Starbucks Employees Vote Yes to Formation of Their First Union in the US

Employees of a chain coffee shop Sturbucks in Buffalo (New York), which has 9,000 stores in the United States, voted in favor of the creation of the first union in the 50-year history of the giant café.

The results, greeted with hugs by the activists, were announced on Thursday by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a state body that called a vote by mail after accepting the request of the waiters of this and two other centers to associate under the umbrella of the SEIU union.

Three coffee shops in Buffalo were voting separately today and, in the absence of knowing the vote count for the other two locations, the NLRB certified that the waiters at the Starbucks store located on Elmwood Avenue supported the majority. the creation of their union and they will be able to create it after the result of this vote.

Now, the representatives of the employees and the company, which has fought tooth and nail to avoid this outcome, will have to sit down to negotiate a collective agreement, the first that Starbucks will face, which has tried to convince its “partners”, as he calls the workers, that putting a representative between them and the management betrays the solidarity culture of the company.

The ravages of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 were the trigger that pushed these workers and others from different sectors throughout the country to demand job improvements and start unionization processes, which are also knocking on the door of other large corporations such as Amazon.

The success of the waiters of Starbucks, whose fight has already spread to three other coffee shops in Buffalo apart from the three that voted today and a fourth in the state of Arizona, is especially striking in the US, given the low level of union membership in the private sector, where only 6.3% of workers are unionized, and it is even lower among cafeteria and restaurant workers, where the level of affiliation only reaches 1.2% of the workforce. (I)