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--:-- Noelle King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noelle King: We're not just employees of Starbucks. I mean, we are Starbucks. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. And actually, employee is not really a word Starbucks prefers. The term of art for a Starbucks worker is partner. Being a partner, that's not just a word. It's a real sense of ownership. I've had so many opportunities to grow, and I felt nurtured in that partnership. If you want to be part of something really big, this is the place to do it. It's like, OK, you're going to call me a partner? Like, I'm going to make myself a partner. Like, let's do it. Let's talk. Let's be partners.
--:-- Noelle King: Today, how Starbucks partners started calling the company out and forming a partnership of their own.
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--:-- Ronnie Mola: Hi, I'm Ronnie Mola, a senior data reporter at Recode from Vox. And for the last couple of months, I have been talking to a lot of baristas.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: So I've been talking to tons and tons of baristas. For some reason, they all seem to be 22 years old. I've talked to more 22-year-olds now than I've done since I was 22. And we're seeing this unprecedented wave of unionization happening at Starbucks. The nationwide coffee chain. Already, a whole bunch of Starbucks have voted to unionize, and in the coming weeks and months, something like 160 more are slated to vote. This is notable because it's a big, widely known corporation. Everyone knows what Starbucks is, and because it's happening in food service where you don't see a lot of unions.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: The push for unions is a relatively recent development. Starbucks is a 50-year-old company. Before the union organizing began in the last year or so, what kind of relationship did Starbucks have with its employees?
--:-- Ronnie Mola: So Starbucks is actually known for having a pretty good relationship with its employees. Yet Starbucks covers $20,000 for IVF and related medication for all eligible employees. It's been offering health insurance for years, and that's something that's just virtually unheard of still in food service. So it's just been part of who we are, that if you work here and you've put in the time, you're going to get the benefits that make you a full partner. You know, they call their employees partners.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: It was generally considered and perceived to be a good relationship. And as I understand it, there's another thing that appeals to many of the 22-year-olds that you were interviewing, which is that the company's politics are progressive.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: Yeah, I was a little bit exaggerating. Not all of them were 22. Plenty of them were in their 30s. But yeah, Starbucks is a progressive company. I don't believe the primary objective or the only objective of a for-profit company is to make a profit. You know, they talk about things like LGBTQ rights. Where somebody at a shareholder meeting asks you to maybe soften your position on marriage equality and gay rights. And you essentially said, if you think you can make a better return, go buy something else.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: Yes. We employ over 200,000 people in this company and we want to embrace diversity. Of all kinds.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: Hi, Gay. Happy Pradmans. We are sashaying away with deals. They talk about single origin coffee beans, you name it. And that progressiveness seems to attract progressive workers. People want to work at a place that's progressive because they're progressive. And, you know, it's sort of this circular relationship.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: You've got a relatively transient workforce. Many of them are young. These are not the type of people who ordinarily in this country would have gotten together and formed a union. But something changed.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: So in one of the Buffalo Starbucks back in 2019, a couple of the baristas started talking about unionizing. You know, they started seeing the dissonance between the company's progressive politics and what was actually happening. A lot of that had to do with their wages and their ability to be fired and their benefits. It was all sort of talk for a while. And then the pandemic happened.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: Starbucks is making a major shift to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company is closing up to 400 Starbucks locations. For a while, they were out of work, and then they come back, and people who were baristas become frontline workers. All of a sudden, their job is inherently dangerous. They have to tell people to put on masks. Back on June 4th, the two entered the Starbucks on West Avenue, neither one wearing a mask. And when an employee approached the two men and asked them to put a mask on, one man punched the victim in the face.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: They have to enforce vaccine mandates in some places. And the job just gets really rough. A lot of them get sick. As most of us know, there was the great resignation. It was hard to hire people last year. So you have this tougher work environment where you're dealing with the dangers of the pandemic. And they're not necessarily staffing as much as they should considering businesses come back. So they're working really hard and they feel like the company is not giving them adequate protections.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: Starbucks used to be a good company. They used to treat their workers with respect. And throughout the pandemic, we have seen them disrespect workers over and over. There was definitely a little resentment on behalf of these workers who had to go in. They're saying, you know, the company started rolling back mask mandates and a lot of other protections a little too fast, a little too brazenly. You know for corporate members who were still working from home at the time while these young people had to go in and be frontline workers.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: When did the first Starbucks stores decide to form a union and how did that process go? So they started trying to unionize in earnest in the spring of 2021. The original Buffalo baristas who were talking about this started reaching out to different partners all around the Buffalo area. That's a little bit easier in a city because you could often sub in for someone at a nearby Starbucks. So there was a lot of trade off with employees going to one place and another.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: And then, you know, they sort of get a critical mass by the summer of 2021, at which point they think they have enough supporters. They also think that corporate might have gotten wind of it. So they go public with their intent to unionize in August of 2021.
--:-- Noelle King: So we have yes votes in Buffalo. We have unions then form. Have the unions achieved the changes in working conditions that these workers wanted? What's different now?
