“You Can Take On A Major Corporation — And Win”

Alex Moni-Sauri interviews James Skretta, former Starbucks barista and Organizing Committee member with Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) in Buffalo, New York

On the tidal wave of unionization victories in shops across the country.

Five months ago, Starbucks was a completely non-unionized company. What did baristas do in Buffalo to trigger this enthusiasm for unionizing Starbucks stores across the US? What was that initial organizing push like? 

To clarify and just adjust one detail, my store didn’t technically win its vote until early March, but the Elmwood and Genesee Street stores won their vote in early December. I’m from the Sheridan and Bailey store, which was part of the second set of stores in Buffalo to have our votes. 

What did we do to set off this explosion? I think the most honest answer is not much. And that, I think, is the real narrative that people need to understand, which is that workers have been frustrated and wanting to organize for a very long time. I think that they just needed to see that you could take on a major corporation and win. 

Testament to that is the organizing approach that our campaign has taken as it has exploded across the country. It’s a campaign that’s led by the workers themselves. Unlike a lot of big organizing models where union organizers are seeking out organizing campaigns or going into shops and trying to find places to organize, in our situation, Starbucks workers all around the country just started reaching out to us after we won those first two elections there in Buffalo. 

After the Amazon Staten Island union vote, EWOC had a 500 percent uptick in people requesting information about organizing.

From there, a lot of the workers in Buffalo have been able to offer insight and experience about what going through the process is like, to help out these other stores. Giving them coaching, support, advice — just really being there in solidarity with them as they undertake this process for themselves.

How many stores have unionized so far, and where do you think this is going?  

With regard to numbers, right now we’re up to almost 250 [that have filed for or won NLRB elections]. Honestly, it’s really difficult to keep track of because new stores are filing for elections. It really does seem like every day. It’s difficult to say where this is heading. I don’t see the pace of unionizing Starbucks stores slowing down. 

Honestly, I think that the company’s response has a lot to do with this. Just the other day, in one of the meetings that Howard Schultz is having with Starbucks workers at various stores around the country to “hear about their concerns,” a barista confronted Schultz directly about the intense union-busting campaign that the company has been engaged in. We just got a ruling from the NLRB a couple of days ago that the seven workers in Memphis were, in fact, as we always knew, illegally separated. Instead of addressing these concerns, Schultz went on to berate and dismiss the barista for bringing these things up. He said, “If you hate Starbucks so much, why don’t you go find another place to work?” That kind of response just makes people more angry and frustrated about the way in which we are deeply disenfranchised in our workplaces. 

Amazon workers in Staten Island recently won union representation, and I’m sure were also inspired by this Starbucks campaign. It looks like a sign of encouragement for labor in the US — would you agree that this is the beginning of a labor revival?

Oh, absolutely. I think it’s undeniable. I have been fortunate enough to do a lot of solidarity work with people in the DSA. Some of the people I’ve worked with are connected to EWOC, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. They put up a tremendous post a few days after the Amazon Staten Island union vote, saying that they had a 500 percent uptick in people requesting information about organizing their workplaces, as well as an even greater uptick in the number of people who have downloaded their workplace organizing manual.

There are many other questions I think that could be asked here — like what will need to change to make it such that the paw actually has claws? The NLRB is deeply underfunded and is not going to be able to handle, in a timely manner, the massive influx of petitions that are being submitted. They are not going to be able to handle the incredible uptick in unfair labor practice charges that they will have to litigate. They’re not going to be able to handle what will happen when there is a ridiculous amount of bargaining that does not happen in good faith.

Right now, the greatest authority for establishing a union is gained through the NLRB and the NLRB union process. It will not be enough though to guarantee workplace democracy. It begs the question of what will need to happen with regard to direct action. It’ll beg the question of just how well-organized are the workplaces that are being organized, because direct action will only be successful if you truly have worker buy-in, and people aren’t just going along with organizing a union because there are a few strong leaders at the store who seem to have the best interests of the workers at heart. 

This is ultimately why I think it’s so important that the workers themselves are the ones that are organizing. And I feel optimistic about this truly being a labor revival because this seems to be a situation where it is the workers themselves who are trying to demand more for themselves, as opposed to the big unionism approach of organizing new bargaining units.

Could you tell us a little more about the union-busting tactics that Starbucks has been using in response to organizing efforts?

