Posts tagged Workers United
Workers at DC’s Wydown cafes got organized. Then they lost everything.
June 3, 2024 // Alex McCracken, Wydown’s co-owner, wrote in an email to Restaurant Dive that he and his two co-owners decided last year that they “were ready for a change.” A copy of management’s message to workers announcing the closure also stated the closure was the result of a long, unspecified process.
Climbing Gyms Are Unionizing. What Does That Mean For Our Community?
May 23, 2024 // Kim and her coworkers countered with their own campaign. Throughout February, they published bubble-lettered posts on Instagram such as “7 Reasons to Join a Union” and “Union Busting Bingo,” which warned employees to beware messages like, “This will make it an ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them,’” and, “Give us a chance to fix things.” They also hosted in-person “solidarity climbs” with affinity groups that included Escalamos, ParaCliffHangers, and Queer Crush, trying to rally pro-union sentiment within each gym’s community. On Sunday nights, employees met virtually with a unionized employee at VITAL—a New York City-based gym that, since its unanimous vote to form a union in 2022, has been seen as a success story by organizers nationwide—who walked Touchstone workers through the process and implications of unionizing.
Starbucks and Workers United, long at odds, say they’ll restart labor talks
February 28, 2024 // Workers have voted to unionize at more than 370 company-owned Starbucks stores in the U.S., but none of those stores has reached a labor agreement with the company. The process has been contentious. In multiple cases, federal courts have ordered Starbucks to reinstate workers who were fired after leading unionization efforts at their stores. Regional offices of the National Labor Relations Board also have issued at least 120 complaints against Starbucks for unfair labor practices, including refusal to bargain and reserving pay raises and other benefits for non-union workers.
Texas Starbucks Employee Challenges Federal Labor Board Structure as Unconstitutional in New Federal Lawsuit
January 24, 2024 // Busler submitted his union decertification petition on November 16, 2023. The petition contained signatures from enough of his coworkers to trigger a vote to remove the union under NLRB rules. However, the NLRB Regional Director still blocked the vote based on unfair labor practice charges SBWU union officials filed against Starbucks, despite there being no proven connection between those allegations and Busler’s decertification petition. The NLRB’s refusal to hold a union decertification vote means that Busler and his coworkers are still trapped under the “representation” of the SBWU union, despite numerous reports of SBWU agents’ combative and abrasive behavior at the store. In other filings in the NLRB case, Busler and his colleagues reported that SBWU officials ordered a divisive strike in which “[union] supporters outside the store were loud, boisterous, and were screaming at customers” and “would sometimes yell at other employees or tell partners that if they did not support Workers United they would be personally ostracized by other partners.” “Moreover, I believe the other employees who signed my decertification petition did not do so because they were coerced or duped by anything Starbucks allegedly did wrong, but because the Union was a divisive force in our store and has now ignored our location for several months,” Busler stated in an NLRB filing.
Despite more ‘salting,’ labor unions are getting pushback in their drive to organize restaurants
January 24, 2024 // While unions "salt" more restaurants with organizers posing as employees, a countermovement is building among the already-unionized to end their representation by groups like Workers United, as this week’s episode of the Working Lunch podcast attests. The broadcast features a guest appearance by Mark Mix, president of the Right to Work Committee. The group helps organized employees across all industries to vote on whether to remain in their unions, a process known as decertification. He spoke a day after Workers United, the parent of the union that’s organized 375 Starbucks units, decided to end its representation of an Ultimo Coffee café. All but one employee of the store had signed a petition asking federal regulators to permit a vote on whether to oust the labor group.
Second Group of Philly Ultimo Coffee Employees Successfully Remove Unwanted “Workers United” Union
January 18, 2024 // Within the last year, Starbucks employees in Manhattan, NY; two Buffalo, NY locations; Pittsburgh, PA; Bloomington, MN; Salt Lake City, UT; Greenville, SC; Oklahoma City, OK; and San Antonio, TX, have all sought free Foundation legal aid in navigating NLRB processes to decertify the WU union. Workers from a Center City Starbucks in Philadelphia are also pursuing a decertification petition against WU with Foundation legal assistance. Coffee employees in the Philadelphia area have scored a string of recent victories in removing unpopular union officials. In May 2023, workers at Guava and Java’s location at Philadelphia International Airport successfully voted to oust UNITE HERE union officials, and a few months later Good Karma Café employees cast ballots to remove the WU union. This month, Ultimo Coffee barista Samuel Tarasenko and his colleagues successfully forced WU out of the coffee shop’s Germantown-area location.
The Supreme Court agrees to hear Starbucks appeal in Memphis union case
January 17, 2024 // The case has been among the most closely watched in the more than two-year-old effort to unionize Starbucks’s company-owned U.S. stores. Starbucks fired seven employees in Memphis in February 2022, citing safety. The Seattle coffee giant said they violated company policy by reopening a store after closing time and inviting nonemployees—including a television crew—to come inside and move throughout the store. But the NLRB intervened, saying the company was unlawfully interfering in workers’ right to organize and that the store had routinely allowed employees to gather there after closing time.
Denver Art Museum workers will form union to combat wage, safety concerns
January 16, 2024 // Denver Art Museum officials confirmed that they received a request this morning for voluntary recognition of a union from “some members of its staff.” “The museum is aware that unionization among museums has been occurring more frequently in the US and is open to working with its employees to explore the best path forward,” wrote communications manager Andy Sinclair. “If unionization is the path they choose, the museum will work within that system.
Philadelphia Ultimo Coffee Workers Win Bid to Remove So-Called “Workers United” Union
January 9, 2024 // Ultimo employees are third recent group of coffee shop workers in Philly to kick out an unwanted union, as Center City Starbucks workers await vote to remove SBWU Tarasenko and his colleagues join Starbucks workers and other coffee employees across the country in banding together to vote out WU union officials, who have targeted coffee shops nationwide for unionization. This year, Starbucks employees in Manhattan, NY; two Buffalo, NY locations; Pittsburgh, PA; Bloomington, MN; Salt Lake City, UT; Greenville, SC; Oklahoma City, OK; and San Antonio, TX, have all sought free Foundation legal aid in filing or defending decertification petitions at the NLRB.
Commentary: BOARD GAME CAFE WORKERS ARE UNIONIZING BECAUSE NOTHING MAKES SENSE ANYMORE
January 4, 2024 // Whether the ownership likes it or not — they don’t, by the way, they said the board game cafe employees unionizing would “flexible and open-door atmosphere we have tried to foster” — Hex & Co. unionized, and two other board game cafes followed suit. If it works out for them, great. But when these cafes can’t afford to keep their doors open, we’d better not hear any complaining about how no one was willing to pay them to teach board games.