--:-- Ronnie Mola: You know, it's like sort of the most cinematic part. Like, OK, they've they've gotten people together. They go in. They vote. They beat this big corporation. But just because you've unionized doesn't mean that you get the benefits of a union. Now they actually have to negotiate a contract. And that is a really tough thing to do.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: The contract is the document that says, OK, these are the benefits you are going to get. Here's the floor on wages. Here are the sort of health benefits that you get. We can't fire you without just cause, that sort of thing. All of that stuff has to be in the contract. And they don't have contracts yet. They have to work with the company to create a contract and negotiate what they want. And that's really hard to do given current labor laws.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: The company is supposed to bargain in good faith, but there is no real teeth behind the NLRB's power to make them do so. And there's nothing forcing companies to actually agree to the contract.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: So they've got a big, difficult road ahead of them in order to get their contract. How long do contracts usually take to sign? So they could take anywhere from six months to never.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: I saw a stat. It depends on which data set you're looking at, but something like 30% of unions never reach a contract, or at least not after a few years. And by that point, they lose a lot of steam. A lot of people who were originally there unionizing maybe have left, and it's sort of done.
--:-- Noelle King: Part of the impetus for all of this is that you have a workforce that is relatively young. You have young people who decided to unionize who now may be dealing with contract negotiations for years, and yet they don't expect to be at Starbucks forever.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: A lot of them I spoke to, you know, I don't know if they're going to be there in a few years. A lot of them are in college. Some have been there already five years and plan to be there longer. It really depends.
--:-- Ronnie Mola: I think they came of age during these big social movements, Black Lives Matter, Me Too. They're really comfortable with the idea of creating change in the world. They're also very comfortable with technology, which helps them spread that message. But I think overall, the sentiment was, we want to make this better for other Starbucks workers and for workers everywhere. We want this to happen at McDonald's. We want this to happen at Taco Bell.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up, I talk to a Starbucks union organizer in Rochester, New York.
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--:-- Noelle King: Last week on Thursday and Friday, six more Starbucks stores voted to unionize in upstate New York. That brings the total number to 16. Haley Fagan is a union organizer at one of those stores. It's a Starbucks drive-thru near Rochester, New York. Workers or partners at her store voted 10 to 3 in favor of the union. It was overwhelming. I cried when they counted the last yes ballot we needed to win ours.
--:-- Haley Fagan: Hi, I'm Haley Fagan. I'm 22. I've worked for Starbucks for five years now. I started out as a barista. Today, I'm a shift supervisor. So I guess that's another way to say key holder. So in the mornings, like, if my store manager isn't there, so I'm opening them up. I'm counting the safe, taking temperatures, inventory, placing inventory orders. We do frozen food polls for the next day. We'd tell like our baristas where to go, what to do. We send them on breaks, stuff like that. You're the manager. Yeah, everything short of like writing schedules and like hiring.
--:-- Haley Fagan: How much do you make as the manager of a Starbucks location? As a supervisor right now, I believe I make $22.84. What does that add up to over the course of a year? Oh, gosh. That's kind of hard to say just because hours are so up and down all the time. All of us are like part time. I don't think anyone is technically full time except the actual store manager.
--:-- Haley Fagan: So one week I could be working like 20 hours and the next week I might be working like 32 or I might be working like 18. I think last year it was around 30,000, though. Okay, yeah. I didn't realize that your hours were so varied. I assumed you were doing 40 hours a week, but it sounds like that's not at all guaranteed. No. And what's an average day's schedule for you? I would say on average 5 a.m., anywhere to like 10 a.m. to like 1.30 p.m. It's super varied.
--:-- Haley Fagan: Working at a Starbucks, working in food service or retail, not necessarily the kind of job that is unionized. It never would have occurred to me when I was your age to push for a union at one of my jobs in food service. Why did you think it was necessary? What was going through your head?
--:-- Haley Fagan: So in like my five and a half years with Starbucks, I've been with multiple different stores through like store closures in which our district manager had, you know, come to us and promised like, you guys are going to be okay. Your store is going to be fine. And then, you know, maybe a month later they were like, by the way, your store is not fine. And now we're going to have to find you somewhere else to work. You know, as someone who doesn't drive, the first location I worked at, I worked at out of proximity, especially because I was 17 when I was hired. Wow. And then I got moved to a location that was a bit farther away and I had to Uber more and rely on rides more.
--:-- Haley Fagan: And I guess I just got used to it. So it's been something I kind of just deal with because I'm like working towards my license currently. But also now Ubers are more expensive. There's some mornings where it's like, if I don't get this $50 Uber right now, I'm going to get written up. But if I do get this $50 Uber right now, that's $50 out of my paycheck. That's two and a half hours of work just to go work for like maybe six hours. And then I've still got to pay to go home. Like that's not sustainable.
--:-- Haley Fagan: Store closures, when they place people after, it's not like them working with us to find a spot that's good for us. They just stick us somewhere. There's very little regard for your actual need. They don't care about partners when they close stores. It's just a money thing.
