OREGON STARBUCKS CHAINS SEE WAVE OF GROWING UNION SUPPORT

In the midst of The Great Resignation, multiple corporate chain stores and restaurants are trying their absolute best to hold together the old ideals of grinding the soul out of people for bread crumbs.

However, pushing to overcome this growing corporate disdain have come several Starbucks coffee outlets in Oregon, voting to unionize their workplaces. One café in Portland, two in Eugene, and three in Beaverton have all reached a tipping point with companies trying to make their profits off blatant wage theft, and have now begun the voting processes to change their workplaces for the better.

For the Eugene chains, the unionization effort came particularly from the letters workers had received from managers demanding that they have a “Plan A, B, and C” to come to work during the worst of the winter snow storms, and how “snow days are not sick days.”

Regardless of the guaranteed slowing of business in such conditions, managers make more money off workers doing their job than they do from the actual (retail) business at hand. Baristas are expected to work for wages that are well below what their labor is actually worth, yet we in the workforce don’t often recognize it because we aren’t supposed to.

If there were ever a time to start discussions of unionizing, now is the absolute best time – as more than 50 Starbucks chains across the U.S. have started the conversation. That’s on top of five Portland-area Burgerville outlets ratifying the first-ever union contracts in the U.S. fast food industry, in December. While this may seem abysmal compared to the 15,000 or so total chain stores in the country, the discussion is being spread relatively quickly.

With simply the discussion of this news, the idea of movement is sure to follow, because all it takes is questioning your co-workers of what would be more beneficial for each. Establishing democracy within the workforce grounded in the suggestions of each other, rather than the orders of an out-of-touch boss that’s “all about the grind,” would be more beneficial – considering that asking about pay, hours, time off, and other accommodations would not be something that requires constant praying that The Boss will understand.

For those interested in joining these or any other enlightened workplaces, I suggest looking for the addresses of these specific sites and applying in-person or online in order to work within a union without having to establish one from within. There are also union halls that can point you in the direction of union jobs, some of which include unionized restaurants and stores.

That being said, none of this is easy. Most of us working these jobs have only heard of the idea through word-of-mouth, and it is harder to try implementing change than to keep things the way they are. Unions are a discussion and attempt that is done in a highly private forum, accomplished mainly through trust, solidarity, and consistent communication. Workplaces such as Target or Ikea are not easy pickings for union discussion because the labor itself is so spread out; one discussion of unions in the stock room can go months without relevance in a sales floor job, due to how inconsistently employees may talk to those around them. A cashier at a large store may only know the face of a stockroom worker and experience one or two passive conversations with them, while to talk seriously about workplace changes requires both boldness and familiarity.

It’s not impossible to achieve a union in these larger stores, but what I’m getting at is that labor has alienated our own retail worker community to view each other as “different,” and to see that the only people of relevancy across multiple job positions are those who are in management. Union discussions in a job site with hundreds of workers, spread out in ways that

mean some never even see each other, mean that the boldness of our actions need to speak volumes to the whole workplace instead of only those you talk with directly.

A union forming in Starbucks has its benefits because of the closeness that already forms within a small restaurant, and to take this further would mean spreading the message even farther outside our own workplace. I don’t have an answer as to how we can make these discussions more relevant, but what I do know is that if we fight for a future where labor becomes less onerous, the more likely we are to thrive. We can turn those bread crumbs into bread with unionization – so long as we realize we need to break bread.