Joshua Bessex/AP Photo
Starbucks employees and supporters react as votes are read during a watch party of their union election, December 9, 2021, in Buffalo, New York.
By a vote of 19-8, baristas at one Buffalo Starbucks have voted to join a union, according to a vote count tallied Thursday by the National Labor Relations Board. Baristas at another Buffalo Starbucks voted against joining, while baristas at a third may have voted to join, though some of the ballots are being contested.
Given the steep tilt toward management that our dysfunctional labor law permits, and the opposition that the Starbucks empire inflicted on their workers, the victory at even one of the company’s 15,000-some U.S. outlets is remarkable.
It’s also very, very small.
The union with which the baristas affiliated is Workers United, a rather small branch of the two-million-member Service Employees International Union. Nearly a decade ago, SEIU kicked off a trailblazing campaign to raise hourly wages in the fast-food industry to a then unheard-of $15, and to win those workers a union. The first half of its campaign succeeded beyond all expectations. In a number of left-leaning cities and states, the minimum wage, not just for fast-food workers but all workers, has been raised to $15, most impactfully in California and New York state.
The second half of SEIU’s campaign—winning those workers a union—until yesterday had gone absolutely nowhere. States and municipalities, no matter how progressive, have no jurisdiction over the rules of unionization, which are set by the federal National Labor Relations Act. Decades of anti-union court rulings and the deep hostility of employers to giving their employees a voice in the workplace—including supposedly worker-friendly employers like Starbucks—have so weakened the NLRA that unionization has proven effectively impossible.
I suppose if we reclassify Starbucks as a fast-food purveyor, SEIU can now claim to have unionized one such outlet, which, if a contract is agreed upon, will produce dues totaling 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent (continue indefinitely) of SEIU’s income. By that metric, it’s not much to show for the many millions of dollars the union has spent over the years on its “$15 and a Union” campaign. By the metric of changing some millions of lives for the better due to hikes in the minimum wage, however, SEIU’s performance has been nothing less than heroic.
Only the largest unions can afford such uncompensated heroism, however. This is something that the Teamsters, which has pledged to unionize Amazon, and will soon be under new leadership that vows to go all-in on that campaign, must ponder. The illegal tactics that Amazon employed earlier this year to squelch a unionization campaign at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, illustrate the lengths to which it will go to keep its employees powerless. In that case, Amazon’s conduct was so egregious that the NLRB ordered it to hold a new election.
The union waging this particular campaign isn’t the Teamsters, but rather the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, and it’s not at all apparent that the RWDSU is going about this in the right way. For one thing, Amazon offers some of the highest-paying jobs available to non-college-educated workers in Alabama, which, in addition to the pressures the company put on its employees to reject the union, was one reason why they voted the union down by a 71 percent to 29 percent margin earlier this year.
Herein lies a broader problem. Because work in Amazon warehouses is so fatiguingly fast-paced and the injury rate so much higher than the industry norm, the company has compelled itself to outbid its competitors in the scramble for workers. As of September, the average starting wage at an Amazon warehouse, the company said, was $18.32 an hour. That may not go very far at its Staten Island warehouse, but it’s a lot higher than the average pay for non–college grads in Alabama, and in most of the non-metro-area locales where Amazon locates its warehouses.
To be sure, discontent at the impossible pace Amazon warehouse workers are forced to keep, and the constant surveillance they’re under, is such that the yearly turnover rate averages more than 100 percent. But discontent only helps prompt unionization when the workers remain on the job. When the workforce consists of relatively highly paid newbies already looking for the exits, organizing, the most arduous of tasks in the best of circumstances, becomes more arduous still.
By the metric of changing some millions of lives for the better due to hikes in the minimum wage, SEIU’s performance has been nothing less than heroic.
Randy Korgan, the Teamster whom the union has tasked with heading up its campaign, acknowledges that mobilizing not just the rank and file but also every conceivable community and political ally will be integral to its efforts. It will require such bank shots as the complaint just filed with the Federal Trade Commission against Amazon over its practice of failing to label which listings on its site are paid for by advertisers as consumers search for a product. The complaint was lodged by the Strategic Organizing Center, which is chiefly funded by the Teamsters and SEIU. By extension, we might see the Teamsters building a campaign around Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to break up the company on antitrust grounds.
Even despite the myriad obstacles with which employers and the courts have sought to deter any growth in worker power, workers’ desire for such power continues to rise. In each of the past three months, the share of workers quitting their jobs is higher than any since the government began recording quit rates. (In a workforce that’s just 11 percent unionized, quitting is the option available to the other 89 percent.) The approval rating of unions, at 65 percent, is the highest it’s been in the past 50 years. The Buffalo baristas are not alone, and this broad demand for a voice at work is a factor that the Teamsters will be trying to figure out how to operationalize as they commence their campaign.
