Posts tagged Workers United
SEIU Rejoins AFL-CIO After Splitting Off 20 Years Ago
January 8, 2025 // The reaffiliation means the AFL-CIO can more directly pitch in on SEIU campaigns, including a high-profile one at Starbucks. That effort is led by Workers United, an SEIU affiliate, and has led to more than 500 unionized stores nationwide at the coffee chain, making it one of the most closely watched organizing pushes in decades.
US orders Starbucks to reopen 2 New York stores company shut down after workers unionized
September 18, 2024 // Last year, the NLRB called on Starbucks to reopen 23 stores that labor advocates say were shuttered in response to workers unionizing. The locations spanned multiple major US cities, including Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Seattle, where Starbucks is headquartered, among others.
Chipotle may have violated workers’ unionization rights, US labor board says
August 28, 2024 // The board said late Monday that its Detroit regional director found merit to allegations filed against Chipotle by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The union alleges that Chipotle unlawfully disciplined an employee in Lansing, Michigan, for engaging in union activity and told employees the fast-food chain couldn’t give them raises because they were unionized. The regional director dismissed an allegation that Chipotle unlawfully withheld credit card tips from unionized workers. An allegation that Chipotle unlawfully used surveillance methods on its employees is still under investigation.
How a Vote to Unionize Backfired on Coffeehouse Workers in Philadelphia
July 8, 2024 // “The union members are not conscious of the fact that their fate is tied up with the flowering of their employers’ enterprises,” Mises explained in Planning for Freedom. For many people who’ve only signed the back of checks, it’s easy to forget that to employ workers for any length of time, a business enterprise must be successful, something OCF Coffee House was not. President and CEO Ori Feibush told local news outlets that the coffee enterprise was already operating at a loss prior to the union vote. “You had an organization that was already at its limit,” Feibush told reporters. “It was at its limit, and it did not have the capacity to continue to burn an additional cost.”
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.