Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Starbucks workers are on strike once again at the first unionized store, located on Elmwood Avenue.
This is an effort to protest the company's retaliatory discipline spree and management's inconsistent and discriminatory enforcement of policies, in addition to short staffing and failure to properly train due to lack of consistent management.
"The Elwood partners are being held accountable for not following Starbucks policies that are continuously violated by stores in the surrounding area. Yet the other Starbucks partners have not been coached properly and or written up for the same violations. To give the first union store multiple write ups one day after the other is blatant discrimination and evidence of retaliation," Elmwood partners wrote in their strike letter to the company.
"We currently do not have a manager. Leading up to this, this location has been in between a bunch of managers since the union started and actually since the pandemic. So we haven't had any real leadership and that's really been bringing down the team," said Brianna Marciniak, a three-year barista of the Elmwood location.
Marciniak notes that other main issues, "The catalyst is really short staffing, undertraining, no leadership, especially at the Elmwood location. We currently have a proxy manager, which means it's a manager of another store who checks in on us. They check in often, by having other managers sit in our lobby, but they're not leading the store. They're just kind of spying and giving us these warnings."
Marciniak says she was written up by one of these managers for working on multiple drinks out of sequence or stickering, which goes against policy, despite having evidence of most surrounding locations do this frequently, especially when stores are very busy.
"You're on the floor, just trying to do your job and they take you off the floor [to write you up] and we're already short staffed. I get written up, but I have to go train the new shift who came in? Clearly, they don't see me as a good example, supposedly, with these warnings, but they're also relying on me to carry and do their dirty work," Marciniak says
Employees told me that it is not uncommon for the store to close early, due to not enough staff.
Since unionization in last December, the Starbucks company has failed to reach a fair deal with the union and has been under fire for continuing to dissuade the unionizations efforts, despite more than 300 Starbucks locations worldwide unionizing and being under investigation from the National Labor Relations Board Region 3, who issued formal complaints charging Starbucks with over 200 violations of federal labor law — one of the largest complaints ever issued by the NLRB.
"We're still here, we're still fighting. This is not going to stop us, we have new hires coming in and immediately jumping on board with the union. It's blatantly obvious how disgusting Starbucks corporate is acting right now and it's not pretty," said Kat, an Elmwood Avenue barista.
