By Richard Mellor in California
Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York state, are celebrating a victory in a ballot to unionise their outlet. Hopefully, it is the first of many such victories and it will inspire other Starbucks workers and others in the catering and retail sector to follow suit. It is one important victory, but as this article by Richard Mellor shows, there is still a long road ahead.
Starbucks is a huge multi-national corporation. It has over 15,000 US cafes and Howard Schultz, its CEO for some 20 years, is worth about $4.5bn. Starbucks owns 9,000 of these stores and has about 6,000 in airports, grocery stores, department stores and other locations that are under license to operate; close to half of these are unionized.
Less than 2% of food service and bar workers in the US are unionized according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) so while this victory will have little immediate effect on Starbuck’s bottom line, it is no small matter. This is especially so as Starbucks spent considerable time and a lot of money trying to get workers to vote against unionization. Starbuck’s CEO, Kevin Johnson, told the media that these workers unionizing could “disrupt the relationship between Starbucks and its employees”. Schultz added, “It goes against having that direct relationship with our partners that has served us so well for decades and allowed us to build this great company,”.
Workers and bosses are not ‘partners’
The workers are organized as Workers United Upstate New York and are connected to the Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, and we certainly hope they “disrupt” the relationship they presently have with their bosses. What good is a union that doesn’t do that? Hopefully, they also understand fully that workers and bosses are not “partners” in the company, regardless of what the heads atop the AFL-CIO tell us.
That Starbucks spent so much money and time sending execs to Buffalo to persuade workers to reject unionization, it “preoccupied Starbucks executives for months” the Wall Street Journal put it, is confirmation that organization can empower the worker and that the bosses fear it. As the unionization campaign was proceeding, Starbucks announced it was raising wages. Unionization or even talk of it, pays.
The National Labor Relations Board, which is technically an Independent body of the US government (so it’s not independent of the US government) responsible for enforcing US labour law in relation to collective bargaining, approves and overseas petitions for union recognition. The Buffalo drive is a result of that appeal and it has inspired Starbucks workers in Mesa Arizona to appeal to the NLRB for a union election as well.
Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, AFL-CIO, pointed out that this vote is, “an incredibly symbolic win that other workers are going to find inspiration from…Workers in organizing campaigns everywhere are sharing this and saying, ‘Look what they did, we can do it, too,’” She’s right about that, but more has to be forthcoming from the rest of organized labour if this trend is to continue, the rest of organized labour and the unorganized can’t be left as passive bystanders or cheerleading.
“We’ve been fighting our entire lives as leaders, as rank-and-file members, to grow our organizations, and I think it’s our time,” Sean O’Brien, the new elected leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters told the Journal.
Striking and forcing the employer to accept a union
These statements are all well and good. But the NLRB is not the only way workers can unionize. Another way is through striking and forcing the employers to accept a union. It goes without saying that given how workers on strike are left to fight what are global corporations on our own, generally isolated from the working class communities in which we live and from other unionized workers around us, it is not feasible for workers in one workplace and certainly one like Starbucks to do that. The cause of this isolation is that we are constrained by the trade union hierarchy’s obsession with obeying the law (except when it comes to their own members).
But that is how the industrial unions were built in the 1930s. Workers that deliver goods, that supply electricity and water, can add the power needed to shut down anti-union employers that resist organization. This would take organization and most importantly violating anti-union anti-worker laws that forbid us from doing this. Enough of us defying anti-union laws will force them to change them. We can’t wait for a so-called friendly Democrat for that, brothers and sisters. If we obeyed the law, we wouldn’t have built unions in the first place. We built unions by violating the bosses’ laws not obeying them or relying on lawyers or the courts.
Only two sources of power in the workplace
Almost a quarter century ago I was asked to give a presentation on behalf of AFSCME (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) to a group of municipal workers in my town who were interested in forming a union. I drank with a few of them in my local pub and introduced them to AFSCME which is why I was asked to speak for the union, I never would have been asked to do that.
I agreed and made it clear I would not disparage another union and appeal to them to Join AFSCME but most important of all, unionize. There are only two sources of power in the workplace, the bosses and the organized workers.
I stressed in that instance that whether they joined AFSCME or not, it is only the first step of organizing to protect your rights on the job. Now a more complex difficult fight begins, the struggle internally to make the union the fighting aggressive workers’ organization it should be. And that means a confrontation with the present leadership, as the conservative clique atop the AFL-CIO, the Flight attendants Sara Nelson and Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien included, all agree in one way or another that the workers and the bosses are in a ‘partnership’, are on the ‘same team’. This has been a disaster for US workers as this philosophy is at the root of the betrayals and class collaboration of the past decades.
That’s what the Starbuck workers are faced with now.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
