ST. LOUIS — A national movement could soon be brewing change at your local Starbucks.
Workers at cafes in Ladue and Bridgeton became the first in the region to file for union elections last week. On Monday, their ranks doubled with announcements from two stores in St. Louis, one in Tower Grove South and one on Hampton Avenue just south of Forest Park.
More could be on the way.
The local baristas are joining thousands of others at more than 100 cafes across the country pushing to upend business-as-usual at one of America’s most iconic companies. The push coincides with a tight U.S. labor market bolstering worker bargaining power following two years of a pandemic. And if the Starbucks campaigns are successful, they could change more than just their stores, observers say: Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s could be next.
“Tens of thousands of workers in the service sector don’t unionize without a ripple effect,” said Pete DeMay, organizing director at the Chicago & Midwest Regional Joint Board of Workers United.
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Starbucks brushed off the announcements in a statement Monday. “We’ve been clear in our belief that we are better together as partners without a union between us, and that hasn’t changed,” it said. The number of stores seeking representation remains a small fraction of the Seattle-based coffee chain’s thousands of locations.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not paying attention. The company has announced plans to raise average wages to $17 an hour from $14, and it recalled former CEO Howard Schultz to the top job in part to help deal with the union campaigns. On his first day back Monday, Schultz announced the company would suspend billions of dollars in stock buybacks — gifts to shareholders — to put money toward stores and employees.
The union’s effort in Starbucks began last summer in Buffalo, New York, where employees filed for a union election in August citing longstanding issues with understaffing made worse during the pandemic.
They spent the next couple of months under a microscope: Top Starbucks executives flew in for “listening sessions,” national media outlets heralded a seismic shift for the company and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders called the workers an “inspiration.”
Andrew Watson, a shift supervisor at the store on Hampton, thought the same thing. After the Buffalo employees won their vote in December, Watson and his co-workers started talking about duplicating the process here.
He wanted to do something about infrequent raises and cuts to staffing he says have left him doing the work of four people on some shifts. It wasn’t a hard pitch. “Everyone had been paying attention to the news,” he said.
Watson predicted several other stores in the area would be following in his group’s footsteps.
Such campaigns threaten to shatter Starbucks’ carefully cultivated image as an employer of choice. For years, the company has eluded organized labor by paying more than the rest of the service sector and offering benefits like health insurance. It has consistently been named as one of the best places to work in national surveys.
“If you asked me 10 years ago if Starbucks would be unionizing, I would have said the chances were slim to none,” said Brian Yarborough, an analyst at Edward Jones.
But DeMay, the Chicago organizer, said recent years have changed the game. Workers were already frustrated with lower wages and saddled with student debt before the pandemic. Then the virus showed that the company can do more if it chooses: It offered a $3-per-hour bonus to people who kept working in the early days of the crisis and two weeks of sick leave for those exposed to the disease.
“I think young people, especially, have had enough,” DeMay said.
Natalie Wright, a 23-year-old barista at the store in Tower Grove South, certainly has. She noted that former CEO Kevin Johnson was in line for tens of millions of dollars upon his retirement. “It’s crazy thinking about that when I’m barely able to pay my rent sometimes,” Wright said.
But paying for the changes demanded by unions will not be free.
Yarborough, the Edward Jones analyst, said that if the coffee chain has to pay more for employees, it will likely try one of two things to compensate: raise prices or invest in technology that allows it to employ fewer people.
Will consumers pay more at a cafe that already charges $5 for a grande latte?
Armando Cjapi, 40, of the Affton area, said he probably will. Looking down at his $3.80 espresso Monday afternoon outside the store in Tower Grove South, he said he could stomach $4.50.
But Eyasu Asfaw, who runs a taxi service and waited on Monday at the Hampton location for a $4.99 oat milk latte, said he might switch to QuikTrip.
