咖啡师凯西·摩尔（Barista Casey Moore）的工作有助于结合星巴克（Starbucks），始于她在布法罗地区的一家商店拿起一家人，而不是她通常工作的地方。在那里，另一名星巴克工人在同一轮班上要求与她谈论下班后的事情。布法罗的一些员工正在谈论组织工会，摩尔的同事想知道她的想法。
Initially, Moore wasn’t sure. She’s always had a positive view of unions, she says (her dad is in the teacher’s union), but she never thought about them at her own workplace. “It honestly never really occurred to me that that’s something we could do, or that we had the right to do,” she says. Her coworker told her there would be a meeting with other baristas starting this effort, for people interested in joining the organizing committee or who had any questions, and so she went.
“在那之后，我想，这绝对是我想做的，”现在参与星巴克组织委员会的摩尔说。“说服我的事情是看到我和我的同事每天都在努力工作 - 体力劳动，所带来的情感劳动 - 使我们许多人几乎无法负担我们的租金。并意识到我们实际上可以为此做些事情。我们可以在工作中发生的事情有发言权。”
In central and western New York, a wave of regional咖啡行业组织had slowly been spreading for several years. An Ithaca, New York chain called Gimme! Coffee ratified their first union contract with the help of Workers United, an affiliate of Service Employees International Union (which is also now the union behind the Starbucks workers organizing drive)在2018年。广告系列传播SPoT coffee在布法罗，然后到城市周围的星巴克地点，该地点举行了选举2021年12月。从那时起，全国各地的星巴克商店就向国家劳资关系委员会请愿，以举行自己的联盟选举 - 随着更多的信件向星巴克首席执行官凯文·约翰逊（Kevin Johnson）发送信件，宣布几乎每天组成工会的意图。
尽管工人曼联一直在帮助星巴克工人浏览复杂的工会过程，但实际的工作主要是由咖啡师本身驱动的。工会向他们表示祝贺，但也表示：“一个[工人联合]的人就像，‘当我们听说这一点时，我们以为你们很疯狂，”摩尔说。“以前没有人这样做。没有人像星巴克这样的大链子。”
How do workers even go up against a giant chain like Starbucks, which has nearly 9,000 stores across the country? (Gimme! Coffee, in comparison, has just four locations in Ithaca, and one more in nearby Trumansburg.) For now, they’re going store by store, without worrying about unionizing the entire company at once. While major union drives of the past century were made simpler by geographic clustering of industries—the whole auto industry in Detroit, for instance—national chains pose a challenge. Attempts to organize workers at Amazon warehouse by warehouse, for instance,一直在停止，流动率高使工会很难巩固坚实的支撑块。So pursuing a store-by-store strategy is sure to be taxing and time consuming, but it’s also a way to grow the movement organically, and a hedge against holding larger, potentially harder-to-win elections.
按商店组织商店看起来像滴水的水龙头一样有效 - 近9,000个商店只是桶中的一滴，但这也可能是打开在星巴克组织的闸门，甚至更大的方法服务行业本身。
对于工会，较小的选举通常更好
When the first three Buffalo-area Starbucks stores petitioned with the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections, they did so with the intention of each voting individually—three separate elections. But the company argued they should vote together. Starbucks made a case to the National Labor Relations Board that instead of just having those three stores vote, all 20 Starbucks locations that make up the “Buffalo market” should vote together about whether to form a union.
从一家公司开始，这听起来像是违反直觉的举动说它不希望“我们之间”建立联盟，但是劳工专家说，这是一个战略举措，如果成功的话，可能会损害组织努力。“Say there’s 25 to 30 workers in a store, it’s much easier to organize that rather than to try and get a majority of a 3,000-worker unit to agree,” says Cathy Creighton, director of Cornell University’s ILR Buffalo Co-Lab, an extension of Cornell’s School of Industrial Labor Relations (ILR), who previously worked as a union lawyer.
这labor board disagreed with Starbucks; it has long held that “single-facility” units are appropriate, and there is precedent under the law that says single stores in a retail chain or one plant out of a multi-plant company can hold their own union elections.
星巴克可以提出相同的论点来挑战单位规模，每次尝试在该国其他地区组织商店，从而有效地延迟了每次选举。摩尔说，她已经看到了这种情况。在这些延误期间，星巴克也有更多时间来增加anti-unionmessaging to employees, Creighton says.
