Matthew Cunningham-Cook of The Lever reports that workers at Starbucks are voting to join unions. The Lever is a blog launched by David Sirota, co-author of “Don’t Look Up” and former speechwriter for Senator Bernie Sanders.
Big events continue to happen on the Starbucks Workers United front. On Tuesday, five Starbucks stores in greater Richmond, Virginia, voted to unionize. On Thursday, they won an election at the 100-employee-plus Starbucks Reserve Roastery flagship store in Seattle — one of the largest Starbucks stores to organize so far. Then, on Friday, the shamefully underfunded National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint over Starbucks’ February mass firing of union leaders in Memphis. Then again on Friday, the first Starbucks store in Colorado unionized. Struggling to keep track of it all? Reporters at Law360 developed this tool to track the growth of Starbucks workers’ efforts.
Readers can help this burgeoning labor movement by trying to shop only at union stores–wherever possible. We try to buy groceries–and anything else they sell–mainly at Kroger, America’s largest, and unionized, grocer. I haven’t gone to Starbucks in a while. Maybe I will when they are unionized!
I will buy nothing from Starbucks until it is unionized.