Celebrating the Victory in Buffalo |
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO
12-10-21
Starbucks is a huge multi-national corporation. It has over 15,000 US cafes and Howard Schultz, its CEO for some 20 years is, worth about $4.5 billion. Starbucks owns 9000 of these stores and has about 6000 in airports, grocery stores, department stores and other locations that are under license to operate; close to half of these are unionized.
Less than 2% of food service and bar
workers in the US are unionized according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics
(BLS) so while this victory will have little immediate effect on Starbuck’s
bottom line, it is no small matter. This is especially so as Starbucks spent
considerable time and a lot of money trying to get workers to vote against
unionization. Starbuck’s CEO Kevin Johnson told the media that these workers
unionizing could “disrupt the relationship between Starbucks and its
employees”, Schultz added, “It goes against having that direct
relationship with our partners that has served us so well for decades and
allowed us to build this great company,”.
The workers are organized as Workers
United Upstate New York and are connected to the Service Employees
International Union AFL-CIO and we certainly hope they “disrupt” the
relationship they presently have with their bosses. What good is a union that
doesn’t do that? Hopefully, they also understand fully that workers and
bosses are not “partners” in the company regardless of what the heads
atop the AFL-CIO tell us.
That Starbucks spent so much money and time sending execs to Buffalo to persuade workers to
reject unionization, it, “preoccupied Starbucks executives for months” the
Wall Street Journal put it, is confirmation that organization can empower the
worker and that the bosses’ fear it. As the unionization campaign was
proceeding, Starbucks announced it was raising wages. Unionization or even talk
of it, pays.
The National Labor Relations Board
which is technically an Independent body of the US government (so it’s not
independent of the US government) responsible for enforcing U.S. labor law in relation to collective bargaining, approves and overseas petitions for
union recognition. The Buffalo drive is a result of that appeal and it has
inspired Starbucks workers in Mesa Arizona to appeal to the NLRB for a union
election as well.
Sara Nelson the president of the
Association of Flight Attendants AFL-CIO pointed out that this vote is, “an incredibly symbolic win that other workers are going to
find inspiration from…….Workers in organizing campaigns everywhere are sharing
this and saying, ‘Look what they did, we can do it, too,’” She’s right about that but more has to be forthcoming form
the rest of organized labor if this trend is to continue, the rest of organized
labor and the unorganized can't be left as passive bystanders or cheerleading.
“We’ve been fighting our entire lives
as leaders, as rank-and-file members, to grow our organizations, and I think
it’s our time,” Sean O’Brien, the
new elected leader of the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters told the Journal.
These statements are all well and good.
But the NLRB is not the only way workers can unionize. Another way is through
striking and forcing the employers to accept a union. It goes without saying
that, given how worker’s on strike are left to fight what are global
corporations on our own, generally isolated from the working class communities
in which we live and from other unionized workers around us; it is not
feasible for workers in one workplace and certainly one like Starbucks to do
that. The cause of this isolation is that we are constrained by the trade
union hierarchy’s obsession with obeying the law (except when it comes to their
own members).
But that is how the industrial unions
were built in the 1930’s. Workers that deliver goods, that supply electricity
and water, can add the power needed to shut down anti-union employers that
resist organization. This would take organization and most importantly
violating anti-union anti-worker laws that forbid us from doing this.
Enough of us defying anti-union laws will force them to change them. We can’t
wait for a so-called friendly Democrat for that brothers and sisters. If we
obeyed the law we wouldn’t have built unions in the first place. We built
unions by violating the bosses’ laws not obeying them or relying on lawyers or
the courts.
Almost a quarter century ago I was
asked to give a presentation on Afscme’s behalf to a group of municipal workers
in my town who were interested in forming a union. I drank with a few of them
in my local pub and introduced them to AFSCME which is why I was asked to speak
for the union, I never would have been asked to do that.
I agreed and made it clear I would not disparage another union and appeal to them to Join Afscme but most important of all, unionize. There are only two sources of power in the workplace, the bosses and the organized workers.
I stressed in that instance that
whether they joined AFSCME or not, it is only the first step of organizing to
protect your rights on the job. Now a more complex difficult fight begins, the
struggle internally to make the union the fighting aggressive workers’
organization it should be. And that means a confrontation with the present
leadership, as the conservative clique atop the AFL-CIO, the Flight attendants
Sara Nelson and Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien included, all agree in one way or
another that the workers and the bosses are in a partnership, are on the same
Team. This has been a disaster for US workers as this philosophy is at the root
of the betrayals and class collaboration of the past decades.
That’s what the Starbuck workers are
faced with now.
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