Discussing benefits and wage hikes that would not automatically apply to organized workers is a common union-busting tactic, Jake Johnson reports.
Howard Schultz speaking at Arizona State University in Tempe in 2019. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Starbucks’ billionaire CEO Howard Schultz announced during a quarterly earnings call last week that the coffee giant will soon be raising wages and improving benefits for employees across the United States — except for the workers at dozens of stores who have voted to unionize or filed for a union election in recent months.
“We do not have the same freedom to make these improvements at locations that have a union or where union organizing is underway,” Schultz told Starbucks shareholders, noting that management must bargain with unionized locations over wage and benefit changes.
“The union contract will not even come close to what Starbucks offers you,” Schultz declared.
Under the new company policy, which is set to take effect on Aug. 1, Starbucks employees will get a 3 percent raise or a wage bump to $15 an hour, whichever results in the highest wage. More experienced hourly workers will receive larger pay increases.
The corporate practice of discussing benefits and wage hikes that would not automatically apply to organized workers is a common union-busting tactic, and labor law experts said Schultz’s new plans may very well be illegal.
According to Matthew Bodie, a former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) attorney who now teaches law at St. Louis University, companies are not allowed to suggest that employees will receive superior compensation if they decide not to unionize.
“If Starbucks said, ‘Drop the union campaign and you’ll get this wage increase and better benefits,’ that’d clearly be illegal,” Bodie told The New York Times on Tuesday. “Hard to see how this is that much different in practice.”
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Longtime labor journalist Steven Greenhouse argued that the Starbucks CEO’s announcement “smells like illegal discrimination against union members for having dared to defy Howard Schultz and unionize.”
“I predict the NLRB will move quickly to find this a nationwide violation of federal law and will order Starbucks to give unionized baristas the same wage increases,” Greenhouse added. “Under Section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act, it is ‘Unlawful to discourage union activities or sympathies’… ‘by discrimination in regard… to any term or condition of employment to… discourage membership in any labor organization.'”
Every non-union worker at Starbucks should be thanking the union for precipitating these raises that Howard Schultz just announced.https://t.co/48kSX5kphe
— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) May 4, 2022
Starbucks Workers United, an employee-led group that is spearheading the national organizing drive, responded on Twitter that “our campaign has pressured Howard Schultz and Starbucks to announce many of the benefits that we’ve been pushing for since day one and we’ve proposed at the bargaining table in Buffalo,” where workers voted in December to form the company’s first-ever union in the U.S.
Since the December victory, more than 50 Starbucks locations across the country have voted to unionize, defying a Schultz-led union-busting campaign that has included intimidation and firing of organizers, sweeping cuts to work hours, and more. The union has been victorious in roughly 85 percent of elections so far.
BREAKING: Starbucks workers have unionized their 50th store nationwide, sweeping 4 out of 4 union elections in Massachusetts today.
There are now 6 unionized Starbucks in MA (cumulative vote 55-3) and 9 other MA stores have filed with @SBWorkersUnited.https://t.co/OwmwghLYKA
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 3, 2022
“We have filed charges against Howard Schultz’s threats that union stores won’t receive these benefits,” Starbucks Workers United noted Tuesday. “That’s not how labor law works and Starbucks knows it.”
In a letter to the NLRB earlier this week, the counsel at Starbucks Workers United argued that Schultz’s recent comments about excluding unionized workers from new benefits have had an “immediate and profound chilling effect on organizing campaigns nationwide.”
[Related: US National Labor Board’s Budget Squeeze]
Starbucks Workers United told CNBC that Schultz’s remarks amount to “just another desperate attempt to prevent Starbucks partners from exercising our right to have a union and the right to collective bargaining.”
“This is an extension of other threats that Howard Schultz and their management team have been making,” the group said. “Hopefully at some point Howard recognizes you cannot have a ‘progressive company’ and be the poster child for union-busting.”
Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Interviewing ex-Starbucks employees would likely settle the issue as to whether Starbucks should be unionized. Of course the lapdogs in the media will never do something so obvious.
In a real democracy, the right of labor to organize and collective bargaining would be protected by fundamental enforceable labor laws.
Strong labour movement is a threat to employers. The threat forces employers to raise wages for non unionized workers. This is fine if the employers are separate firms. A single firm discriminating among its workers in different establishments based on unionization status is most likely illegal.
This asshole needs to be prosecuted for violating labor law. It’s about time the law worked in the public interest for a change.
BOYCOTT!!! BOYCOTT!!! BOYCOTT!!! Other places serve coffee too…
Sure, these increases are due to the kindness of his heart and nothing to do with the threat of unionization. I am sure Starbucks was itching to give decent wages for the last few years but for some reason or other could not do so!