June 27, 2023 • 40 mins
Against the backdrop of soaring stock prices and multi-million dollar executive packages, the labor movement is undergoing a resurgence. A Starbucks location in Buffalo, NY became the first within the coffee chain to unionize in 2021, and since then, more than 330 stores in 39 states have followed suit – with more elections underway. All the while, the Starbucks corporation was engaging in controversial labor-busting practices: the National Labor Relations Board found that Starbucks violated federal labor laws and a federal judge ruled that Starbucks engaged in “egregious and widespread misconduct.” Guest Gianna Reeve is an employee of the Camp Road Starbucks in the Buffalo area – and an organizer with Starbucks Workers United. Reeve joins Alec Baldwin to share her experience at one of the first stores to organize, the conditions that led to the unionization efforts, and what the Starbucks Workers United organization hopes for the future.
Gianna Reeve is a featured participant in the upcoming documentary “The Baristas vs The Billionaire.” To learn more, visit: www.baristasvsbillionaire.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's
the Thing from iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
My dad died in eighty seven, and I wanted to
try and build the kind of company he never got
a chance to work for.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
That's Howard Schultz, three time CEO of the Starbucks Corporation,
when he was a guest on this podcast in September
of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
So the entire business model was trying to balance profit
with conscience, benevolence, and social impact. So the first thing
I did was everyone at Starbucks was going to be
an owner. So I gave ownership to every employee in
eighty seven, which I've done since then. And I gave
comprehensive health insurance, first company in America to provide comprehensive
(00:47):
health way before.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
The Affordable Care for every single person that works for you.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yes, yeah, what does that cost you a year before
the Affordable Care Act? It costs three hundred million a year,
more than the cost of coffee beans for Starbucks. Thought
it was crazy, and I was trying to raise money
at the same time. I had all these ideas and
people said, wait, you.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Want to get rid of that component?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, And I said no, I said, I'm going to
prove to you that we will have lower attrition, higher performance,
and our customers will know what we're doing for our people,
and it will resonate with the brand.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
And this is going to be our marketing stretch. Though
Schultz is discussing the benevolence that his company has shown
to its employees, one could argue that Schultz is feeling
a tad underappreciated these days. While in the last five
years the stock price of Starbucks has doubled and in
(01:38):
twenty twenty two, the coffee chain's revenue reached thirty two
billion dollars, the US is experiencing a labor movement resurgence,
with union petitions up more than fifty percent in twenty
twenty two from the previous year. Current Starbucks unionization efforts
began in twenty twenty one, and the company mounted an
(02:00):
aggressive anti union campaign in response. As a result, a
federal judge found Starbucks engaged in quote egregious and widespread
misconduct unquote, and the National Labor Relations Board found the
company violated federal labor law one thousand, three hundred times
under Schultz's watch. Schultz was even called to testify before
(02:23):
Congress over the union busting allegations, and ended up stepping
down from his position early. My guest today is a
Starbucks Workers United organizer and an employee of one of
the first Starbucks in the country that filed for a
union election, Gianna Reeve. Since Reeve and her colleague's initial
(02:44):
organizing efforts in Buffalo, three hundred and twenty eight stores
in thirty nine states have voted to unionize, and more
elections are under way. I wanted to know how Reeve's
journey with the coffee chain began.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Working at Starbucks in September to October of twenty twenty.
I started at a Tim Horton's. As you know, Buffalo
born and bred that I am. You always started like
a Tim Hortons or somewhere like that, and I didn't
really enjoy the job. I felt like it was a
series of management overstepping bounds. They were a franchise location,
(03:21):
so I was looking for something better, and what looked
better was Starbucks.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Why did you want to go to Starbucks? Did you
think that this was a good place to work? Do
you have a sense of it just was a quick opportunity.
They were hiring why did you end up there? Specifically,
from what.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
I knew about Starbucks being a consumer first before a
prospective employee, I thought it sounded amazing. I looked at
the benefits. I looked at the way they treated their
queer employees. I looked at the way that they wanted
to connect with customers, and when, wow, this is this
is a company that really values human connection. That's something
(03:59):
that I'm missing working at Tim Horton's that I would
really like to have. While I'm working a coffee job,
I had a bit of rose colored glasses on going
in that were slowly taken off over time. But that
was really the thing that brought me to Starbucks, was
that value on humanity.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Now, when you get there, how soon do you begin
to sense that there's changes that need to be made
In your estimation? Was everybody like minded about this or
did you have to open people's eyes? What was the
dawning of we have real problems here that can only
be addressed by unionization.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Well that's a very loaded question in the sense that
I think each Starbucks brist Dom I tell you a
different story, but I can tell you mine, and that
my store location was one of the first three to organize,
and it started for folks even before they were at
the location they were at. So my location was fairly
new at the start of the union drive in Starbucks,
(04:58):
we were maybe a year old. At that point. A
lot of us came from other locations, and through our
experiences at those other locations, we were starting to just
become exhausted. We'd go through the right channels for things
like understaffing, harassment, trying to uphold COVID policy because we
were tasked with being the people to say, hey, like,
you have to keep your mask on, and people would
get aggressive, people would get violent about that. We know
(05:21):
how people feel about that. So we weren't experiencing support
and we weren't getting that protection that we needed from
management and from upper corporate levels, and it was wearing
down on everyone in different ways.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
So in a sense, the genesis of this, the fuse
that led this, was related to COVID and COVID policies
in the store.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
I think for a lot of people it was a
bit of a turning point in looking at the company
in a different way. But also even before that, the
earliest seeds of Starbucks Workers United movement came from another
coffee chain in Buffalo, New York, Spot Coffee Organizing, and
through them, one of our works workers at the first
(06:01):
three locations named Lexi Rizzo, contacted Workers United and said
that this is something that we need to do. This
needs to happen. COVID kind of put that on pause
for a bit, but even though it put it on pause,
it also started to stoke those flames. It really brought
the issues that were already there and existed within Starbucks
to the forefront of people's.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Minds, such as.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Understaffing, a lack of seniority benefits, benefits that partners have
a hard time accessing. I know more partners on Medicaid
than I know being on these Starbucks health insurance plans
simply because they cannot afford them. They don't have the
hours available to work. Starbucks often likes to parade their
(06:44):
benefits being available for part time workers as well, but
we're starting to see, and we have been seeing partners
becoming so decreased in hours that they're not hitting that
twenty hour a week limit that you need in order
to be able to be eligible for those benefits.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
So they're deliberately scheduling it that way.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Yes, it's very difficult to be excited about benefits that
you can't obtain, and it's even more frustrating when it
feels like the company isn't listening to you. And one
of the best ways to get a company to listen
to you is to come together with your fellow co
workers and say, no, you need to listen to us.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Now, when you say partners, what do you mean by partners?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Partners is the term that Starbucks uses to describe their employees.
So we are all considered partners by Starbucks.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Are you still working at Starbucks now?
