In May, Jon Gamache, a 28-year-old barista at the Ladue Starbucks, posted a picture to Twitter. It showed the coffee shop’s pick-up counter jam-packed with left-behind drinks, sandwiches, and pastries. “Starbucks has cut our labor so much that our customers have to wait 30, 40 mins for their orders,” Gamache wrote in the tweet. “This is a picture taken *after* our morning rush, this is all the food & drinks people *abandoned*. But Starbucks still makes sure to hang up fresh anti-union propaganda in the back.”
Gamache says that according to Starbucks’ protocols, for every 10 customers, there should be one employee on the floor. One hundred and twenty customers means 12 employees behind the bar. Around the time Gamache posted the photo, with 120 people coming in every hour, there were eight employees working. Ladue Starbucks baristas have also seen their hours cut. “I was working 35 hours a week, and now I’m working 14,” Gamache says. “You don’t get benefits at 14 hours. It’s drastic, going from 40 hours a week to 20. You just lost half a job.”
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Ladue management was unable to comment, but since the photo, that Starbucks location has hired more staff overall while not scheduling more workers per shift.
Gamache and other baristas at Starbucks locations throughout St. Louis want the coffee giant to provide them with reinvestment, better pay, and more training. So they joined the hundreds of other Starbucks locations across the country who filed for union elections with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Six other St. Louis–area Starbucks filed paperwork to unionize, too. In June, workers at the Ladue location voted to join the Chicago-Midwest chapter of Workers United, making it the first unionized Starbucks in St. Louis.
The Ladue vote represents a victory for the baristas, but it also poses an interesting question: If more food service and retail workers begin to unionize, could it stop the decline of the union movement and the worker protections they afford members? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2021, only 9 percent of wage and salary workers in Missouri were members of a union. In 2020, that percent was 9.4. At its peak, in 1989, that number was 15.5 percent.
Many people—in and outside the industry—still feel that restaurant work is a temporary station meant for teenagers. That is not the case in 2022 and hasn’t been for a long time. The average age of a food service worker is 35, and their average annual salary is $26,933. The average Starbucks wage is $17 an hour, or about $35,000 a year, assuming the barista works 40 hours a week.
Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told St. Louis Magazine that this movement is long overdue. “Starbucks workers, like millions across America, get it: Their employer will not improve poor job conditions, pay what inflation requires, nor ever genuinely respect them unless they form strong unions against employers’ demands and threats. Long overdue, major unionization drives strengthen social justice movements.”
The changes aren’t coming without challenges, however. Baristas say they’re experiencing increased pressure from corporate.
In May, chief executive of the company Howard Schultz announced that Starbucks would be handing out pay raises as part of a $1 billion wave of reinvestment, but only to stores that don’t unionize. A Starbucks media relations representative walked back the CEO’s initiative, stating: “New pay and benefits changes will apply to stores where Starbucks has the right to unilaterally make these changes. Where Starbucks lacks the right to unilaterally make these changes (for example, stores where there is a union or union organizing), the company will provide wage increases that were announced in October 2021 and will otherwise comply with all applicable legal requirements.”
“They’re 100 percent targeting us,” says Maddie Hagan, a 24-year-old barista at the Bridgeton Starbucks, which filed with the NLRB for a union vote. “I know one other organizer who’s been losing hours consistently. They’ve also separated us on the schedule. We used to work the same days every week, but now they never schedule the two of us at once, even going so far as to alternate some of our days.” A Starbucks representative told St. Louis Magazine that “any claims of union-busting are false. We’ve continued to respect our partner’s voices and the rules laid out by the NLRB.”
When Hagan reached out to the union, “we were pretty much screwed. We had eight people working, which is not enough to run a Starbucks.” But when the Bridgeton location hired a new wave of employees to address the short staffing, managers cut time across the board, Hagan says.
“We’re really just looking for a say in how things work.” Hagan says. Control over allotted hours, a say in how hiring is organized, a position to negotiate benefits—these decisions are all made upstream of Starbucks’ baristas, or “partners” in the company’s parlance. “Every store is different,” Hagan says. “They can’t just look at some numbers, press a couple buttons on a computer, and send it down to the store.”
But not every location will see the same outcome as the Ladue location. Some employees might believe that a union comes between partners and Starbucks corporate or don’t wish to pay union dues. Hagan’s Bridgeton store voted no in June.
And there are still challenges at the Ladue location. “We’ve lost a lot of people since filing in March,” Gamache says, noting a number of factors that might have led to employees exits: across-the-board schedule cuts, changes in management, and scrambling the schedule, even for employees who said they’d vote “no” on the union.
“Where we do see union support,” Gamache says, “is with our regulars. They come in and say, ‘If this is what’s good for you guys, then we hope you get it.’”