This demand has taken a range of forms in recent weeks. It was apparent in the strike of 10,000 workers against John Deere, who rejected two Deere proposals that their own United Auto Workers officials recommended before finally accepting a third, and better, offer. It was apparent this past weekend when the 1,400 members of the Bakers Union (the BCTGM, for you acronym lovers) on strike against the breakfast cereal titan Kellogg also rejected a contract offer that some of their leaders had recommended.
Earlier this year, the BCTGM had won better pay and conditions in strikes against Frito-Lay and Nabisco. Kellogg, which has long demonstrated more hostility to worker organization than its Big Bakery competitors, has continued down that path in the course of the current strike. At issue, and it’s been an issue in most of the year’s other strikes, is the employer’s wish to maintain (or in Kellogg’s case, make even worse) its two-tier employment system, under which newer hires must wait years to become eligible for full pay and benefits.
At first, Kellogg proposed to change the system so that new hires would never become eligible for more senior pay and benefits. In its subsequent offer to the union, it proposed making 3 percent of those newer hires eligible for moving to the senior tier each year—at which rate, members at Kellogg’s Omaha plant (its largest in the U.S.) calculated, it would take new hires an average of nine years on the job to become eligible for full pay and benefits. Worse yet, Dan Osborn, the president of BCTGM’s Omaha local, told me yesterday, “those nine years would not count toward your pension.” Upon news of the union members’ overwhelming rejection of the proposal, Kellogg vowed to permanently hire replacements. With unemployment in Nebraska at just 1.9 percent, however, and with the jobs requiring both long hours and extensive training, Osborn doubted how seriously Kellogg was taking its own threat. “Permanent replacements?” he said. “Who the hell with?”
Of the 470 members of the Omaha local, Osborn estimates, just a dozen have crossed the picket lines to return to work.
Decades of anti-union court rulings and the deep hostility of employers to giving their employees a voice in the workplace have so weakened the NLRA that unionization has proven effectively impossible.
Worker militancy, even in the face of their leaders’ recommendations, has also been in evidence recently in the vote of UAW members to change the way their leaders are selected. Since its founding in 1936, the UAW has chosen its leaders at conventions of delegates elected by its member locals, the method that nearly every American union employs. In the 1940s, that led to a caucus headed by Walter Reuther taking power. For decades, this leadership produced the best contracts, the most assistance to social justice movements, and the most serious challenges to management control of any union in American history.
It also preserved the caucus structure, even though any serious opposition to it had ceased to exist by the early 1950s. In recent decades, as the union’s social democratic leaders departed the scene and the caucus structure ossified, it began producing a wholly different breed of leaders. In the past few years, two UAW presidents and a host of lesser officials have pleaded guilty to raiding the union’s treasury to fund elaborate lifestyles, offenses that would have appalled Reuther, who was not only a dedicated socialist but also a thoroughgoing puritan.
This fall, the federal prosecutor who put those two presidents behind bars ordered the union to let its members vote on whether they wished to continue to select their leaders in delegated conventions, which in recent decades had been dominated by the self-dealings of many of those leaders, or preferred to change to rank-and-file elections. (Omitted from the choices was the union’s 1938 convention process, in which, by the decree of the new union’s somewhat unstable president, Homer Martin, delegates’ preferences were to be recorded by newfangled sound-o-meters, which would determine which candidates had the most support by comparing how much noise their supporters made when asked to vote. After the delegates had all but destroyed the convention hall in the course of making the loudest noise possible, that system was discarded.)
Anyway, this fall, the members opted for rank-and-file voting. It’s the same method the Teamsters use, and for the same reason: A quarter-century ago, federal prosecutors required the Teamsters to use it as part of cleaning up the union, and the Teamsters have stayed with it, even though the federal monitorship has been lifted.
There’s nothing inherently transforming about rank-and-file voting. Since its adoption, the Teamsters have elected as their president an outsider-reformer (Ron Carey) for one term, then the more establishment James P. Hoffa (son of the legendary Jimmy) for four terms, and this fall, an insider with reformer support (Sean O’Brien). The share of members actually voting has never exceeded one-fourth of the membership and is usually a good deal lower.
But after enduring a string of presidents and other officials who ended up in jail for misappropriating the dues they paid, the UAW rank and file opted to take more direct control of who speaks and negotiates for them. They displayed a form of the same desire for more control over their working lives that we’ve seen this year at Kellogg, Nabisco, Frito-Lay, and John Deere; among the behind-the-camera workers in Hollywood and the nurses at Kaiser Permanente; and now among the baristas at a Buffalo Starbucks. That desire can surely be found among the million-plus workers at Amazon, and millions of American workers elsewhere, though the Teamsters, and the union movement, and American progressives are all still a very long way from discovering how to turn that desire into tangible gains.