Speaker 3 (07:31):
I am still working at Starbucks now?
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Yeah? What's that like? Give us a description of So
you're at a Starbucks location. This one location, which the
one you were at is the Camp Road Starbucks. Correct,
you're still there now at the Camp Road Starbucks. Using
just that as an example, I'm not going to assume
they're all identical, but maybe they are. How does the
management breakdown? This is someone who's title, who runs the show,
(07:54):
Who's in charge?
Speaker 3 (07:55):
If you asked Starbucks that it would be the managers.
If you asked any other worker at Starbucks that they
would probably say the shift supervisors. Why because shift supervisors
are the day to day sort of operations. The manager
comes and goes, the manager writes the schedule, but the
shift supervisor is going to be the one that baristas
are in the most contact with. If you're coming into work,
if you're calling in you're like, hey, I'm going to
(08:18):
be late, that's going to be your shift supervisor. If
you don't know where you're going to be on the
floor for the day, if it's going to be drive through,
or you're going to be on the espresso bar, if
you're going to be making the cold drinks, that's the
shift supervisor deciding that. So a lot of your day
to day operations are being overseen by the shift supervisors.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
So the manager, are they off managing multiple locations? Do
they have them taking a little tour of the area,
because as everybody knows, Starbucks is kind of ubiquitous. Are
they going to different locations there? In Buffalo?
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Typically, now that the union busting heat has died down,
it's typically one manager per location, But at one point,
at the peak of the union busting and at the
height of the first three store locations union elections, there
would be sometimes five six, seven what Starbucks would call
support managers on the floor that were there to supposedly
(09:11):
help the Buffalo district because we were struggling so hard
and they just missed the more completely with us. They
were so apologetic, but really they were essentially spies. I
couldn't go anywhere in my store location without there being
one of these support managers breathing down my neck. I
couldn't talk on the headsets at work and have organizing
(09:33):
conversations without a manager wearing a headset and listening in
at all times.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Right out in the open. They did it right in
front of.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
You, right right now.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Your phone conversation is about organizing, right in front of you.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yes, it was never hidden as a secret that that's
their motive.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
How did you feel about interacting with management? I when
you say that the actual managers, as supposed to the
shift supervisors come and go, what was your relationship black
with these people who were monitoring your phone calls?
Speaker 3 (10:01):
So the relationship with management at the time of the
union election, I Camp wrote it was a lot of
me trying to be as professional and employing my customer
service voice on them as much as I was on customers. Really,
I wanted to make sure that they knew that I
wasn't just coming in to make trouble, because it seemed
(10:22):
to be like that was the feeling we were getting
about how they were depicting union organizers, and I wanted
them to know that, no, I've got a clean record,
I'm a model employee. I'm doing this because I love
my partners and I want them to have the best
experience at work as possible. I want this company to
be what it says it's going to be. So I
(10:43):
thought the best way to exhibit that was to remain optimistic,
remain nice.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
And don't take the bait. Don't let them provoke back
to something where you're going to give them grounds to
terminate right now. I mean, I go to Starbucks, period,
and there's a lot more kind of owner operated places
I go to in my neighborhood, smaller coffee shops and
so forth. But I mean, I'm I'm a Starbucks person.
I like their products. I have what I order at
Starbucks that I like. And one of the last times
(11:14):
that I was out of Starbucks was up in Vermont.
We were there and I couldn't believe the pace, and
I couldn't believe the intensity, and I couldn't believe the
look on the faces of the women and the men
that were working there as they were like spinning, pivoting,
whipping and hitting the button to have the water shoot
the other thing to clean it and put more milk
in it, and they're trying to make these drinks in
(11:37):
this balletic way. But it was more it was like
some primitive army coming down a mountaintop to kill you, you know.
I mean they were like so the amount of the
heaving and breathing that was going on from these people.
They were working their asses off, you know, they were
working their asses off. There's a certain type of person
that they hire who is just like a super hard
(11:58):
working person. And those people that come there who don't
get it, who don't get the Starbucks program of you
got to be quick and you've got to be you know,
really fast moving, they don't make the cut. Is that
kind of how it works?
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Yeah, they they don't last too long. You have to
move at a certain kind of pace like that, and
it's kind of like learning a dance how you said,
it's it is a bit ballatic and that you gotta
move around, you gotta it's almost like a part dance,
part coffee shop, part working in a kitchen, because sometimes
you'll be like, oh, behind hot, behind corner, going around
(12:33):
because if not, you're going to just have a pile
of baristas on the floor covered in sugar syrup and espresso,
wondering what the hell happened.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
And you think also that there's people who I have
this image of people who, like day one, within a
couple of hours, there's a certain type of person who's
like in the bathroom crying and they're like, what have
I gotten myself into? I got to get out of here.
You know, this isn't for me. It's too fast.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
It definitely exists. It's a bit of a culture shock,
that sort of feeling. It's I hate to say it.
Starbucks now sort of feels like the fast food of
coffee in a lot of ways because of that, like
increased demand for breakneck speeds and for pushing out as
much coffee as possible. The way that we earn more
(13:18):
labor hours to have more people on the floor at
any point in time is based on how many customers
we get in and out of our stores or in
and out of the drive through at any point. So
a lot of the times you'll hear barista's saying, you know, hey, manager,
so and so, we really need more people on Saturday.
Saturday mornings are just brutal. Can we get one more person?
(13:41):
And they'll come back and say, unfortunately, the labor doesn't
cut it. You know, we don't have the time, we
don't have the people. We need to work on getting
some more people out of our drive through and then
we could see if that ups our labor budget to
have more people on the floor. So it's it's this
constant cycle of work harder, go faster, and maybe you'll
have a little bit of put on you if they
have another person to the floor, But that's a really
(14:03):
big if.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Well, Now, other than the staffing issues when you were
at Starbucks initially, what did you begin to notice were
some other problems? In other words, what were the problems
that were substantial enough that guided you to want to
start a union to address them?
Speaker 3 (14:18):
For me, it was a lack of accountability for management,
a lack of accountability through the company as a whole.
Later on, as I began to learn more and more things,
but really it came down to the actions of my manager.
A lot of the time, he's no longer with the company,
but it was right when I started at Camp Road.
(14:40):
I transferred from another location in Buffalo from McKinley location
and came to Camp Road as it opened up, and
we had a lot of new hires coming in. They
were bright, prospective people, and I was really excited to
work with them. And as we know, there is the
stereotype of the gay barista, and I think so Starbucks
(15:00):
kind of loves it because we just they flock. We
flocked to Starbucks to work because it's seen as a
progressively valued company and it seems like a safe place
to work that you might not get otherwise. So we
had a lot of openly gay partners, openly trans partners
that came into my store to work, and they were
(15:21):
amazing people. I love talking to them, I love their
work ethic. They were going to be great. I remember
thinking to myself, these are going to be amazing people
on the floor. Once they get those drinks down, they
are going to do amazing stuff. And as time went on,
over a period of two or three months at my location,
I saw all of them forced out in one way
(15:43):
or another. One by one. Partners were being outed on
the floor by management where I would have no idea
that someone was trans, or I wouldn't know their gender
identity because what's at my business, and they would go
and say it out right. There was a partner at
my location and she didn't have access to a vehicle.
