Starbucks baristas vote to unionize at West Rogers Park store

Workers at a Starbucks in West Rogers Park voted narrowly to unionize Wednesday, making their store the fifth unionized Starbucks in Chicago.

Baristas at the Starbucks at 6075 N. Lincoln Ave. voted 4-3 to unionize with Starbucks Workers United, the Service Employees International Union affiliate representing Starbucks employees nationwide.

“The main reasons are to get people the support they need while they’re working at Starbucks,” said Sean Plotts, a shift supervisor at the store and a member of the workers’ organizing committee there.

That could mean employees getting more hours, Plotts said, so baristas don’t have to work “a job-and-a-half” or having more daytime coverage at the store so they can better handle the volume of customers.

Plotts, who has worked for Starbucks for more than five years, said he and some of his co-workers work more than one job to make ends meet.

Plotts said he works 30 to 35 hours at Starbucks each week making about $23 an hour. He has a second job working irregular freelance hours in liquor inventory at a bar in the Loop. Plotts said he would like to work more hours at Starbucks if hours were made available to him.

As of last week, baristas had unionized 200 Starbucks stores nationwide, according to the National Labor Relations Board. In total, employees at more than 300 stores in 36 states had filed for union elections with the NLRB. Of the approximately 250 elections that had been held, 40 were union losses.

“We will respect the NLRB’s process and bargain in good faith with the stores that chose to be represented by Workers United. We hope the union does the same,” a Starbucks spokesperson said in a statement.

In Chicago, workers at eight Starbucks have filed for union elections since January. Starbucks Workers United won its first elections here in May, when baristas at two Edgewater Starbucks voted overwhelmingly to unionize. In early June, the union eked out a victory in Hyde Park while narrowly losing two elections in the Loop and in Palmer Square. The following week, baristas at a Bucktown Starbucks voted nearly unanimously to unionize. Today’s vote brings the union’s Chicago record to five wins and two losses.

Starbucks has opposed the union push at its stores. Nationally, the Starbucks union has filed hundreds of charges with the NLRB alleging a range of unfair labor practices. As of last week, the NLRB’s regional offices had issued 18 complaints against the company covering 80 unfair labor practice cases nationwide.

In the Chicago area and in Peoria, workers have filed claims of unfair labor practices ranging from threats of retaliation against workers who support the union to promising benefits to an employee if they didn’t support one, WTTW reported last month. Starbucks told WTTW it denies the claims.

Workers at a unionized Starbucks in Edgewater went on strike a month ago, asking for Starbucks to remedy what they described as chronic understaffing at the store. A shift supervisor at the Edgewater cafe told the Tribune he suspected understaffing was the result of corporate retaliation for unionization; Starbucks denied the claim, calling it “categorically false.”

Starbucks reported record revenue between April and June, posting $8.2 billion in revenue over the quarter.