Baristas are organizing the coffee giant’s first union, challenging Howard Schultz’s long-held vision of a company immune to collective bargaining.

For years, Starbucks baristas have found public pressure to be a very useful tool for bargaining with their employer. If they wanted the dress code to be less draconian or managers to stop understaffing stores, they went on Reddit or launched a Change.org petition, and more often than not, Starbucks caved to some of their demands.

This was the Howard Schultz vision from the day he founded the coffee chain. For Schultz, Starbucks sought to create—like his own politics—a middle-ground “third way” that eclipsed service-industry mores by giving its hourly employees stock benefits, tuition reimbursement, and healthcare. Yet beneath this was a hostility to collective bargaining typical of Schultz’s progressive contemporaries from that era, like Whole Foods’s John Mackey. (“Unions are not the answer” were Schultz’s actual words on this matter.)

Starbucks has largely kept this course since Kevin Johnson took over as CEO in 2017, including after the pandemic roiled the service industry. And that’s why at three stores in Buffalo, baristas have formed a group called SB Workers United, and say they will try to form the chain’s first union to leverage negotiating power.

Read the full article at: www.fastcompany.com