Starbucks has benefits for ride share and stuff, but it's
(16:05):
not comprehensive coverage to gets you to work from nine
to five, so she would rely on rides from friends.
But she was quick, she was smart. I thought if
anyone was going to really excel, it was going to
be her. And I came into work one day expecting
to see her on my shift and asked my fellowship supervisors, like, Hey,
why isn't she in? And they told me that my
(16:26):
manager had fired her, And that just left me a
little bit flabbergasted. I was like, what do you mean
he fired her? She was doing great. I'm not understanding.
And the reason he fired her was because she was
a couple minutes lately, two to five minutes late coming
into her shift, despite him knowing that she relies on
other folks to get rides, that she was trying her best.
(16:52):
She was doing amazing, and I've seen people late far
more far more often than this scenario. And she was
just gone. And she was so excited to use the
healthcare benefits that Starbucks re fights because it's gender inclusive healthcare,
so that she could actually begin hormone replacement therapy, she
could look into surgery if she so wished, and she
(17:14):
was just so optimistic, and she was so happy to
be working for Starbucks. And it was just gone in
a snap. And I saw this same trend repeat over
and over again, and I just didn't know what to do.
I was angry. I was frustrated because this isn't what
this isn't what I signed up for, This isn't what
(17:35):
I expected this to be like. But I didn't know
how to change it. So I was just sort of
left frustrated.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
And you think that they targeted her because she was.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Trans I do think so. I do think my manager
targeted her because she was transit.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Other than the firing itself, he was the one that
made comments in front of other people publicly about her gender. Yes,
when you say that, I mean regardless of one's view
of transgenderism and companies being asked to pay for hormone
injections and surgeries and so forth, like that. I mean,
people are entitled to a certain amount of privacy and
(18:11):
dignity in the workplace. How did everybody else react? Because
what I'm getting to is, when did the moment come
for the unionization thing where it dawns on you and
you start to enlist people. Or was there a group
think where there were a bunch of people who you
were all talking to each other going this has got
to change.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Yeah, I wish I had an easy answer in the
sense that there was that sort of like click and
boom moment. For me, it was a lot of situations
like this where partners privacy wasn't being respected, where workers
that have been in a company for seventeen years were
making within a dollar what I was making coming in
at two years. So at that point when the unionization
(18:49):
effort kicked off, I was already ready to make something happen.
I wanted change. I just didn't know that options like
unionization existed for a Starbucks location until one of my
fellow co workers texted me and said, Hey, can we
talk about work stuff? But we can't do it at work?
And I was a little bit confused. It's like, what
(19:12):
could we possibly need to talk about work? Outside of work,
I'm not following, and he said, please, like, can you
meet me at Spot Coffee. I had no idea that
I would walk into Spot Coffee and be asked how
I felt about unionizing Starbucks. That one trip to a
coffee shop changed my life.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Activist Gianna Reeve. If you appreciate conversations about the labor movement,
check out my episode with former California assembly Person and
head of the California Labor Federation Lorena Gonzalez.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
My favorite part of the story is having to go
to then Governor Jerry Brown. I mean, I'm like, oh God,
I got to talk to him about cheerleaders. We were
at a dinner together and I said, Governor, when you
have a chance on and talk about this bill I'm
working on. It has to do with professional cheerleaders. And
he said I was a cheerleader, and I was like.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Are you kidding me?
Speaker 4 (20:08):
I've hearing this.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Luck would have it.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
He was a cheerleader in college or high school. And
so I was like, oh, I think I'm going to
get this one.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
But we did.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
I'm very proud of that.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
To hear more of my conversation with Lorena Gonzalez, go
to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Gianna
Reeve shares some of the conditions that led to the
unionizing effort at Starbucks. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were
(20:44):
listening to Here's the Thing union organizer. Gianna Reeve was
a shift supervisor at the Camp Road Starbucks in the
Buffalo area of upstate New York when her location filed
the petition to unionize in twenty twenty one. A simple
meeting with one of her co workers would change the
course of Gianna's life.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
He told me about the first union meeting that was
going to have partners from all the different locations in
Buffalo come together and talk and see if this was
a movement with legs basically, so going to this meeting.
Before this, I was sort of entrenched in Camp Road
in that I didn't really go to other store locations.
(21:28):
I didn't really pick up shifts there. I was really
focused on just doing my job at Camp Road and
doing it well, and I didn't have a lot of
conversations with workers outside of my store. So going into
this meeting and hearing a lot of the same problems
existing at these other store locations in Buffalo that I
think is what I would describe as like that clique
(21:49):
for me, that this isn't just a camp road issue.
This is a Starbucks issue, and this needs to be addressed.
When you have a half dozen baristas in a circle
all time talking to each other and going wait, wait,
your store has wasps too, Yeah, my partner just got
sent to the er because she was stung on the floor,
and conversations like that of like, oh did they take
(22:10):
away your non slip floor mats? My store doesn't even
have non slip formats. My store has carpet in the
back room, and just continuous stories just bouncing off each
other of all of these things that haven't been addressed
over the years they've been at Starbucks. It was just
mind boggling how similar our stories were.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
So when you mentioned the carpeting versus the non slip thing,
I mean, I only want to focus on that to say,
so there were places, there were Starbucks that were making
the necessary changes to protect their customers and their workers
and some that weren't. And not was every Starbucks derelict
than these kinds of modifications, or were some better than others?
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Some We're definitely better than others. A lot of store
locations are older and that they haven't had remodels or
improvements in years. It's kind of like if you had
ten different things and you said pick three or four
out of these ten. I think every Starbucks would be
able to pick three or four things if I could
sit here and make a list of either structural, safety, employment,
(23:12):
or labor issues that they're having on the floor, and
they would be able to do so. For me, it
was seeing a lot of problems with labor cuts, with staffing,
with wages, with healthkin safety, with management accountability, and for
others it was something maybe like health and safety in
the sense that carpeting in the back room is an
(23:33):
absolute no for a food service jomp. I've never heard
of anything like that before. There was a point when
management had come in over one hundred corporate officials that
come into Buffalo and they were asking workers, you know,
what can we do to make things better for you here?
We really dropped the ball on Buffalo what can we do?
(23:53):
And for Camp Road, a lot of it was our floors.
We were a brand new store. They weren't made to
handle the salt that was coming in from the snow,
and they were wearing down. We had our grout was
just being eaten away, and that creates problems with fruitflies.
So our store was just covered, covered and fruit flies.
