So they flew in other store managers
from stores across the country, and they assigned them to all of these stores
in Buffalo.
What they support managers were actually assigned
to was to surveil the workers at every possible moment.
We've heard from store managers that are no longer with the company,
that they were told that workers were never to be left unattended.
There was always supposed to be either a store manager or a support manager
on the floor to break up any conversation that might arise about the union.
It was scary for my coworkers to feel like their every move was being watched.
Nobody wants to
come into their workplace every day and feel like they're being watched.
Despite a corporate executive presence
Starbucks Workers United pressed forward to a historic victory.
Winning the first union Starbucks
in the country, which we did on December 9th, was amazing.
To be able to stand there with my coworkers
and be the first one to do that.
That was fantastic.
The movement of unionization for Starbucks locations
has grown since the Elmwood December 9th win.
I believe we were in 27 states and had 103 petitions filed.
Today, we were here in Buffalo for what was going to be
the next vote count for three other additional stores
that had filed union petitions back in November.
But that vote count for those additional stores never happened due to
what union advocates said was a deliberate anti-union strategy by Starbucks.
An announcement from the NLRB stated that the votes
would be impounded because of a request for review filed by Starbucks.
Under the Trump administration, the NLRB allowed either party, company
or employee to request review of petitions
if the request is filed within ten business days of the decision.
Starbucks made their request on the 10th day.
Ian Hayes, the workers' attorney, spoke at a press conference about this decision.
"Starbucks knows what it's doing.
Starbucks' attorneys know what they're doing.
They were gaming the system to try to delay the process,
break the workers momentum just like they have been for the last half year.
And this right here is what union busting looks like in the United States in 2022."
Bores stated
that Starbucks is simply adhering to the NLRB's due process,
nothing is being done deliberately to delay or slow down the vote count.
So these workers yet again who had worked
so hard to get to this point, had their voices silenced.
It's unfortunately what had happened in Mesa.
Last week.
I flew out to Mesa to support that store, and we had to go through the exact
same thing right before their vote count.
It is another delay tactic after delay tactic after delay tactic
that the company has employed.
Public support from members of government have pushed the workers
to continue their fight.
I think we're looking at a new frontier in the labor movement in this country.
During the pandemic, a moment called "Striketober" sparked
an influx of protests.
From Deere and Companies' factories, Kellogg's U.S.
plants, to nurses in Massachusetts, and distillery workers in Kentucky.
Tens of thousands of union workers across a variety of industries
were either on strike or close to it.
However, despite ongoing activism,
the rate of union membership is down from previous years.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that the rate of union membership
was 10.3% in 2021 and is equivalent to pre-pandemic levels of 2019.
I think that our laws are a little bit behind, unfortunately,
and we're going to have to reform them and adjust them if we want to see
this labor movement really take off.
And I think that the NLRB is on board with that.
I think that they also want to be the agency that protects the worker.
So we're just waiting for everything to sort of catch up with our movement.
I think what's
kept me fighting this fight is knowing that I'm on the right side of history.