This is Starbucks’ secret weapon against its workers’ union

The president of the union who has been organizing starbucks stores has a message for the coffee shop chain: come to the negotiating table, and make it just one table, not hundreds.

The Workers United union has been trying to negotiate the first contracts for the more than 300 Starbucks locations that have formed unions since late 2021. But since those stores unionized one by one, the coffee chain has maintained that each store must negotiate your own contract.

Lynne Fox, the union’s president, told HuffPost that the workers want to consolidate the talks so they can start moving forward on an agreement. Workers have gotten nowhere with the company even though many joined the union more than a year ago, she said.

“The fastest way to do it is in a national framework at a table and negotiate these universal issues at the same time,” he said.

Fox said Starbucks should agree to a broad contract that establishes a national minimum wage, “fair scheduling” procedures, guaranteed minimum hours and an agreement to advance union elections, among other provisions. Regions and individual stores could then add add-on agreements if they wish.

But Starbucks said Workers United should stick to negotiating individual contracts since the union has been organizing stores one by one.

“This is a deliberate attempt to divert attention from Workers United’s failure or inability to negotiate for nearly 300 individual stores as they successfully litigated and applied to Starbucks,” Andrew Trull, a company spokesman, said in an email. electronic. He added that the company has advanced a contract with workers at a single store in Pennsylvania who joined the Teamsters last year.

None of the roughly 9,000 Starbucks corporate-owned U.S. stores had union representation until Workers United began organizing them in 2021. Groundbreaking as the election victories have been, the The hardest part I was always going to be negotiating a first contract. On average, it takes more than a year for a new union to negotiate one, and in many cases unions never succeed due to litigation and delays by employers.

Prosecutors with the National Labor Relations Board have charged Starbucks with a litany of charges for unfair labor practices, including refusal to bargain with workers in 163 stores. The NLRB board in Washington has already ruled in A case that Starbucks illegally refused to bargain with workers at its Reserve Roastery in Seattle. Prosecutors also say the company violated the law by insisting that workers negotiate in personrather than with a Zoom option as the union has proposed.

“They have not agreed to any of our proposals, nor have they counter-proposaled any of our proposals,” Fox said. “The company has had 15 of our top proposals for seven months. They have not signed a single line or sentence or countered anything.”

Starbucks said it had proposed “more than 423 bargaining sessions in a single store” but that the union had set preconditions for those meetings, such as remote bargaining for workers, that the company would not accept. The company maintains that negotiating on Zoom is equivalent to recording the sessions.

“We believe that negotiating in person is not only required by federal law, but will also achieve the best results for our partners,” Starbucks said.

On Tuesday, Fox sent a letter to Starbucks general counsel Zabrina Jenkins asking the company to get serious about a nationwide deal. “Starbucks has employed increasingly outrageous delay tactics that have escalated into an unacceptable repudiation of the right of its 8,000 workers to negotiate a contract,” she wrote.

Fox noted that during his recent Senate testimony, former CEO Howard Schultz said that negotiating so many contracts at once has created “significant complications and obstacles in the collective bargaining process.”

Schultz blamed the union for the problem, noting that Workers United called for elections on a store-by-store basis, rather than regionally, as Starbucks proposed. The union would have been less likely to win larger elections, as it would have diluted its support in stronghold stores.

“Now we have to be in a position to negotiate individual stores one by one across the country and set up one-on-one meetings,” Schultz lamented.

But Starbucks doesn’t have to negotiate the contracts separately; you could negotiate them under a national framework to speed up the process and reduce the number of lawyers involved. You have chosen not to.

“I can only speculate (as to Starbucks’ motives), but I think it deliberately complicates the process and drags it out,” Fox told HuffPost. “If you want to negotiate in good faith, that’s not the way you do it.”

In reality, a company in Starbucks’ position has little incentive to strike a deal that might encourage more stores to organize. Employers can drag out the process to undermine the broader union effort and make workers believe that organizing would be a waste of time. It is illegal for an employer to bargain in “bad faith,” but the penalties for doing so are notoriously weak.

Trull insisted that the company has always dealt in good faith. “We remain engaged and ready to negotiate in person,” he said.

The union’s influence with Starbucks grows with each store it organizes: Workers United has won 315 elections, or 81% of those held, according to the NLRB, raising the odds the union will force Starbucks to sit at one table. negotiation to reach an agreement. But the pace of organizing has slowed since early 2022, and the union will have to work to keep the stores it has already organized.

workers in three union stores in New York recently filed petitions for decertification votes to purge the union from those workplaces, though it’s not clear those efforts are going anywhere. That’s another incentive for employers to stop a contract: The workforce changes and union supporters are replaced by union opponents.

Fox said the union anticipated such fights from the start.

“That was part, I’m sure, of the big plan,” she said of Starbucks. “For people to keep going, there would be turnover, or people just couldn’t make a living and had to leave to find another job. We are prepared for that.”

NLRB prosecutors have filed 94 complaints against Starbucks, accusing the company of illegally firing union supporters, closing stores where workers were organizing and raise withholding of unionized workers, among other complaints.

So far, administrative law judges have ruled that Starbucks violated the law in at least 14 separate cases.

“I am very proud of these workers. I really admire them. I think they’re shocked that the company they love treats them so cruelly,” Fox said. “Starbucks could have used this moment to really be the industry leader and really validate their workers, and they just decided not to.”