It was disgusting. No one wanted to work like that,
(24:14):
No one wanted to serve food and drink like that.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
So interesting.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
At some point management said we got you, no worries,
We'll take care of this, and they had a crew
come in after clothes in the in the middle of
the night and try and refinish our floors. What they
did was they sanded away the ceilant on the tile
and made it porous. They essentially ruined our stores floor tiling,
(24:39):
and it was just the problem became even worse. It
was exacerbated by this action. And to me that really
it sounds funny to say. It's a little bit of
an overall theme with Starbucks' attempts at either helping in
quotations or union busting and saying, Okay, we're here, we're listening,
making the.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Wor workspace healthier for the workers and the customers.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Yeah, yeah, let's make it healthier for you. What can
we do to make it healthy and then us saying
something and then being like hurt, you got it, but
then taking actions that don't inherently help the problem or
they make the problem worse.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Do you find that that's a theme that the company
didn't rely enough on the workforce to glean information what
was best for those locations.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Absolutely, I mean everything I'm talking about and all of
these problems that are existing in my store and now
nationally on this level we're talking about, all of this
could have been solved by a seat at the table
on Starbucks's board of directors. They have two honorary empty seats.
One is for I believe customers and the other is
for all of the barife dosen' workers with the company.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
They've never filled those seats.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Yes, why aren't those seats filled? Because if those seats
were filled, I think this company could be so much better.
Starbucks workers want this company to be that human, worker
driven company that wants to spark change, positive change. We
want to see that happen. That's why we're all here,
That's why we sort of were interested in the company
in the first place. That's why we applied.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
When does the word strike, When does the word union?
When does that enter the conversation and the person you
were with at the other coffee shop was that they
need to talk to you about work outside of work.
Where does it go from there?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
That goes into that first meeting we had with other
Starbuck partners from other locations in Buffalo, not just from
the first three but from all of them, and then
very rapidly after that, where right now the timeline is
August of twenty twenty one, and we're going forward and
(26:42):
we're saying, yeah, we need this to happen. So the
next step in the organizing process is going to be
signing union cards and talking to each worker on the
floor through one on one conversations. And there is this
beautiful one week window where we could talk without restriction,
and we could just discuss, and we could brainstorm, and
we could imagine what this company could look like if
(27:04):
all of our voices were put into it, and we
could really make a difference. So we got I believe
between sixty six and seventy percent cards signed at Camp
Road in a matter of a couple of days, and
we filed for union election. So there was that great
one week window where a lot of movement was happening,
(27:26):
a lot of progress, We had a lot of momentum,
and then at the end of that week window it
started to shift. We put out a letter from all
of the workers that initially went to the meeting about
our intent to organize, because it's generally good practice and
it signifies your attempt to organize to the company so
(27:48):
that you're protected legally. It's funny, the more public you
are about your intent to organize, the more protected you are,
and from a legal standpoint, because the company can't argue
that they didn't know. It is retaliation if they try
to terminate you or reprimand you at that point. So
they got our letter. We had our amazing week, and
(28:10):
then we started to see people from Starbucks corporate flood
into Buffalo. I think we've counted over one hundred different
names to do, what to surveil and to intimidate, and
to influence.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
And to look for grounds to terminate you.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Yes, right, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
How many of the people that were perceived, whether they
signed any paperwork or whether they were completely fully expressing
their support of the unionization publicly, How many of your
fellow workers there were terminated since they commencement of the union.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Organizing the termination? I can't say exactly a number. They
did terminate one of our my friend that I met
in the coffee shop Will. They terminated Will for wearing
a suicide awareness pin. So prior to the corporate members
coming into Starbucks Buffalo locations and staying there for months,
might I add, they had changed Starbucks policy to that
(29:14):
you can no longer wear non Starbucks affiliated pins unless
it's a labor pin. This was a direct dig at
us wearing our union pins on the floor, so now
we were no longer allowed to wear them. Unfortunately, at
my location, we had a partner passed away by suicide
and we all got these pins. One of our partners
(29:37):
got these pins that say you are not Alone, and
it has like the number for the one of the
suicide foundations on it, and we asked and asked and
asked if we could wear these on the floor, if
they could just make one exception because we lost someone
that we all loved, And they said, sorry, but no,
we don't care. We're not You're not going to get
(29:59):
an exception for this not wearing it, ignorant of the
fact that even making this policy change was illegal in
the sense that they cannot change conditions in the store location.
The rules that exist when you file for union election
have to be the same throughout the union election. So
they've made this change and now they've said, we are
not going to make this exception.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Can they moved the goal post in order to find
a way to fire people.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Absolutely, that was a change of our it's called laboratory conditions.
That was a change of laboratory conditions. So that shouldn't
have happened in the first place. And to not display
the empathy that's typically so embedded in the ethos at
this company, and saying, why can we at least wear
pins to honor a partner that's passed away, the partner
(30:45):
that everybody looked on the floor. Can we at least
have that even for a week? For a day, no
leeway was given.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Organizer Gianna Reeve. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on
the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you'll get your podcasts
when we come back. Gianna Reeve shares the public's reaction
to Starbucks workers striking. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening
(31:26):
to Here's the Thing. Starbucks union organizer Gianna Reeve attended
a meeting in Buffalo with then CEO Howard Schultz and
other members of Starbucks leadership in late twenty twenty one.
She would end the meeting confronting Schultz about the company's
labor busting practices. I was curious how such an unorthodox
(31:48):
meeting came together in the first place.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
The invite list was every partner in the Buffalo area,
So if you're barista, you were invited. They closed our
star locations early to have us go to this meeting
at a high regency hotel, as they put it, special guests.
Some of us thought it might be Taylor Swift. Others
among us were like, they're going to bring out Howard.
(32:13):
They're going to try and bring out the big guns
to convince us that what we're doing isn't the right
move for the company.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
How many people were in that room, would you guess.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Between one hundred and two hundred. But the interesting part
of that is that about a third of the people
that were in the room were the corporate members that
had been coming to the Starbucks locations for months at
that point and surveilling and harassing and impeding on the
flow of operations in these stores. They were there as well,
wearing crisp out of the bag Green Aprons sitting and
(32:44):
listening and just eating up on this whole experience, while
there was another bunch that were just baristas from the
Buffalo's stores wondering what the hell was going on.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
How long did the meeting last?
Speaker 3 (32:59):
The lasted about an hour and a half. It was
about a half an hour of the actual talks and everything,
and maybe about ten minutes when Howard came out and spoke.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
So he was not in attendance for the whole meeting.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
No, he only came out for his speech and then
promptly left.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
So he was actually interested in talking but not listening.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yes, he wanted to talk, but not listen. And when
I believe there was there was a little bit of
tension in the room because as many as there were
Green Apron extras, there were also people in the front row.
I sat in the front row with another organizing partner
from Sheridan Bailey's location named James, and we sat in
(33:42):
the front row together because we had talked prior a
bunch of us and said, wouldn't it be crazy if
someone asked Howard Schultz after he was done speaking to
sign our set of fair election principles which provide us
more protections. It provides union workers equal time. If they're
going to have captive meetings with workers, we would be
given essentially the same time. It would be a document
(34:04):
saying that we're not going to threaten union workers anymore.
