On the Recent Starbucks Campaign
It was just five months ago when workers at three Starbucks locations in Buffalo cast their votes on whether or not they wanted to be represented by Starbucks Workers United (SWU), an SEIU affiliate. The success of workers at the Elmwood location in December 2021 led to an explosion in union activity at Starbucks stores across the country. At the time of writing this, over 250 stores have filed to unionize and 55 stores have won their elections, with each passing day seeing more stores announcing their intent to file and more victories. Only five shops have rejected the union.
SWU, individual Starbucks workers, and supportive organizations have widely used social media in order to spread the word about the unionization struggle, which has been essential to growing the campaign from Buffalo to the West Coast. This broad popularization effort has involved using Twitter and Instagram to provide updates from different stores in real time, including new filings, rallies, and victories. Social media reports have included news on retaliation against workers via scheduling cuts or firings for minor infractions like the “#Memphis7”, which involved Starbucks terminating almost the entire union leadership at the Poplar & Highland Store. Reports filed under the “#WhyWeOrganize” hashtag has provided insight into workers’ individual reasons for wanting a union.
The workers making up the “Memphis 7”
The online activity has given us a clear picture of the union-busting strategy that Starbucks has employed. For example, it became clear that workers involved with the union were being targeted by having their hours drastically cut. All of these workers sharing their experiences with schedule cuts gave a clear picture of the scale of the retaliation. This social media activity has brought a lot of attention and support to the struggle from journalists and individual workers alike.
Social media has allowed Starbucks workers all over the country to connect with struggles at different stores. Workers have been able to relate to each other based on the shared experience of being Starbucks workers – or, in the language promoted by the company, “partners”. They recognize that Starbucks has failed to live up to the progressive image they seek to cultivate when it comes to providing a high standard of living for the workers who make it possible for Starbucks to rake in billions every year. This is something many workers recognize, but the universality of their exploitation becomes truly apparent as workers come forward and confront the bosses in the form of organization and then popularize the struggle.
One clear example of Starbucks failing to provide for their workers has been their inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was exposed on January 6 of this year, when workers at the Elmwood location in Buffalo walked off the job to demand safer working conditions after Starbucks ignored workers’ health concerns at the peak of the Omicron wave in the US. A similar demand was brought forth by workers at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, who decided to not open their store on March 7 of this year, in protest of Starbucks’ decision to lift the mask mandate at all stores in Philadelphia. Demands for a safer workplace have been at the forefront of this campaign. Other demands that have been consistently advanced in public letters expressing intent to unionize are regular and transparent scheduling, higher pay, sufficient staffing, and having a voice when it comes to decisions being made in the workplace.
Elmwood walkout
When looking at these demands, it becomes apparent that these problems are not unique to Starbucks workers, but are problems affecting the broad mass of restaurant workers. Of course, there are clear differences between coffee shops like Starbucks and full-service restaurants. These include the sharply-defined division of labor that separates workers by position and distributes positions to workers by nationality. In coffee shops like Starbucks, workers mainly labor together behind the counter, all trained to perform many of the same duties, with small variations. In restaurants, servers and cooks have distinct jobs in two distinct sections of the restaurant, one devoted to food production, the other to beverage production and food distribution. However, there is no reason why restaurants cannot unionize at a rate and speed approaching the Starbucks campaign. The differences between coffee shops and full-service restaurants simply call for a concrete approach to organizing that proceeds from the situation at each shop.
Starbucks workers are able to point to a single exploiter as the cause of their grievances. Our goal is for restaurant workers to organize ourselves as a class against restaurant owners as a class with their own interests that are antagonistic to ours. We must not only think of the conditions at our own workplace but of the industry as a whole, and seek to transform it. We do not need to be employed by the same company in order to relate to the experiences of other restaurant workers. We do not need to have the same position, same boss, be in the same city, etc. The industry is such that conditions of exploitation that workers face on the job are more or less universal. A dishwasher at an Olive Garden in Missouri and a line cook at a diner in Queens will likely hold a lot of the same grievances about their jobs, e.g., low pay, no control over scheduling, no health care, no paid time off, and no job security. If the diner in Queens were to organize and win their union election, this should inspire the restaurant workers at Olive Garden, and prove to them that it is possible to win in our industry. With each union victory, workers will understand more and more that they are part of a class with the same interests – and that in order to advance those interests, we must join forces to defeat the class of exploiters whose prosperity depends on our misery.
While we support the Starbucks unionization effort completely, we also recognize that the bureaucratic SWU union has obscured more than it has clarified in leading this campaign.
SWU treats unionization as a collaborative process between labor and capital in which the role of workers is to vote and occasionally attend rallies, full stop. On their website, SWU say they are “pro-Starbucks and pro-union,” that “we want Starbucks to be the best it can be” – that “it should be the leader in collaborating with its partners [workers] to raise standards of living and working in the industry.” They assure us that “strikes are rare” and that “our union’s values will be inclusiveness, compassion, joy, creativity, respect, and solidarity.”
In the face of this mystifying language that aims to pacify workers and bureaucratize the process of unionization, we must be clear-eyed and firm. The relationship between the interests of workers and the interests of capital is a relationship of contradiction. The labor-capital contradiction can only be resolved through hard struggle in which workers emerge victorious, i.e., in which the capitalists are defeated. Unionizing is not a simple matter of lawyers and contracts, in which workers play a secondary, supporting role. If we approach unionization in the manner of the bureaucratic unions, our short-term victories will ultimately reveal themselves to be losses, and our contributions to the labor movement in the US will be to add yet more footnotes to the history of its long, painful decline.