BUFFALO, N.Y. (WBEN) - Employees at local Starbucks who are trying to unionize claim corporate leadership are visiting their stores in an attempt to intimidate them and bust their efforts to unionize.
The employees said Wednesday they were visited recently by Rossann Williams, the Executive Vice President of the company's North America operations.
"They're asking vague questions and coming on the floor," Devyn Goldberg, one of the organizers, said. "It really is giving a presence of intimidation."
Other employees claim Williams says she is inspecting the stores. However, their belief is that she is attempting to break up their efforts to unionize by pulling aside workers to chat with them individually.
"Why is the president of Starbucks North America spending her entire holiday weekend here going store-to-store in her car and swarming the stores with her team just to say 'How are you doing?'," Gary Bonadonna Jr. of Workers United said. "It's intimidating. It's meant to influence them and their decision to form a union. We need the condemn this union busting. It's unethical. It's immoral. She sure as heck didn't march in the Labor Day parade."
A spokesman for Starbucks said the company has a long history of leadership visiting the markets to speak with employees and that Williams' presence was getting their input.
"We pride ourselves in creating a venue for our partners to provide their point of view, to share their concerns, and for our leaders to listen," Starbucks spokesman Reggie Borges said. "Our success, past, present, and future, is built on how we partner together and lift each other up, always with the Starbucks mission and values at our core. Through this, our goal remains the same: We want to create the very best jobs for every partner and we do that by listening and working together in a way that brings meaningful support to solve every challenge. That's what Rossann was doing."
Employees at the stores are seeking to organize under the Starbucks Workers United banner to address chronic problems such as understaffing, unpredictable scheduling and insufficient training. There are more than 8,000 Starbucks stores in the United States. None of the stores have unionized workers.
The company is currently appealing a June ruling by a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge that it unlawfully retaliated against two Philadelphia baristas who sought to unionize.
Employees in Western New York are worried of retaliation against them, too.
"We just shut down to the public for a deep cleaning and re-training," Katie Cook, a shift supervisor at Starbucks on Walden and Anderson in Cheektowaga. "We're not upset about that. These are things everybody at my store has been asking for for months, if not years...We were just upset. We found out last-minute on a Sunday afternoon our stores would be shutting down. We weren't given a time when it was going to reopen. Our hours were also, unfortunately, slashed down to accommodate the training and the cleaning. We're upset that we weren't a part of the solution to the problem."
Organizers at the Buffalo-area stores say far more workers have signed union cards than the 30% required to qualify for a vote. If successful, the effort by workers in the Buffalo area would only apply to those stores.
Starbucks, which refers to workers as partners, says it offers "world-class benefits," including health coverage, paid time off, parental leave, 401(k) and stock incentives and full college tuition through Arizona State's online degree programs.
Goldberg also said the company has not signed the fair election agreement and said they will continue to urge them to do so. A vote on union representation is expected to come later this month from the NLRB.
