Starbucks Workers United held their first hearing against the Starbucks Corporation on Tuesday Feb. 21 at the Wayne Lyman Morse Federal Courthouse in Eugene, OR. The hearing was in response to alleged union busting practices by Starbucks against their employees. On Jan. 7, 2022 the Starbucks located on 29th and Willammette filed to be a union. They were the first unionized Starbucks in Oregon. At that time there was one unionized Starbucks, now there are 280. The first Starbucks in the country to unionize was out of Buffalo, New York.
The General Counsel for Starbucks Workers United, Sarah McBride, presented in her opening statement examples of the union busting the workers experienced.
“We are here because Starbucks responded with a coordinated effort to thwart organizing with unlawful threats.” Union organizers were forced to attend 2-1 meetings to urge them to vote against the union. These meetings were between 2 managers and one employee. At the Franklin Starbucks, workers who wore union shirts were told to go home and change, they were disciplined and given verbal warnings. People were sent home and the store was left understaffed. Their first witness, Ian Meagher, a founding member of the union organizing committee, discussed this effort further when questioned.
Meagher stated that Starbucks management usually ignored dress code violations. The general counsel presented pictures of shirts that Meagher had worn before that clearly violated the dress code. Those shirts were ignored, yet when he and others showed up in their Starbucks Workers United shirts they were told to go home. He stated that the manager who told him to go home had previously complimented a shirt that he was wearing that clearly violated dress code. “I have a particularly salient example, my manager directly complimented a shirt I was wearing. It was a dinosaur pattern shirt. She knew the artist and was wearing shoes from the same artist.”
Meagher discussed the 2-1 meetings that Starbucks would hold with their employees. He said that before the unionizing effort began he had one or two of these meetings before. Meagher has been a Starbucks employee since 2017, working for stores in Salem and Eugene. He never saw these 2-1 meetings on every employee’s schedule before they began unionizing.
Meagher stated that his first 2-1 meeting was with his store manager and a manager from out of town. They stated that the meeting was for the employee’s benefit. They were there to answer questions about unionizing. Meagher stated in his testimony that he asked the managers why Starbucks had hired an anti-union law firm and if the 15 minute meetings were mandatory. He was told that Starbucks had to put their business first and never seemed to get a straight answer on whether the meetings were mandatory.
Another 2-1 meeting took place with the store manager and a District Manager. Meagher stated that it was unusual to have a district manager in the store dealing with day to day stuff. In this meeting he was given a visual guide on how to mark a ballot for the union. The guide was titled, “We want you to vote and we want you to vote no.”
The hearing lasted throughout the rest of the day, other witnesses’ testimony were pushed back due to the length of the cross examination of Ian Meagher. We reached out to the Starbucks attorneys at Littler Mendelson and are waiting for their response. This hearing is ongoing and The Torch will continue to update as the story unfolds.
