Carolyn Thompson/AP Photo
Richard Bensinger, left, who is advising unionization efforts, along with baristas Casey Moore, right, Brian Murray, second from right, and Jaz Brisack, second from left, discuss their efforts to unionize three Buffalo-area Starbucks stores, October 28, 2021, in Buffalo, New York.
One of the most interesting union campaigns in recent years is happening right now in Buffalo, New York. Workers in three Starbucks outlets started a union organizing effort over their concerns about seniority pay, scheduling, staffing levels, and safety and health during COVID (plus, at one store an infestation of bees was left festering for months). Earlier this month, the National Labor Relations Board mailed ballots to the workers in these stores, who will have four weeks to vote on whether to unionize with Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. If they do, these stores would be the first unionized locations among the ubiquitous chain’s thousands of U.S. locations.
Starbucks’s response to the union campaign has been mostly predictable: They closed at least one location (finally clearing out the bees) and converted it into a training center; they’ve also held countless meetings to push pro-company and anti-union propaganda. The coffee giant’s efforts have on occasion veered into the comic and bizarre: In October, corporate executives descended on Buffalo stores, sweeping floors while asking about workers’ concerns, and a few weeks ago, founder and ex-CEO Howard Schultz touched down to speak directly to Buffalo workers. Schultz’s messaging was, at minimum, idiosyncratic: In his talk, he jarringly shared a story about the Holocaust, and he later penned a Splenda-filled missive to the team in which the word “love” appears five times.
The company’s overall reaction, though, is utterly unoriginal. It’s the same knee-jerk opposition to unions that we’ve seen since the 1800s, with a few just-as-hoary variations. Instead of beating people up, Starbucks uses other well-worn approaches, from gaslighting (“Everything’s great”) to good cop/bad cop (“We love you! But we closed the store—for other reasons—after you asked for a union.”) American employers’ anti-union playbook is so standardized that one union in another industry has even come up with a bingo board of typical management talking points during an organizing drive.
Starbucks is great at inventing fantastical coffee concoctions—and creakingly orthodox in its opposition to its workers’ desire for a union. If the company wanted to demonstrate real innovation and imagination, it would realize that a different approach—recognizing and working with the union—could be a powerful competitive advantage and actually benefit the business.
Instead, the company’s response shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why workers want unions. Schultz’s letter, for example, basically says: We’re a good company. We aren’t a sweatshop or a meat processing plant or a coal mine. We even exceed what’s legally required and provide some genuinely beneficial above-and-beyond offerings for our workers and for communities. And because we’re better than some employers out there, you don’t need a union.
But without a union contract, these above-and-beyond offerings can be eliminated in a heartbeat. They’re acts of benevolence, not rights. Without a union contract, workers have no job security, protection from arbitrary firing, right to raises or to adequate staffing levels. They don’t have the transparency and processes that union contracts provide, which can help reduce race and gender inequities and provide LGBTQ workers with protection.
More broadly, the decency of an employer doesn’t obviate the need for a union. Even a nice monarchy is still an unsettling prospect. Unions are a way for workers to have a say on the job, to be part of an institution that provides them with a formal, legally enforceable voice to counteract the power imbalance with management. When there are new developments in the workplace and in the world, from bees to a pandemic, unions give workers a way to have a more impactful voice than that provided by a corporate suggestion box.
Today’s workers increasingly understand that they need an institutionalized voice on the job. A recent MIT survey found that almost half of non-union workers would join a union if given the chance, and a Gallup poll in August found that over two-thirds of respondents approve of labor unions—the highest level in half a century. Opposition to unions is out of step with mainstream America.
Starbucks’s response to the Buffalo union campaign completely fails to reflect an understanding of this shifting zeitgeist. The company fails to grasp that a unionized Starbucks could be a tremendous asset to business.
Starbucks is great at inventing fantastical coffee concoctions—and creakingly orthodox in its opposition to its workers’ desire for a union.
