VIA JON GAMACHE
Workers at the Ladue Starbucks hold signs during a one-day strike last year. The store became the first in St. Louis to unionize last June.
Workers at the Starbucks in Affton (10015 Gravois Road, Affton) filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to unionize with Starbucks Workers United, the union announced this morning.
The release suggests the workers are "fed up" with their store managers and district managers.
"We’ve lost so many valuable members of our team because they felt unsupported and ignored by higher management," Emily Daugherty, a shift lead at the store, said in the release. "The lack of urgency to staff the store, or to promote from within, in order to fill the valuable positions we’ve recently lost, proves that they don’t strive to ‘create a culture of warmth and belonging’, per Starbucks’ values. Our store has been so desperate that we’ve needed to close the store early multiple times now, due to lack of staff.
"We’re hoping that joining this fight and forming this union, it’ll give our partners the incentive to enjoy their job again, and promote healthy work-life balance. We all started out as people who love coffee and love this community, but we’ve been treated as lesser than and worked to the bone. This union gives us, and those in the future, a sense of humanity and fairness."
Added barista Marcy Morgan added, "We have mornings where we are sardines in a can, attempting to maintain the speed of peak and evenings where a skeleton team is expected to stay upwards of two hours past close in the store. I’ve watched each partner of my own, regardless of their skill and time, fall victim to the excruciating pressure this job brings. We are understaffed, underpaid, overworked and overextended."
The Affton store is part of a wave of St. Louis-area Starbucks making efforts unionize — and that's part of a national surge that began last spring. Union organizers say Starbucks has fired more than 230 employees involved in organizing during that time, and triggered more than 100 complaints to the National Labor Relations Board. Even so, 315 stores across the U.S. have now unionized.
That includes one at Grand and Sidney in St. Louis, which officially joined the union last month, the sixth in the area.
Here's the updated map showing where all the unionized Starbucks stores are across the STL area. Solidarity, workers! @SBWUStLouis @SBWorkersUnited pic.twitter.com/gSGhK2Lgb9
— Saint Louis DSA 🌹 (@stlouisdsa) May 11, 2023
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