Absolutely. I would say that there are two phases to what the company has engaged in with their union-busting program. In the first phase, the union-busting was centered almost exclusively on Buffalo. In Buffalo, the company sent in over 100 corporate managers to conduct surveillance in the stores. The managers were explicitly told that workers were to never be left alone. It’s obvious what they’re trying to do here. They’re trying to intimidate us and make it such that we don’t feel comfortable having open conversations on the shop floor about organizing. They were explicitly feeding us the general false information. 

And they’re threatening our benefits, saying that we’re not going to be able to transfer stores, saying that our managers aren’t going to be able to work with us anymore, talking about how you’re going to have to pay $600 in union dues. Which, to be fair, you’ll probably pay around $600 in union dues over the course of a year — but through the contract that we intend to negotiate, you’ll probably also get a net raise of around $4,000. 

The most intense aspect of this union-busting campaign was the psychological warfare and psychological manipulation that the support managers would subject us to. They would have one-on-one conversations and two-on-one conversations and in some cases, there were as many as seven or eight corporate managers talking to just one worker to try and convince them that: “We’re all family here and we really value our direct relationship. We’re all partners. I would just hate for you to no longer be able to speak for yourself.” The amount of third-partying of the union that the company and these managers would do is just really incredible. 

Third-partying, could you explain what you mean by that?

So one of the most common union-busting tactics is to “third-party” the union. Call the union a third party, an outside group. The company imagines that, one party is the management of the corporation, the second party is the workers, and they want to call the union a third party which is going to get in between the two parties and make it impossible for the workers and the managers to be able to talk directly to one another. But this is just absolutely false, because the union is the workers. We are the union. The union only exists because we make the union. The union is the workers themselves coming together, forming an organization that allows them to fight for themselves and have legal protections under the NLRA.

But every company wants to say otherwise, and truly every company will say this: “A direct relationship with our workers is what allows us to be an effective and agile company.” Read what Amazon has said about the union, read what REI has said about the union, read about any company that has employees that try to unionize. 

By late November or so, we saw the start of the second phase of the union busting. As time went on in Buffalo, the union-busting campaign became more intense. They started writing pro-union people up for small infractions that people had not had been written up for before. For example, minor tardiness issues. They started rigorously enforcing the dress code, things of that nature, really just like trying to nickel and dime us to start creating a paper trail so that they could eventually terminate some pro-union workers, which is what they have done. In Buffalo, there have been no less than five pro-union workers now who have been terminated.

We saw in Memphis, those seven workers in Memphis were fired almost immediately after the store filed. The NLRB just ruled that that firing was illegal. In Phoenix, Laila Dalton was written up with nine written warnings about two or three days before that store was getting ready to file. She was one of the big leaders there, and they eventually moved to separate her for simply protecting herself at that store. 

The company has seen that the approach in Buffalo hasn’t worked, and they can’t sustain that kind of approach across 200 stores. You can’t send 100 managers to all these stores around the country. So instead, what they’re doing is putting the responsibility to union bust on the managers and the district managers and the regional managers, hoping that these managers are so wedded to the company that they will just do what they are told. So it makes sense that a support manager or a store manager will try to quash their workers from unionizing because if they unionize, the company’s going to think they’re a bad manager and they might get fired.

So these are the things they’re doing. Unfortunately, it’s really effective, because we talk to workers around the country who are scared. People are legitimately afraid of retaliation.

Winning the NLRB elections is one thing, as you mentioned — then the challenge is to win your first contract. Have the contract negotiations in Buffalo already started, and what are your expectations for that process?

For the two stores in Buffalo that won back in December, contract negotiations have begun. I feel very optimistic about them. I think that the only way though that we’re going to win a good contract is if we continue winning stores, because Starbucks is going to come to see that they’re not able to handle negotiating with 400, 500 individual stores. If five, six hundred individual stores end up winning union elections, we’re talking about 10,000 workers, and the company’s not going to be able to disregard 10,000 workers. That’s just too significant of a portion of their profit generating machine.

Would you like to highlight anything that we haven’t touched on so far?

I would just say that we don’t organize because we hate the place that we work. Howard Schultz couldn’t be more wrong about this. At Starbucks, what I find is that the workers that most want to organize are the workers who have been there for two, three, four, five, ten years. 

Howie can say what he wants about corporations being under assault by the threat of unionizing. But all he does is show that he doesn’t actually understand what it means to be a worker in what he likes to think is his company.

This is our company. If we’re all partners at Starbucks, then it’s our company just as much as his company. We’re going to stand up for that and we’re going to fight to make that a reality, not just in aspiration, but legally, through a contract.