We're extending an olive branch. So he said, wouldn't it
be crazy if someone did this? And someone asked? And
for some reason in my stupid bravery or just impulse
or adrenaline, I said, yeah, wouldn't it? And I took
the paper and went and sat in the front row
(34:24):
and I listened to his whole speech so in depth.
I also listened to the podcast episode he was on
with you Alec, and I noticed a lot of the
same beats, the same story of this is the company
that he wanted to be, that he modeled this after
what his father didn't have. He wanted this to be
a company that his father would be proud to work from.
The projects yes, as often likes to say yes. And
(34:51):
so going into that and just listening and hearing the
same story now over and over again now that I've
heard it, and wondering, wouldn't his father have wanted union
membership for himself and wanted representation and protections at work.
And during this Congress meeting with Howard, Senator Ed Marquis
brought this up, and that was another point in which
(35:13):
Schultz bristled and became visibly annoyed or frustrated with this
line of questioning, even though it's something that baristas have
been thinking for a while now, because you can't separate
Howard from Starbucks, and this message and this idea is
embedded into the company. And as we're looking for ways
(35:34):
to meet the company better by having a worker focus,
you just can't help but think of that and wonder
what's happened. And I think what's happened is that the
workers don't have a voice, and we need to see
that shift.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Shultz step down.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Correct, Yes, he's replaced. He went from Howard to Kevin
Johnson to Howard to now Laxman.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Where is the effort now? Where's the unionization at Starbucks? Now?
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Right now we are at over I believe three hundred
unionized locations and counting where filing petitions nearly every day.
We are continuing to build power within the Starbucks locations
and find baristas that are experiencing the same problems that
we have because after Buffalo, and we won in Buffalo,
(36:22):
just a monumental win.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
So the Buffalo location is unionized, yes, and everybody that
works there is in the union. Everybody, Yes? What union
are they affiliated with?
Speaker 3 (36:32):
We're affiliated with Workers United, So we aren't Starbucks Workers United?
Affiliated with Workers United. We don't pay dues until we
have a contract, and that's been kind of the sludging point.
Starbucks has not really been bargaining in good faith with us.
There have been times where we'd come to the table,
we'd set up a meeting, it would be the briests
coming in and Starbucks' lawyers would show up for two
(36:55):
minutes and then leave and gone. Nothing negotiated, nothing really discussed.
And we've been seeing that sledge happen time and time
again with these bargaining sessions that we've been trying to have.
We have our non economic proposals all ready to go,
they're just not coming to the table.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
How can you compel them to sign the contract? How
does that work?
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Well, I'm so glad you asked. That's going to come
from building power within our consumer base. Consumers. You think
that they would be jumping at the chance to sort
of vote with their dollars and say no, I can
take a stand by not buying Starbucks. But the thing
is is that a lot of customers still don't know
that this is happening within Starbucks locations. They don't realize
(37:35):
that Starbucks has been putting on one of the most
aggressive union busting campaigns in modern history. So a lot
of the next steps are going to be educating consumers
and moving forward and letting them know what's happening in
these store locations and saying like, are you going to
not cross the picket line when you see us out
on strike? And we've had large strikes where there's been
(37:56):
over one hundred locations on strike at any given point
during some of the companies largest days of like Red
Cup Day. You come in, you get a free red cup,
you get your holiday drink, and you go. We had
strikes going at over one hundred store locations across the
country on days line.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
And the strike entail people just not working, yeah, work stop.
It was just no service.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
People can't say coffee, wow, No, you cannot.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
What was the public's voice in that? What would people
say to you while you were striking?
Speaker 3 (38:21):
There's always a couple of people that aren't too happy
when they see a picket line for whatever reason or other.
But a lot of the times it was customers being like, wow,
I didn't know that. I had no idea. I've been
coming here for the past however long, and I just
had no knowledge of this. I'll go to Spot coffee
or something instead, or like we point them to one
of the unionized coffee shops in Buffalo. Points like that.
On strikes, a lot of people are enthusiastic, and especially
(38:43):
in the Buffalo area. Buffalo's a union town. We have
higher union density than a lot of other locations across
the country. So chances are that you are in a union,
or you know someone that's in a union, or family
members in a union. So you see a picket light
and you're you're not crossing that.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Well, let me just say thank you so much for
your courage and your intelligence. I mean, you really really
are are somebody who you've obviously examined this from every
angle and you've brought about what's important. Changed because when
I saw those people at the Manchester Vermont Starbucks, I
mean working themselves, I mean just it was crazy. It
(39:20):
was crazy. And when you sit there and say you'd
like to have those conditions be improved. You're to be
committed for it. You've done. It's really, really truly amazing.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
My thanks to Starbucks Workers United organizer Gianna Reeve. This
episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin.
Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is
Daniel Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing that is
(39:56):
brought to you by iHeart Radio
This is Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's
the Thing from iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
My dad died in eighty seven, and I wanted to
try and build the kind of company he never got
a chance to work for.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
That's Howard Schultz, three time CEO of the Starbucks Corporation,
when he was a guest on this podcast in September
of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
So the entire business model was trying to balance profit
with conscience, benevolence, and social impact. So the first thing
I did was everyone at Starbucks was going to be
an owner. So I gave ownership to every employee in
eighty seven, which I've done since then. And I gave
comprehensive health insurance, first company in America to provide comprehensive
(00:47):
health way before.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
The Affordable Care for every single person that works for you.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yes, yeah, what does that cost you a year before
the Affordable Care Act? It costs three hundred million a year,
more than the cost of coffee beans for Starbucks. Thought
it was crazy, and I was trying to raise money
at the same time. I had all these ideas and
people said, wait, you.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
Want to get rid of that component?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, And I said no, I said, I'm going to
prove to you that we will have lower attrition, higher performance,
and our customers will know what we're doing for our people,
and it will resonate with the brand.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
And this is going to be our marketing stretch. Though
Schultz is discussing the benevolence that his company has shown
to its employees, one could argue that Schultz is feeling
a tad underappreciated these days. While in the last five
years the stock price of Starbucks has doubled and in
(01:38):
twenty twenty two, the coffee chain's revenue reached thirty two
billion dollars, the US is experiencing a labor movement resurgence,
with union petitions up more than fifty percent in twenty
twenty two from the previous year. Current Starbucks unionization efforts
began in twenty twenty one, and the company mounted an
(02:00):
aggressive anti union campaign in response. As a result, a
federal judge found Starbucks engaged in quote egregious and widespread
misconduct unquote, and the National Labor Relations Board found the
company violated federal labor law one thousand, three hundred times
under Schultz's watch. Schultz was even called to testify before
(02:23):
Congress over the union busting allegations, and ended up stepping
down from his position early. My guest today is a
Starbucks Workers United organizer and an employee of one of
the first Starbucks in the country that filed for a
union election, Gianna Reeve. Since Reeve and her colleague's initial
(02:44):
organizing efforts in Buffalo, three hundred and twenty eight stores
in thirty nine states have voted to unionize, and more
elections are under way. I wanted to know how Reeve's
journey with the coffee chain began.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Working at Starbucks in September to October of twenty twenty.
