Starbucks wants to resume contract talks with the recently formed labour union that represents thousands of the coffee chain’s US baristas, the company said on Friday, aiming to break what it called a months-long “impasse”.
The announcement comes a day before the two-year anniversary of a successful vote for union representation at a Starbucks café in Buffalo, New York, an election that kicked off organising efforts at hundreds more stores around the country.
The Starbucks Workers United union now represents workers at about 350 of the 9,000 stores that Starbucks operates in the US. But its efforts to win a contract have stalled. Union officials last met for talks with the company on May 23, they said.
The lack of progress stands out in a season when larger, older unions have won big gains in contract negotiations with companies from airlines to carmakers. The Starbucks union’s demands include a $20-an-hour base wage and stable shift schedules.
The union and the company have given differing reasons for the lack of progress. SWU has repeatedly accused Starbucks of “dragging its feet”.
Starbucks said union representatives had not confirmed any proposed bargaining sessions since mid-June and “has refused to meaningfully engage with the company to propose and confirm alternative dates for first bargaining sessions”.
In a letter to the union president on Friday, Starbucks executive Sara Kelly wrote that the chain hoped to resume bargaining with a small set of stores in January and ratify contracts by the end of 2024.
Kelly asked for the union to commit to certain terms for the talks, including treating each participant “with dignity and respect” and holding sessions “without video or audio feeds or recording so that all participants are comfortable with open, honest discussions”.
Union president Lynne Fox said the letter was being reviewed. “We’ve never said no to meeting with Starbucks. Anything that moves bargaining forward in a positive way is most welcome,” she said.
The union has organised 170 locations in 2023, compared with 190 in 2022, a person familiar with the union’s operations estimated.
More than 9,000 baristas have joined the SWU. As the union pushes to expand into more locations, Starbucks has raised benefits and mandated employee meetings that discuss the downsides of unions, workers said. Management-side labour relations consultants say they have studied Starbucks’ tactics.
“If it is part of Starbucks’ strategy to sort of create friction for these newly formed unions, that’s definitely happened,” said Dan Altchek, a lawyer who represents employers in labour disputes for Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr.
The National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that oversees unions, has logged almost 700 unfair labour practice complaints against Starbucks and its law firm Littler Mendelson, including allegations that it illegally fired union leaders and refused to bargain with the group.
The board and federal judges issued injunctions in a handful of cases, ordering Starbucks to reinstate 34 fired employees, while dozens of cases are awaiting decisions. Starbucks has denied wrongdoing. In a statement it said: “We respect our partners’ right to freely organise, engage in lawful union activities and bargain collectively.”
The firings had made workers more afraid to publicly support the union, the union said. SWU is organising each individual store into its own contract bargaining unit, a move that labour experts say probably makes it easier to grow the union but more difficult to negotiate with the company.
“[Starbucks] has been able to slow the effort at unionisation at new stores, so that’s been effective from their perspective,” said Kate Andrias, a Columbia Law School professor who studies organised labour. “But I still think that the workers are committed and eventually should prevail.”
Altchek believes that the union-organising slowdown has probably come at substantial cost to the company, though analysts say it is difficult to estimate the financial impact of two years of labour strife. Starbucks reported North America and US comparable store sales growth of 8 per cent in its latest quarter, which ended on October 1.
Yet sales slowed over the three-week period ending November 19, which coincided with a temporary labour walkout at 200 stores on “Red Cup Day”, a popular promotion when the company gives out reusable coffee cups, said Matthew Goodman, an analyst at research firm M Science.
Starbucks is also facing labour pressure in its boardroom. In November a coalition of unions that own company shares, including the Service Employees International Union, nominated three people to serve as corporate directors.
“At a time when Starbucks has set an ambitious goal of opening more than 17,000 new stores by 2030, it cannot waste any more resources fighting its own workers,” the coalition said.
Starbucks said it would review the unions’ board nominees ahead of its annual meeting in March.
The union says it has scored some victories already. Starbucks in 2022 introduced more sizes for baristas’ green aprons and the option for customers to tip with their credit cards, two of the union’s initial demands.
The company says these changes reflected feedback from employees and did not extend to stores that unionised prior to the announcement, citing an obligation to bargain for such changes.
Last month Starbucks announced a technology that it would make it easier for workers to ask their manager to temporarily halt customers from placing orders on its mobile app when lines build up inside the stores, a primary aim of last month’s strike.
Michelle Eisen, a Starbucks barista and union organiser in Buffalo, remains hopeful.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Eisen said. “The company has spent millions of dollars . . . to try to prevent this union campaign from being successful and we prevailed. I think we accomplished the impossible here.”
This article has been amended to clarify the nature of changes to technology that enables temporary halts to mobile app orders