--:-- Haley Fagan: How did the pandemic change your job? Something about what happened in the past two years just feels so profit-driven. There's always a push to like introduce all these new drinks or like this new equipment that you have to learn how to use and maintain and clean while we're also cutting your hours because like the pandemic and everything like people are getting sick obviously stores aren't able to maintain the like normal operational hours that stores don't earn enough money to like earn the hours to schedule people. So they just told us it was our fault, basically, that we don't get hours anymore.
--:-- Haley Fagan: I'm thinking about my teen years. I'm thinking about my early 20s. And if I felt like an employer was jerking me around, I think my first impulse would be, forget these guys. I'm going to go work someplace else, right? I'll go work down at the PX. I'll go work at the hotel restaurant. You've stuck with Starbucks. Why is that when it sounds like there's been a lot of upheaval and a lot of it hasn't been super great.
--:-- Haley Fagan: Yeah. So that is something I honestly find myself thinking about a lot. So I struggled a lot with like mental health as like a younger teenager. And something I really found at my first store was kind of that like found family with my coworkers. It was a very small kiosk of like eight employees. We saw each other every day. It was you know all my friends. And as rough as it was I really found like value and joy in that going to work and doing things and making drinks and making people smile and talking to people.
--:-- Haley Fagan: And the like job itself has brought me like such an immense amount of like comfort and honestly, like genuine opportunity for all of the negative it brings. There's a reason that I want to fight to make it better for myself. And it's because I don't want to leave.
--:-- Haley Fagan: What was the exact moment where you thought the solution to all of this is forming a union? That really is when like Buffalo went for it, just like seeing them like, oh, they're forming a union. And something in my head was just like, wait, I could do that. Like, why didn't I ever think of that. You know, that's one of those things like you heard about like the fight for 15 or whatever, but like you don't hear about like food service workers like doing things and not for nothing.
--:-- Haley Fagan: When the fight for 15 was happening, I was probably like 10. And, you know, my father, he was very like conservative. So all I was hearing from him was like, oh, those lazy people who want $15 for flipping burgers as like a child. So I was just like, I never paid attention to it. It never like interested me. But watching other people do things that I could have never really thought of or like never would have thought of and watching it actually happen, like that's really inspiring.
--:-- Haley Fagan: But also hearing from my other co-workers, like it is bad and this is a good option. Like, you know, we can do this. That's also very inspiring because that's a team of like 20 people standing behind me.
--:-- Haley Fagan: Now you've done it. You 10 to 3 in favor of the union. There you go. What is next? What do you do now? Yeah. So we got to figure out who we want on our bargaining committee and get that going. You want to be on? I absolutely do. I would love to. It would be so cool.
--:-- Haley Fagan: And what do you hope? I know that once you hit the phase of bargaining, then you're looking at asking for stuff, right? What are you going to ask for? What do you hope will change? What do you want? So for myself personally, I really hope to see any semblance of increased transparency. And I guess that's very broad, but I guess to like put it in perspective on two separate occasions, I've been promised like, oh, you're fine. Your store is fine. And then all of a sudden, And a week later, it was like, by the way, in two weeks, your store is not fine. Sorry.
--:-- Haley Fagan: You want more security that when you're told a thing by your employer, when Starbucks says your store isn't going to close, you want to guarantee that that's true. They're not going to tell us two weeks later that, oh, actually, you're out of a job. And see, that is like a very specific example that I'm sure not everyone can relate to. But on the same note, like a store closure is not a sudden decision. That's something like they've been looking at numbers for a while. Why aren't we part of that conversation at all? Why don't we know until it's too late? If this affects my financial security, my job security, what's happening to me, why don't I know? I want to know. I deserve to know.
--:-- Haley Fagan: The CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, said at a company town hall recently. Here's where it gets a little sensitive, because I've been coached a little bit, but I do want to talk about something pretty serious. We can't ignore what is happening in the country as it relates to companies throughout the country being assaulted in many ways by the threat of unionization.
--:-- Haley Fagan: That man's the CEO of a company that you mostly like working for, have invested five years of your life in. What do you make of that statement? I heard it and honestly, it was just like a little funny to me. Like, honestly, we went into work the next morning and everyone who had like heard about it, we were like, what do you mean? Like, he talks about like how Starbucks is better without a union and like, you know, good if we can just talk to partners, like, you know, partner to partner or whatever. But it's like he's super ignoring the fact that partners are starting the unions like Workers United isn't like getting like full staff of people hired at every unionizing like store or store that's filed to like make it happen. It's like, this is like 200-ish stores across like 28 states. And it's all these people saying like, hey, there needs to be a change.
--:-- Haley Fagan: And like, it's laughable when he's like, oh, we're being assaulted. And it's like, no, like, we're just saying we deserve better. There's no outside force attacking or assaulting anyone. Like, we are the union. That's the point. We have a say. If an outside force had a say over us, we wouldn't be doing this. You know, we are becoming unionized, so we have a say.
--:-- Noelle King: Haley Fagan, 22 years old. She started at Starbucks as a barista. She became a shift supervisor. And now you can add union organizer to her title.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's show was produced by Will Reed, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
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