This victory of Starbucks employees in Buffalo will reverberate across America | Robert Reich
What occurred at one Starbucks store is part of a much larger pattern — a surge in strikes and labor actions across America
Workers in one Starbucks store, in Buffalo, New York, made history on Thursday by becoming Starbuck’s first unionized workplace in the US. It’s a watershed for the biggest coffee seller in the world, which operates 8,953 stores in the United States — and which has done everything in its power to keep its workers from forming a union.
The vote itself was tiny. There were 19 baristas and shift supervisors who voted in favor of unionizing, 8 voted against. But it marked a huge victory, nonetheless. Starbucks had waged a massive anti-union campaign in Buffalo — sending out-of-town managers and even executives into stores to discourage unionizing, closing down some stores, and packing remaining stores with new employees in order to dilute pro-union employees’ voting power.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
