ST. LOUIS — Local Starbucks employees carried signs and walked picket lines Thursday, aiming to drive coffee-seekers away from the corporation they say overworks and underpays its staff.
The walkout began well before dawn at three ºüÀêÊÓƵ-area stores that have voted to unionize, and coincided with roughly 100 strikes nationwide.
Negotiations between Starbucks attorneys and workers at a Ladue store broke down Wednesday, said Jonathon Gamache, 29, who has worked as a barista at the South Lindbergh Boulevard and Clayton Road store for two years.
The local Starbucks employees said their shifts are often short-staffed, and said they are sometimes required to do several jobs at once. Gamache said his location used to have 50 employees, and today is down to 19.
“There are days — if you work at Starbucks, you’ve seen them — where you have nobody there. You got a line out the door,†Gamache said during the rally. “Something is broken. Somebody’s sick. You’re sick. And you are thinking to yourself, ‘Why the hell is anybody still doing this?’â€
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Nationwide, workers are protesting firings, store closures and other actions that they say are illegal retaliation by Starbucks against them for unionizing.
The company has said it respects employees’ right to organize, that store closings were due to safety concerns and that fired employees violated company policies. The company and union have accused each other of stalling bargaining talks.
Starbucks has nearly 9,000 corporate-owned U.S. locations. In just over the past year, about 260 stores have voted to join a union. Dozens of them began bargaining last month. The National Labor Relations Board in August ordered Starbucks to rehire some fired baristas who were union activists.
In ºüÀêÊÓƵ’ Cheltenham neighborhood, workers at the usually busy Starbucks at Hampton and Wise picketed on the sidewalk throughout the chilly morning, bundled in coats and hats. A steady stream of confused drivers wound through the parking lot, and were diverted away from the closed store by the picketing workers.
Riley Staack, a 32-year-old shift supervisor from ºüÀêÊÓƵ, said workers at the Cheltenham store held an anonymous vote and “overwhelmingly†agreed to strike.
At around 11 a.m., employees from the two striking stores in Ladue and Richmond Heights marched to Cheltenham, along with representatives from other unions who showed up in support. When they gathered around a group of speakers, a small cluster of disposable cups of McDonalds and gas station coffee were temporarily set aside on the curb.
Some of the attendees carried seasonally themed signs, including one large “Christmas list†that requested a living wage, fully staffed shifts, and a bargaining meeting with the company.
“This is the kind of thing that gets their attention. This is the kind of thing that’s going to get us a contract,†said Eric Moore, area director of the Chicago and Midwest Regional Joint Board of Workers United, which has helped organize the Starbucks employees.
Moore said he serves as the lead negotiator for the local workers. He said the company and its lawyers have walked out of five bargaining sessions in the past two weeks.
“I have never seen a corporation more scared in my life,†Moore said.
Local union members said the sessions failed because Starbucks did not want national union representatives to attend via Zoom.
Starbucks said in an email Thursday evening that in virtual meetings negotiators can’t tell who is on the call, and that excerpts of talks have been shared on social media.
“We believe that bargaining in this format will undermine important and personal conversations related to the unique needs of our partners at each store,†Starbucks said.
Gamache encouraged other employees to act.
“I tell other stores, don’t wait until things get bad to organize,†he said.
Reuters contributed to this report.