Green Bay Starbucks (PC: Fox 11 Online)
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — A Green Bay Starbucks is now Wisconsin’s fifth unionized Starbucks, after workers voted to join Wisconsin Starbucks Workers United.
Employees at the Auto Plaza Way location gathered Tuesday evening to watch as ballots were counted for the union representation election. The count revealed a 12-8 vote in favor of joining the union. This means that Starbucks must recognize the union there.
This comes shortly after Green Bay employees participated in a national strike on Starbuck’s Red Cup Day — one of the company’s busiest days of the year.
The workers at the Green Bay Starbucks had petitioned the National Labor Relations Board on Oct. 10 for an election, becoming the second group in Northeast Wisconsin to take steps toward forming a union. An Appleton location unionized in June of this year.
In their initial letter to local management and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, workers said:
It is our belief that the working conditions we are regularly forced to endure disrupt our ability to do our jobs with dignity, and taking collective action to change said conditions is our best, and only, way forward. We are committed to forging a strong contract that returns the pride and honor that the position of Starbucks Barista should have, and hold Starbucks to its promise of working with us, ‘with transparency, dignity, and respect.’ Many of the working conditions we have put up with until this point have been normalized: lack of staffing, poor training, and abusive management paralyze partners around the county, and the lack of communication from leadership compounds these issues.
Starbucks employees across the U.S. have won representation in over 260 stores, as of Wednesday.
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