Now that employees of at least one store in Buffalo, N.Y., have voted to unionize, what’s next for Starbucks?
“Put simply, we continue on as we did today, yesterday and the day before that,” Starbucks North American President Rossann Williams said in a letter posted on the chain’s website shortly after the votes were tabulated Thursday. “Most important, the vote outcomes will not change our shared purpose or how we will show up for each other.”
In simultaneous balloting, workers at a second store voted not to join a union, while the outcome at a third unit remains uncertain. A majority of the votes accepted by federal regulators were cast in favor of unionization, 15-9. Seven additional votes were cast but excluded from the count because the ballots had been slipped under a door rather than sent through the mail. If those votes are adjudged by federal regulators to be acceptable, they could tip the election in favor of management.
Regardless, Williams referred to the outcome as “a split vote.” She also noted that the vote to unionize one store is not yet official. Under federal regulations, any party with objections to a vote has five business days to challenge the outcome.
Williams did not say if Starbucks intends to mount a challenge. But she did contend in her letter that all employees in the Buffalo market should have been invited to participate in the vote, since workers are routinely moved from one unit to another. Starbucks has maintained that employees rotating into a union store will feel the effects of that representation and therefore should have been allotted to cast ballots, too.
Broadening the vote would have also increased the likelihood of a union defeat. In total, 80 Starbucks employees cast ballots in the vote that ended Dec. 8. If all 450 baristas in the market had been included, union proponents would have had to convince several hundred people to vote yea.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rejected that challenge, saying the staff of each unit had the right to decide its fate.
Before the voting began, the staffs of three more Buffalo units petitioned the NLRB to schedule a unionization vote for their stores. A café in Mesa, Ariz., also filed for a go-ahead to start organizing.
Williams suggested that Starbucks will be a lot savvier about those situations.
“For the last three months in Buffalo, we’ve been working hard on creating the very best Starbucks partner experience,” Williams wrote. “And we’ve been learning a lot about unions and hearing talk of ‘corporate versus partners.
“We will keep finding new and better ways to continue leading on wages and benefits, improve our listening and active partnership, and keep building a company that matters. Because we are partners.”
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