Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo
Michelle Eisen, a barista at a Buffalo, New York, Starbucks location, helps employees of a local Starbucks as they gather to cast votes to unionize or not, in February in Mesa, Arizona.
For Meridian, 17, a trans nonbinary person from Virginia seeking their first job, their interest in Starbucks went beyond salary or benefits. “I live in a very rural town,” they explained to me. “I thought, what is an environment that I want to be in, in this very small-town job? And Starbucks appealed to me because they seemed like a very progressive company and I thought I would be in good company there.”
Workers, when asked, say they enjoy the work. The environment Starbucks tries to cultivate and the values it espouses bring in a certain type of employee. “Starbucks attracts a lot of progressive-minded people,” said Cory Johnson, 28, who works at the Boulevard and Myers Starbucks in Richmond, Virginia. “People who are either doing some kind of activism or organizing outside of work.” Co-workers throughout interviews for this piece referred to each other as “family.”
Courtesy of Armando Vega
Starbucks employee Meridian
But when the COVID-19 pandemic began, many of the elements that created this progressive, community-oriented atmosphere disappeared, as face-to-face interactions with customers were now considered a health risk. Cafés shut down, leaving transactions to the drive-through window, as well as new demand from an old source: mobile ordering.
This shift is one of the quiet reasons why we’ve seen over two dozen Starbucks stores unionize over the past couple of months, with hundreds more potentially on the way. The pandemic exacerbated long-standing problems that had damaged Starbucks’s relationship with its workers, and those workers had the organizing chops to address those problems through collective action.
BEFORE THE PANDEMIC, restaurants were integrating software between the front of house, the kitchen, and the supply chain to make the industry “more efficient.” Every food service sector worker knows the peril of “the schedule”: whether or not they will get enough hours to pay the bills this week.
Early on in the pandemic, mobile ordering became the primary way customers would get their coffees and muffins at Starbucks. Restrictions were placed on how many people could be in a given space, which reduced available employees. And the new phenomenon of online ordering became add-on work for current staff. “I would describe it as [like] a lot of food service jobs,” said Johnson. “Making sure there’s less people on the floor doing the work, but putting more work on the people who are on the floor doing it.”
Initially, workers received 30 days’ “distress pay.” But as the pandemic went on, restrictions were eased, and more people became comfortable being around others again, the distress pay faded as mobile ordering remained, increasing the workload. In addition, Johnson noted, “we simply do not have the people to keep up with the demand.” Employment in leisure and hospitality is still 1.5 million short of where it was in February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It has been hard to find workers to cope with the increase in responsibilities.
During this difficult time, employees at the Boulevard and Myers Starbucks asked management to ameliorate these conditions. “When you try to bring these issues [staffing, supplies, etc.] to managers’ attention, even if they are sympathetic managers … they’re being walled in by higher-ups … whose primary objective is to get as much profit as they can,” Johnson explained. “Putting more people on the floor, for example, to help do the work gets in the way of making as much profit as they can.”
Virginia is number 23 in the nation for worker protections, after having spent years as the worst state for workers in the country.
Existing workers during this time were frustrated as they hadn’t seen a raise in years, persevering through the most dangerous and difficult parts of the pandemic while watching new employees earn the same wages as they did. And inflation eroded whatever gains any of them might have made from distress pay or promotions.
The catalyst, as it were, for the Westchester Commons Starbucks partners in Richmond was the December 2021 omicron wave. As Meridian tells it, “They [management] got rid of the plexiglass at our front registers. We have a lot of partners who were uncomfortable with that. So we wrote this very lovely, polite open letter to management saying … cases are on the rise, we feel pretty uncomfortable if customers don’t have to wear their masks.”
The open letter was drafted by several workers. It states in part, “With numerous partners living with immunocompromised family members or being at high risk themselves, we urge you to please consider the following [policy proposals] in restructuring store procedures for this fiscal year.” The list included temporarily closing the café and only doing drive-through to slow the spread of omicron; asking for plexiglass barriers between themselves and customers; setting a capacity limit for the inside of the store for customers; and instituting a grab-and-go format for mobile orders to limit contact between partners and patrons.
According to Meridian, management reacted by “laugh[ing] in our face … [saying] that we’re ungrateful, that if you don’t like Starbucks you should quit.”
It was at that moment that the partners at store number 13674 knew, as Meridian put it, “collective bargaining and legal contracts is the only way … to have a say in our workplace.”
PANDEMIC RESTRICTIONS ARE often framed as though they are preventing people from returning to work, due to their non-willingness to comply with COVID safety measures. What is often lost in the statistics is that, while the American people are “tired” of the pandemic, a majority support COVID safety measures for this very reason. At Meridian’s store, unionization efforts kicked off as workers saw their managers treat their health, safety, and potentially their lives with contempt.
Courtesy of Armando Vega
Starbucks worker Cory Johnson
The workers at Westchester Commons set to organizing in secret. They convened a small organizing committee that began holding one-on-one meetings with workers and getting union cards signed, first by workers they considered sympathetic. By the time management found out and they went public with their union drive, organizers were confident they had a majority. When the National Labor Relations Board hosted their election by mail, the union was formed by a 13-8 vote. It was one of seven wins in Virginia over the past week. There are now 40 unionized Starbucks stores nationwide.
Cory Johnson and his co-workers at the Boulevard and Myers Starbucks in central Richmond say that their union came about not as a sudden moment, but as the solution to many problems that melded together. A co-worker first approached Johnson about forming a union last July. They filed in February, had a hearing in March, and are now waiting for an election to start.
The majority of the organizing work, as Boulevard and Myers employees tell it, has involved educating potential members on their rights and what unionization can help achieve. According to Johnson, most workers don’t know how to go about setting up a union or what’s involved. But he was excited at the recent results in Virginia. “The labor movement has had … pretty harsh experiences here,” he said. “Who would have guessed, union coffee here in Richmond?”
Virginia has long sold itself as the number one state for business in America. Virginia was one of the first states after the passage of the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 to introduce right-to-work laws. In recent years, a Democratic government did raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour (though not until 2026) and finally allowed a legal remedy for wage theft. But the state still lags behind; Virginia is number 23 in the nation for worker protections, after having spent years as the worst state for workers in the country.
Workers at Westchester Commons now have a list of policies they are looking to negotiate into their first contract. One of their first proposals is that “the pay that would have gone to Starbucks from someone calling out on their shift, would get distributed amongst those who had to work a short-staffed shift.” The union also wants annual cost-of-living increases. “If Starbucks raises wages at other stores, they [should] raise it at our store,” Meridian said.
The victorious Starbucks workers recognized the similarity of their struggles across the restaurant sector, and urged solidarity. “If you are at a Starbucks store that has not unionized or a Wendy’s that doesn’t have a union, reach out to your local unions,” Meridian said. “They were so excited to help me.”
