From the blog, Naked Capitalism:
Organizers Herald 100th Win as Starbucks Unionization Wave Continues
Posted on May 30, 2022 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield
Nice to see that the Starbucks unionization wave continues. At the moment . . . there’s precious little good news to report. That workers are organizing`is one of the few positive developments. May the Starbucks wave continue, and spread to other parts of the economy. Maybe to Amazon? And perhaps beyond.
By Andrea Germanos. Originally published at Common Dreams
The tally of unionized Starbucks locations is continuing to swell, with the latest additions coming after pro-unionization votes late last week in Seattle and Birmingham, Alabama.
The coffee giant’s CEO “Howard Schultz and Starbucks are getting creamed in union vote after union vote,” labor journalist Steven Greenhouse tweeted Saturday, May 29.
By the union’s count, there are now 100 stores across the nation that have unionized.
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The milestone was achieved after successful votes Friday at two stores in Seattle.
The Eastlake store employees won their effort to collectively bargain in a landslide 12-0 vote, while the Union Station store voted 6-3 in favor, local KOMO News reported.
A day earlier, the store on Birmingham’s 20th Street South became Alabama’s first Starbucks to back unionization after a 27-1 vote Thursday.
Kadarius Perkin, a shift supervisor at that store, declared after the vote, “Our voices will be heard,” according to AL.com.
“Starbucks has until later this week to file any objections with the National Labor Relations Board,” The Associated Press reported Sunday.
Workers at hundreds of Starbucks stores have filed to unionize since the first successful union drive in Buffalo, New York late last year.
According to Matt Bruenig, founder of People’s Policy Project, “a trickle of election filings” that started last year “has built to a wave—and Starbucks workers are winning in location after location.”
Bruenig analyzed data from the National Labor Relations Board, writing in an op-ed published last week at Jacobin that out of 89 union elections that had taken place at Starbucks, the union prevailed in 77 locations—87%—of them.
Those wins, he noted, came despite “a fierce campaign against the union, prompting a torrent of unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against the company.”
PS. The above is the good news: 100 wins. The other news is, Starbuxx has over 15,000 stores in the U.S.
The supreme irony (as in, “empty words unmasked”) is that the leaders of Capitalism proclaim their strong belief in the Free Market Economy but reject the implementation of a Free Market Economy in which the marketplace between workers and employers is made level.
J’Accuse!
Frederick Hayek’s early works made clear that a marketplace must have balanced power in order to function. Then he came to Chicago and followed the money.
Such is life.
That last thing Capitalists want is a genuine, power-balanced, Free Market Economy.
The huge, fatal, mistake of those protesting these abuses of workers is “going negative,” making “big business” the enemy.
Going negative breeds division, and without mass numbers, the side with the most money will win. The side with the most money is spreading division in order to protect their monopoly on labor.
Going positive, preaching “we are all in this together, and the way forward is indeed through the use of a Free Market economy, applied to labor and employers” puts the onus on those who are against the Free Market Economy.
Or as Quakers would put it, “Spirit is available to all; let us come together in Spirit.”