The brewing contract fight at Starbucks

By Elise Foley

Here's some reading while you have your morning coffee: Starbucks workers around the country are enacting a huge union push, and they've already unionized 20 stores. But they're facing some big hurdles, too, from the company's pushback against the sheer number of branches.

HuffPost's Dave Jamieson has done extensive reporting on the Starbucks union drive. We talked to Dave about his latest piece on what's next for the organizers.

What makes Starbucks workers' union effort different?

Until this campaign came along, none of Starbucks' 9,000 corporate-owned stores in the U.S. were organized. Unions have struggled for years to get a toehold inside this fast-food, fast-casual space, and the success of this Starbucks effort could blow things wide open — especially among younger pro-union workers. The hope in the labor movement is that this will spill over into other big-name companies, like we've already seen with Amazon.

What should customers know about what Starbucks is doing to push back?

The company has been trying to slow the campaign as best it can by putting up legal hurdles, and its managers have been holding meetings to persuade workers to vote against the union. Most controversially, Starbucks has fired a number of open union supporters and organizers. The company says these terminations were legitimate, but labor board officials have already determined that seven firings in Memphis were retaliatory. The union has accused Starbucks of trying to purge union leaders.

You've also written about how the labor board is shrinking. How does that affect the Starbucks union effort?

The National Labor Relations Board is the agency that conducts union elections and prosecutes companies or unions that break the law. The agency has lost almost a third of its staff in the last decade, and it's struggling to keep up with the burst of organizing at Starbucks, where workers are filing for new elections every week. The board's general counsel recently told us that staffing is at a critical level, and they don't believe they'll be able to fulfill the agency's mission to protect workers without more help from Congress. That's why a weakened labor board is bad news for the labor movement.

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