商店组织商店的缓慢游行肯定会很繁重 - 每次联盟大选都使该公司有机会反击和战斗。每当需要实际签订工会合同时，就可以解决单独的合同可能是另一个整个头痛（尽管克雷顿说，雇主有先例自愿同意一项总协议；但是，星巴克是否会是另一个问题）。在微观层面上，乘商店去商店更容易 - 更有可能对联盟有利 - 是一次立即解决整个连锁店。
让每个商店都有声音
联盟认为，让每个商店都有自己的工会选举也是确保那里的工人在此过程中实际上有声音的一种方式。“We’re organizing store by store because we genuinely believe every store has the right to decide whether they want to unionize or not, and even though we’re all [part of the] Starbucks company, different stores have different issues and different managers, and things like that,” Moore says. “We truly believe every store should have a right to decide if they want to go through this process, because in all honesty, it’s also a huge fight that you have to gear up for.”
星巴克说，它已经通过面对面的聆听课程，一个内部工作场所平台，使公司领导者主持现场视频会议以及通过电子邮件或800号码与领导力联系的方式来使工人发表声音。星巴克发言人雷吉·博尔斯（Reggie Borges）指出了公司对the pandemic，包括它在雇员听到了他们感到害怕和不安全的雇员的消息后（星巴克称之为“合作伙伴”）后，在2020年3月和4月关闭了商店。他指出最近wage investmentsas a sign of support.
这company also says its argument that all 20 Buffalo stores vote together was to ensure all workers in the area have a voice, since employees can sometimes work across stores (as Moore was doing when she first heard about the union). “When you have a single store deciding to unionize, that doesn’t bring about equity,” Borges says. “With individual store efforts, what that does is [silence] the number of partners who work in that store but don’t call it home; it’s not their primary store, they don’t qualify to have a voice.” Borges says that if a union contract were created for a store, partners who work there wouldn’t be able to move to other stores, and vice versa.
克雷顿不同意这个论点。首先，她指出员工互换的速度很小。摩尔的故事似乎是一个异常值。例如，根据提交的文件，在布法罗的Elmwood商店NLRB，来自其他商店的员工在2021财政年度工作了7.1％的班次（或5％）；前一年，这些数字分别为3.5％和3.6％。她说：“其次，更重要的是，工会绝不会阻止员工在工会商店工作并捡起数小时和非工会商店，也不会阻止工会的反向。”
她说，星巴克的员工和工会本身表示，他们不会在工会合同中包括语言来限制互换，他们认为这是他们不想消除的好处。Creighton补充说，拿走在其他商店工作的选择，因为一个商店的工会甚至可能被解释为对组织工人的威胁。
Spreading across the country
截至今日，more than 20 stores从田纳西州孟菲斯到梅萨，亚利桑那州一直关注布法罗商店，并请愿举行自己的联盟选举。在某些方面，这是否是最佳策略的问题：它正在有机地发生。快速发展的趋势并没有发生，这是工人联合的更广泛运动的一部分，而是员工本身的一部分。
摩尔说：“合作伙伴一直在Twitter，Instagram，通过电子邮件，通过我们的网站上联系，就像，‘我在商店中如何做到这一点？’”摩尔说。“从本质上讲，这件事一直是合作伙伴的组织。”布法罗（Buffalo）的合作伙伴，包括摩尔（Moore），在他们最近提起诉讼后，与塔拉哈西（Tallahassee）的合作伙伴以及霍普韦尔（Hopewell），新泽西州和芝加哥等人接到了电话。
社区支持星巴克工人所看到的也可能表明势头如何进一步发展。联合会的第一家商店说，他们已经见过倾泻of customers and tips, with regulars coming in wearing union pins. At Moore’s store, which actually did not file to unionize, she says she’s gotten orders where people change their mobile names to “union yes” or “union strong,” and had customers leave sticky notes with their tips that say “solidarity.”
Just as that community support could bolster the spread of the organizing effort, it could also hurt Starbucks—something the company seems to acknowledge. In its2022年1月12日星巴克在向美国证券交易委员会提交的文件中写道，如果其“重要部分”的员工正在工会化，其劳动力成本可能会增加，并且其业务“可能会受到负面影响”。但是它还补充说，该公司对组织努力的反应可能“对我们的品牌的感知方式产生负面影响，并对我们的业务产生不利影响，包括对我们的财务业绩。”
从历史上看，在美国，近几十年来，美国的公众舆论倾向于偏爱雇主而不是工人。这辞职，增长r/antiwork subreddit，和media attention最近的工会竞选活动指出了转变。克雷顿说：“美国社会对工人的友好比我一生都要友好。”
克雷顿（Creighton）回忆起在12月被问到，即将在布法罗（Buffalo）专注于工会活动时会发生什么。“我当时想，‘我不知道。。。我认为这可能会开始一些东西，然后：Blammo，它开始了很多。”
However this moment plays out, there’s no denying “we’re in a very unusual moment,” says Ileen Devault, a professor of labor history at ILR, where workers have more economic power. “What American workers do with that advantage, I don’t know,” she adds. If they start organizing, that contagious spirit may spread even further, to other industries. “We’re all sort of waiting to see what happens.”