When public opinion is so strongly pro-union, a unionized workforce at Starbucks would offer a meaningful competitive advantage. Imagine the marketing a unionized Starbucks could do. Imagine the potential long-term brand loyalty from younger customers, who in surveys are even more supportive of unions than their elders (more than three-quarters approve of unions). And conversely, consider the business downsides of being viewed as a union-buster. Many customers care about corporate ethics these days. And Starbucks isn’t a monopoly like Amazon; when it comes to coffee, customers can easily vote with their feet, since there are plenty of other places to get a cup of joe.
A unionized Starbucks could bring other business advantages, including increased retention and employee engagement. The company’s yearly turnover rate, around 65 percent, is better than the industry average. But that’s still a tremendous avoidable churn, and expensive too: A single turnover can cost the company as much as a third of a worker’s annual wages or even more. Also, even if 65 percent turnover is better than some other companies’, it may look very different and less acceptable to workers and customers. Imagine the boon to Starbucks if its turnover decreased to single digits. Imagine if people could make a lifelong career there. Unionized UPS has been driving circles around non-unionized FedEx during the pandemic, as its employees, who earn decent pay and benefits, haven’t been quitting. With a stable workforce, UPS has ensured continued on-time deliveries and beat earnings expectations, while FedEx’s profit margins are falling. In these unpredictable times, with COVID, climate crises, and who knows what else lying ahead, reliable and committed workers are a meaningful business asset.
In addition, unions can be a valuable resource for employers. Professional union staff often have extensive expertise in workplace safety and health. And in many unionized workplaces, joint labor-management committees collaborate to solve workplace problems. In the health care industry, such partnerships have led to improved service and reduced costs through in-the-weeds joint projects focusing on reducing wait times or improving staff responsiveness to patient calls. This approach makes sense, whether the focus is on healing patients or selling coffee. After all, who’s more knowledgeable about current operational shortcomings: some guy parachuted in from McKinsey or a person who’s on the front lines every day?
Traditionalists may ask, but what about the bottom line? What about shareholders? They could rightly add that not all shareholders are fat cats; some are pension funds that fuel worker retirements. But unionization can increase a company’s bottom line, in all the ways described above. And let’s remember, unions have zero interest in their companies failing. (Note that the workers organizing in Buffalo haven’t called for a boycott.) True, unionization could lead to a different division of profits, but it has the potential to increase the pie overall.
Beyond that, the interests of unionized workers and shareholders may well be more aligned than they realize: Both often care more about a company’s health over the long haul than the CEOs and high-level executives who often are incentivized to focus on short-term quarterly share price fluctuations. Neither workers nor shareholders are well served by an excessive CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio (Starbucks’s was 1,211-to-1 for fiscal year 2020, and shareholders rejected a $50 million retention plan for the CEO earlier this year.) Including union or worker representatives on corporate boards could also help to combat the short-termism that CEOs are inclined to pursue.
Finally, what’s the purpose of a company in the end? Starbucks has long positioned itself as a progressive business, and indeed, CEO Kevin Johnson was one of the 181 corporate leaders who in 2019 signed a much-heralded Business Roundtable statement about the purpose of a corporation. That statement rejected the notion that corporations have obligations only to shareholders, and it recognized that a company should be responsible to multiple stakeholders, including customers, communities, suppliers, and yes, employees. While there’s scant evidence of the companies thus far living up to these principles, the statement reveals their understanding that the broader society is moving toward a new vision of what a company should be.
Starbucks, like any company whose workers are unionizing, could take a genuinely innovative path. It has the opportunity to become a visionary leader; its executives could use their imagination to move toward a different corporate future. Imagine a Starbucks in 2030 or 2035 that’s known nationally as the unionized coffee chain, with the most stable workforce among all quick-serve restaurants, amazing service, amazing coffee, beloved by a generation of customers, shareholders, and workers.
A sweet-talking but hard-line anti-union campaign is neither innovative nor new. It’s yesterday. It’s boring. It’s old. But it’s not the only choice.