I started at a Tim Horton's. As you know, Buffalo
born and bred that I am. You always started like
a Tim Hortons or somewhere like that, and I didn't
really enjoy the job. I felt like it was a
series of management overstepping bounds. They were a franchise location,
(03:21):
so I was looking for something better, and what looked
better was Starbucks.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Why did you want to go to Starbucks? Did you
think that this was a good place to work? Do
you have a sense of it just was a quick opportunity.
They were hiring why did you end up there? Specifically,
from what.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
I knew about Starbucks being a consumer first before a
prospective employee, I thought it sounded amazing. I looked at
the benefits. I looked at the way they treated their
queer employees. I looked at the way that they wanted
to connect with customers, and when, wow, this is this
is a company that really values human connection. That's something
(03:59):
that I'm missing working at Tim Horton's that I would
really like to have. While I'm working a coffee job,
I had a bit of rose colored glasses on going
in that were slowly taken off over time. But that
was really the thing that brought me to Starbucks, was
that value on humanity.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Now, when you get there, how soon do you begin
to sense that there's changes that need to be made
In your estimation? Was everybody like minded about this or
did you have to open people's eyes? What was the
dawning of we have real problems here that can only
be addressed by unionization.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Well that's a very loaded question in the sense that
I think each Starbucks brist Dom I tell you a
different story, but I can tell you mine, and that
my store location was one of the first three to organize,
and it started for folks even before they were at
the location they were at. So my location was fairly
new at the start of the union drive in Starbucks,
(04:58):
we were maybe a year old. At that point. A
lot of us came from other locations, and through our
experiences at those other locations, we were starting to just
become exhausted. We'd go through the right channels for things
like understaffing, harassment, trying to uphold COVID policy because we
were tasked with being the people to say, hey, like,
you have to keep your mask on, and people would
get aggressive, people would get violent about that. We know
(05:21):
how people feel about that. So we weren't experiencing support
and we weren't getting that protection that we needed from
management and from upper corporate levels, and it was wearing
down on everyone in different ways.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
So in a sense, the genesis of this, the fuse
that led this, was related to COVID and COVID policies
in the store.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
I think for a lot of people it was a
bit of a turning point in looking at the company
in a different way. But also even before that, the
earliest seeds of Starbucks Workers United movement came from another
coffee chain in Buffalo, New York, Spot Coffee Organizing, and
through them, one of our works workers at the first
(06:01):
three locations named Lexi Rizzo, contacted Workers United and said
that this is something that we need to do. This
needs to happen. COVID kind of put that on pause
for a bit, but even though it put it on pause,
it also started to stoke those flames. It really brought
the issues that were already there and existed within Starbucks
to the forefront of people's.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Minds, such as.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Understaffing, a lack of seniority benefits, benefits that partners have
a hard time accessing. I know more partners on Medicaid
than I know being on these Starbucks health insurance plans
simply because they cannot afford them. They don't have the
hours available to work. Starbucks often likes to parade their
(06:44):
benefits being available for part time workers as well, but
we're starting to see, and we have been seeing partners
becoming so decreased in hours that they're not hitting that
twenty hour a week limit that you need in order
to be able to be eligible for those benefits.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
So they're deliberately scheduling it that way.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Yes, it's very difficult to be excited about benefits that
you can't obtain, and it's even more frustrating when it
feels like the company isn't listening to you. And one
of the best ways to get a company to listen
to you is to come together with your fellow co
workers and say, no, you need to listen to us.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Now, when you say partners, what do you mean by partners?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Partners is the term that Starbucks uses to describe their employees.
So we are all considered partners by Starbucks.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Are you still working at Starbucks now?
Speaker 3 (07:31):
I am still working at Starbucks now?
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Yeah? What's that like? Give us a description of So
you're at a Starbucks location. This one location, which the
one you were at is the Camp Road Starbucks. Correct,
you're still there now at the Camp Road Starbucks. Using
just that as an example, I'm not going to assume
they're all identical, but maybe they are. How does the
management breakdown? This is someone who's title, who runs the show,
(07:54):
Who's in charge?
Speaker 3 (07:55):
If you asked Starbucks that it would be the managers.
If you asked any other worker at Starbucks that they
would probably say the shift supervisors. Why because shift supervisors
are the day to day sort of operations. The manager
comes and goes, the manager writes the schedule, but the
shift supervisor is going to be the one that baristas
are in the most contact with. If you're coming into work,
if you're calling in you're like, hey, I'm going to
(08:18):
be late, that's going to be your shift supervisor. If
you don't know where you're going to be on the
floor for the day, if it's going to be drive through,
or you're going to be on the espresso bar, if
you're going to be making the cold drinks, that's the
shift supervisor deciding that. So a lot of your day
to day operations are being overseen by the shift supervisors.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
So the manager, are they off managing multiple locations? Do
they have them taking a little tour of the area,
because as everybody knows, Starbucks is kind of ubiquitous. Are
they going to different locations there? In Buffalo?
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Typically, now that the union busting heat has died down,
it's typically one manager per location, But at one point,
at the peak of the union busting and at the
height of the first three store locations union elections, there
would be sometimes five six, seven what Starbucks would call
support managers on the floor that were there to supposedly
(09:11):
help the Buffalo district because we were struggling so hard
and they just missed the more completely with us. They
were so apologetic, but really they were essentially spies. I
couldn't go anywhere in my store location without there being
one of these support managers breathing down my neck. I
couldn't talk on the headsets at work and have organizing
(09:33):
conversations without a manager wearing a headset and listening in
at all times.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Right out in the open. They did it right in
front of.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
You, right right now.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Your phone conversation is about organizing, right in front of you.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yes, it was never hidden as a secret that that's
their motive.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
How did you feel about interacting with management? I when
you say that the actual managers, as supposed to the
shift supervisors come and go, what was your relationship black
with these people who were monitoring your phone calls?
Speaker 3 (10:01):
So the relationship with management at the time of the
union election, I Camp wrote it was a lot of
me trying to be as professional and employing my customer
service voice on them as much as I was on customers. Really,
I wanted to make sure that they knew that I
wasn't just coming in to make trouble, because it seemed
(10:22):
to be like that was the feeling we were getting
about how they were depicting union organizers, and I wanted
them to know that, no, I've got a clean record,
I'm a model employee. I'm doing this because I love
my partners and I want them to have the best
experience at work as possible. I want this company to
be what it says it's going to be. So I
(10:43):
thought the best way to exhibit that was to remain optimistic,
remain nice.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
And don't take the bait. Don't let them provoke back
to something where you're going to give them grounds to
terminate right now. I mean, I go to Starbucks, period,
and there's a lot more kind of owner operated places
I go to in my neighborhood, smaller coffee shops and
so forth. But I mean, I'm I'm a Starbucks person.
