Starbucks Union Drive Slowed Down in July

Election victories fell to 23 from 80 as the rate of election filings flattened out.

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Every month, I release a report on the Starbucks unionization drive (see May 2022, June 2022) using data from the National Labor Relations Board supplemented by data from More Perfect Union. This is the report for July 2022.

Union Elections and ULP Charges

In July, the Starbucks Union filed 52 unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against Starbucks, bringing the total number of ULP charges to 276. These charges typically allege that Starbucks has engaged in retaliation of one sort or another.

The Starbucks Union won 23 union elections last month, which increased the size of the union by around 578 workers. At the end of July, the Starbucks Union had successfully organized 208 stores covering around 5,588 workers.

Also in July, the union filed for 14 new elections. Based on the current win rate and average unit size, these 14 stores will eventually yield around 11 victories covering 304 Starbucks workers.

At the end of July, there were 44 open election filings where an election had not yet been run. These 44 open elections should yield around 36 victories covering 957 Starbucks workers.

Overall, what the July data shows us is that the Starbucks union drive is slowing down. This was already apparent a few months ago when the rate of new elections being filed for began declining. But it took a few months for the election-filings decline to result in an election-victories decline because the NLRB was still working through a huge backlog of Starbucks elections that had been filed earlier this year. That backlog is mostly gone and so the rate of election victories is now constrained by the rate of election filings rather than the NLRB’s capacity to process the cases.

Of course, even with the decline, the rate of growth is still impressive. Prior to this year, nobody would have believed that a Starbucks union could organize a new store every few days. And yet that is what the Starbucks union did last month.

Locations

By the end of July, the Starbucks Union had won elections in 132 cities across 33 states.