By Doug Singsen
On Sunday, June 25, the unionized workers at the Starbucks at 8880 S. Howell Ave. in Oak Creek went on strike to protest the company’s decision to remove decorations celebrating Pride month. Although Starbucks’s website declares that “Pride isn’t just a month – it’s core to Starbucks mission and our future,” Starbucks has prevented workers from putting up Pride decorations at many stores or ordered existing Pride decorations taken down. In response to this lack of support for LGBT+ issues, over 150 Starbucks stores, including the Oak Creek store, went on strike in protest.
Starbucks is one of a number of companies that have backtracked on purported commitments to gender and sexual diversity in the face of a nationwide wave of conservative attacks on the LGBT+ community. While conservative activists have attempted to paint corporations like Starbucks as “woke,” the reality is that corporate commitments diversity are superficial at best, as Starbucks’ actions this month have shown.
Yet Starbucks employees now have a way to fight back: their union. The workers at this Oak Creek Starbucks voted to unionize their store a year ago, part of a nationwide surge in union organizing at Starbucks stores, with over 300 stores representing over 7,000 workers voting to unionize. These workers have gone on one-day strikes multiple times in the past year, but this is the first time that the Oak Creek workers have struck.
According to workers involved with the organizing campaign, unionizing the Oak Creek Starbucks location came very naturally. The unionization drive was initiated by Hannah Fogarty in January 2022, when the Omicron variant of COVID-19 was peaking in Wisconsin. Fogarty and other workers at the store felt that the company was not providing them with adequate protections against the disease. So one day while they were particularly understaffed, the workers jokingly started talking about what would happen if they unionized.
Yet as workers thought more about what this would mean for them, they quickly decided that it sounded like a good idea. The same day, Fogarty reached out to Workers United, an affiliate of the national union SEIU, and started organizing with them to unionize the store. Fogarty had no previous organizing experience, but her parents were members of a teachers union in Freedom, Wisconsin. She participated with them in the 2011 occupation of the Wisconsin capitol building to protest Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union Act 10 legislation, which was a formative childhood memory for her.
Fogarty, who is now a staff organizer with Workers United, says that wages and mandated overtime are big concerns for the workers at this Starbucks. When Fogarty started working there, she was getting paid $12.65 an hour. She was working full-time but still had to borrow money from her parents to make ends meet. Starbucks raised workers’ wages to $15 last year, but with the rampant inflation during and after the pandemic, this still is not enough to meet workers’ basic needs. The Oak Creek workers received training on how to organize a workplace and worked with a union organizer to navigate the unionization process. They began collecting signed unionization cards from their co-workers and quickly reached an overwhelming majority, with over 70% of the store’s workers signing cards.
During the unionization drive, the company tried various deceptive tactics to discourage the workers from forming a union. The Pride strike co-captain, Elizabeth Trimble, says that the company has been withholding benefits from unionized stores that have been given to non-union stores, such as credit card and a more relaxed dress code. The company also told workers that if they unionized, they could lose tuition benefits and trans health care benefits. The only way this would happen is if the union took away those benefits, so in effect the company was threatening to retaliate against the workers for wanting to unionize. The company also forced workers to sit in captive audience meetings where they criticized the union and told the workers that they were too young to understand what they were doing.
None of this deterred the workers, who proceeded to file with the NLRB for a union election in February of last year. When the election took place two months later, a large majority of the store’s employees voted to unionize. The Oak Creek workers were excited by the victory and started working with the national union to draft a contract proposal. They requested bargaining dates with Starbucks, but the company refused to provide them.
The company’s harassment of its workers did not stop with the vote to unionize. In the week after the one-day Pride strike, the company again forced the store’s workers to attend meetings with managers. This time, the managers claimed that they actually liked the union and wanted to give the workers everything they were asking for, but the union was getting in the way. They claim that the union has missed scheduled negotiation sessions. Yet according to Trimble, Starbucks corporate representatives show up late to negotiation sessions and then refuses to actually negotiate, either because they won’t negotiate remotely or because they claim they’re only there to hear how the workers are feeling, not to actually negotiate with them. The meetings were run by the store manager and district manager, who said they were just there to “present the facts,” but the workers were told that they couldn’t ask questions or present their perspective, and when they tried to do so, they were belittled and ignored.
Not surprisingly, turnover in the store has been very high. A number of shift supervisors have left because they found the situation too stressful. Shift supervisors work closely with their fellow workers and are part of the union’s bargaining unit. Several of them are sympathetic to the workers’ desire to form a union and one of them was in fact a co-captain of the strike.
Many of the store’s customers have been vocally supportive of the union. One customer left a note in a tip jar saying “congratulations on the union, this is hope for the future.” A number have said that they didn’t think it was possible to organize in the service industry and they are heartened by what the workers are doing. Customers who aren’t already pro-union have at least been willing to listen openly to the workers’ reasons for unionizing. Online comments have been a different story. Workers were barraged with negative comments when they announced the strike in a local Facebook group.
Starbucks itself is not welcoming the union, supporting their workers’ decision, or following through on their supposed commitment to the LGBT+ community. Their true priority is, as always, one thing and one thing only: their profits.
To support Starbucks workers, you can sign the #NoContractNoCoffee pledge to receive alerts about rallies, pickets, and other events organized by the union and its allies. If you are a Starbucks worker who is interested in organizing your store, you can contact Starbucks Workers United here.
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Doug Singsen teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, where he is a member of the OPE Workers Center. His writing has appeared in Socialist Worker, the International Socialist Review, and Jacobin, among other venues.