I like their products. I have what I order at
Starbucks that I like. And one of the last times
(11:14):
that I was out of Starbucks was up in Vermont.
We were there and I couldn't believe the pace, and
I couldn't believe the intensity, and I couldn't believe the
look on the faces of the women and the men
that were working there as they were like spinning, pivoting,
whipping and hitting the button to have the water shoot
the other thing to clean it and put more milk
in it, and they're trying to make these drinks in
(11:37):
this balletic way. But it was more it was like
some primitive army coming down a mountaintop to kill you, you know.
I mean they were like so the amount of the
heaving and breathing that was going on from these people.
They were working their asses off, you know, they were
working their asses off. There's a certain type of person
that they hire who is just like a super hard
(11:58):
working person. And those people that come there who don't
get it, who don't get the Starbucks program of you
got to be quick and you've got to be you know,
really fast moving, they don't make the cut. Is that
kind of how it works?
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Yeah, they they don't last too long. You have to
move at a certain kind of pace like that, and
it's kind of like learning a dance how you said,
it's it is a bit ballatic and that you gotta
move around, you gotta it's almost like a part dance,
part coffee shop, part working in a kitchen, because sometimes
you'll be like, oh, behind hot, behind corner, going around
(12:33):
because if not, you're going to just have a pile
of baristas on the floor covered in sugar syrup and espresso,
wondering what the hell happened.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
And you think also that there's people who I have
this image of people who, like day one, within a
couple of hours, there's a certain type of person who's
like in the bathroom crying and they're like, what have
I gotten myself into? I got to get out of here.
You know, this isn't for me. It's too fast.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
It definitely exists. It's a bit of a culture shock,
that sort of feeling. It's I hate to say it.
Starbucks now sort of feels like the fast food of
coffee in a lot of ways because of that, like
increased demand for breakneck speeds and for pushing out as
much coffee as possible. The way that we earn more
(13:18):
labor hours to have more people on the floor at
any point in time is based on how many customers
we get in and out of our stores or in
and out of the drive through at any point. So
a lot of the times you'll hear barista's saying, you know, hey, manager,
so and so, we really need more people on Saturday.
Saturday mornings are just brutal. Can we get one more person?
(13:41):
And they'll come back and say, unfortunately, the labor doesn't
cut it. You know, we don't have the time, we
don't have the people. We need to work on getting
some more people out of our drive through and then
we could see if that ups our labor budget to
have more people on the floor. So it's it's this
constant cycle of work harder, go faster, and maybe you'll
have a little bit of put on you if they
have another person to the floor, But that's a really
(14:03):
big if.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Well, Now, other than the staffing issues when you were
at Starbucks initially, what did you begin to notice were
some other problems? In other words, what were the problems
that were substantial enough that guided you to want to
start a union to address them?
Speaker 3 (14:18):
For me, it was a lack of accountability for management,
a lack of accountability through the company as a whole.
Later on, as I began to learn more and more things,
but really it came down to the actions of my manager.
A lot of the time, he's no longer with the company,
but it was right when I started at Camp Road.
(14:40):
I transferred from another location in Buffalo from McKinley location
and came to Camp Road as it opened up, and
we had a lot of new hires coming in. They
were bright, prospective people, and I was really excited to
work with them. And as we know, there is the
stereotype of the gay barista, and I think so Starbucks
(15:00):
kind of loves it because we just they flock. We
flocked to Starbucks to work because it's seen as a
progressively valued company and it seems like a safe place
to work that you might not get otherwise. So we
had a lot of openly gay partners, openly trans partners
that came into my store to work, and they were
(15:21):
amazing people. I love talking to them, I love their
work ethic. They were going to be great. I remember
thinking to myself, these are going to be amazing people
on the floor. Once they get those drinks down, they
are going to do amazing stuff. And as time went on,
over a period of two or three months at my location,
I saw all of them forced out in one way
(15:43):
or another. One by one. Partners were being outed on
the floor by management where I would have no idea
that someone was trans, or I wouldn't know their gender
identity because what's at my business, and they would go
and say it out right. There was a partner at
my location and she didn't have access to a vehicle.
Starbucks has benefits for ride share and stuff, but it's
(16:05):
not comprehensive coverage to gets you to work from nine
to five, so she would rely on rides from friends.
But she was quick, she was smart. I thought if
anyone was going to really excel, it was going to
be her. And I came into work one day expecting
to see her on my shift and asked my fellowship supervisors, like, Hey,
why isn't she in? And they told me that my
(16:26):
manager had fired her, And that just left me a
little bit flabbergasted. I was like, what do you mean
he fired her? She was doing great. I'm not understanding.
And the reason he fired her was because she was
a couple minutes lately, two to five minutes late coming
into her shift, despite him knowing that she relies on
other folks to get rides, that she was trying her best.
(16:52):
She was doing amazing, and I've seen people late far
more far more often than this scenario. And she was
just gone. And she was so excited to use the
healthcare benefits that Starbucks re fights because it's gender inclusive healthcare,
so that she could actually begin hormone replacement therapy, she
could look into surgery if she so wished, and she
(17:14):
was just so optimistic, and she was so happy to
be working for Starbucks. And it was just gone in
a snap. And I saw this same trend repeat over
and over again, and I just didn't know what to do.
I was angry. I was frustrated because this isn't what
this isn't what I signed up for, This isn't what
(17:35):
I expected this to be like. But I didn't know
how to change it. So I was just sort of
left frustrated.
Speaker 1 (17:42):
And you think that they targeted her because she was.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Trans I do think so. I do think my manager
targeted her because she was transit.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Other than the firing itself, he was the one that
made comments in front of other people publicly about her gender. Yes,
when you say that, I mean regardless of one's view
of transgenderism and companies being asked to pay for hormone
injections and surgeries and so forth, like that. I mean,
people are entitled to a certain amount of privacy and
(18:11):
dignity in the workplace. How did everybody else react? Because
what I'm getting to is, when did the moment come
for the unionization thing where it dawns on you and
you start to enlist people. Or was there a group
think where there were a bunch of people who you
were all talking to each other going this has got
to change.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Yeah, I wish I had an easy answer in the
sense that there was that sort of like click and
boom moment. For me, it was a lot of situations
like this where partners privacy wasn't being respected, where workers
that have been in a company for seventeen years were
making within a dollar what I was making coming in
at two years. So at that point when the unionization
(18:49):
effort kicked off, I was already ready to make something happen.
I wanted change. I just didn't know that options like
unionization existed for a Starbucks location until one of my
fellow co workers texted me and said, Hey, can we
talk about work stuff? But we can't do it at work?
And I was a little bit confused. It's like, what
(19:12):
could we possibly need to talk about work? Outside of work,
I'm not following, and he said, please, like, can you
meet me at Spot Coffee. I had no idea that
I would walk into Spot Coffee and be asked how
I felt about unionizing Starbucks. That one trip to a
coffee shop changed my life.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Activist Gianna Reeve. If you appreciate conversations about the labor movement,
check out my episode with former California assembly Person and
head of the California Labor Federation Lorena Gonzalez.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
My favorite part of the story is having to go
to then Governor Jerry Brown. I mean, I'm like, oh God,
I got to talk to him about cheerleaders. We were
at a dinner together and I said, Governor, when you
have a chance on and talk about this bill I'm
working on. It has to do with professional cheerleaders. And
he said I was a cheerleader, and I was like.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Are you kidding me?
Speaker 4 (20:08):
I've hearing this.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Luck would have it.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
He was a cheerleader in college or high school. And
so I was like, oh, I think I'm going to
get this one.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
But we did.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
I'm very proud of that.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
To hear more of my conversation with Lorena Gonzalez, go
to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Gianna
Reeve shares some of the conditions that led to the
unionizing effort at Starbucks. I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were
(20:44):
listening to Here's the Thing union organizer. Gianna Reeve was
a shift supervisor at the Camp Road Starbucks in the
Buffalo area of upstate New York when her location filed
the petition to unionize in twenty twenty one. A simple
meeting with one of her co workers would change the
course of Gianna's life.
Speaker 3 (21:06):
He told me about the first union meeting that was
going to have partners from all the different locations in
Buffalo come together and talk and see if this was
a movement with legs basically, so going to this meeting.
Before this, I was sort of entrenched in Camp Road
in that I didn't really go to other store locations.
(21:28):
I didn't really pick up shifts there. I was really
focused on just doing my job at Camp Road and
doing it well, and I didn't have a lot of
conversations with workers outside of my store. So going into
this meeting and hearing a lot of the same problems
existing at these other store locations in Buffalo that I
think is what I would describe as like that clique
(21:49):
for me, that this isn't just a camp road issue.
This is a Starbucks issue, and this needs to be addressed.
When you have a half dozen baristas in a circle
all time talking to each other and going wait, wait,
your store has wasps too, Yeah, my partner just got
sent to the er because she was stung on the floor,
and conversations like that of like, oh did they take
(22:10):
away your non slip floor mats? My store doesn't even
have non slip formats. My store has carpet in the
back room, and just continuous stories just bouncing off each
other of all of these things that haven't been addressed
over the years they've been at Starbucks. It was just
mind boggling how similar our stories were.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
So when you mentioned the carpeting versus the non slip thing,
I mean, I only want to focus on that to say,
so there were places, there were Starbucks that were making
the necessary changes to protect their customers and their workers
and some that weren't. And not was every Starbucks derelict
than these kinds of modifications, or were some better than others?
Speaker 3 (22:50):
Some We're definitely better than others. A lot of store
locations are older and that they haven't had remodels or
improvements in years. It's kind of like if you had
ten different things and you said pick three or four
out of these ten. I think every Starbucks would be
able to pick three or four things if I could
sit here and make a list of either structural, safety, employment,
(23:12):
or labor issues that they're having on the floor, and
they would be able to do so. For me, it
was seeing a lot of problems with labor cuts, with staffing,
with wages, with healthkin safety, with management accountability, and for
others it was something maybe like health and safety in
the sense that carpeting in the back room is an
(23:33):
absolute no for a food service jomp. I've never heard
of anything like that before. There was a point when
management had come in over one hundred corporate officials that
come into Buffalo and they were asking workers, you know,
what can we do to make things better for you here?
We really dropped the ball on Buffalo what can we do?
(23:53):
And for Camp Road, a lot of it was our floors.
We were a brand new store. They weren't made to
handle the salt that was coming in from the snow,
and they were wearing down. We had our grout was
just being eaten away, and that creates problems with fruitflies.
So our store was just covered, covered and fruit flies.
It was disgusting. No one wanted to work like that,
(24:14):
No one wanted to serve food and drink like that.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
So interesting.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
At some point management said we got you, no worries,
We'll take care of this, and they had a crew
come in after clothes in the in the middle of
the night and try and refinish our floors. What they
did was they sanded away the ceilant on the tile
and made it porous. They essentially ruined our stores floor tiling,
(24:39):
and it was just the problem became even worse. It
was exacerbated by this action. And to me that really
it sounds funny to say. It's a little bit of
an overall theme with Starbucks' attempts at either helping in
quotations or union busting and saying, Okay, we're here, we're listening,
making the.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Wor workspace healthier for the workers and the customers.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Yeah, yeah, let's make it healthier for you. What can
we do to make it healthy and then us saying
something and then being like hurt, you got it, but
then taking actions that don't inherently help the problem or
they make the problem worse.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Do you find that that's a theme that the company
didn't rely enough on the workforce to glean information what
was best for those locations.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Absolutely, I mean everything I'm talking about and all of
these problems that are existing in my store and now
nationally on this level we're talking about, all of this
could have been solved by a seat at the table
on Starbucks's board of directors. They have two honorary empty seats.
One is for I believe customers and the other is
for all of the barife dosen' workers with the company.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
They've never filled those seats.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
Yes, why aren't those seats filled? Because if those seats
were filled, I think this company could be so much better.
Starbucks workers want this company to be that human, worker
driven company that wants to spark change, positive change. We
want to see that happen. That's why we're all here,
That's why we sort of were interested in the company
in the first place. That's why we applied.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
When does the word strike, When does the word union?
When does that enter the conversation and the person you
were with at the other coffee shop was that they
need to talk to you about work outside of work.
Where does it go from there?
Speaker 3 (26:22):
That goes into that first meeting we had with other
Starbuck partners from other locations in Buffalo, not just from
the first three but from all of them, and then
very rapidly after that, where right now the timeline is
August of twenty twenty one, and we're going forward and
(26:42):
we're saying, yeah, we need this to happen. So the
next step in the organizing process is going to be
signing union cards and talking to each worker on the
floor through one on one conversations. And there is this
beautiful one week window where we could talk without restriction,
and we could just discuss, and we could brainstorm, and
we could imagine what this company could look like if
(27:04):
all of our voices were put into it, and we
could really make a difference. So we got I believe
between sixty six and seventy percent cards signed at Camp
Road in a matter of a couple of days, and
we filed for union election. So there was that great
one week window where a lot of movement was happening,
(27:26):
a lot of progress, We had a lot of momentum,
and then at the end of that week window it
started to shift. We put out a letter from all
of the workers that initially went to the meeting about
our intent to organize, because it's generally good practice and
it signifies your attempt to organize to the company so
(27:48):
that you're protected legally. It's funny, the more public you
are about your intent to organize, the more protected you are,
and from a legal standpoint, because the company can't argue
that they didn't know. It is retaliation if they try
to terminate you or reprimand you at that point. So
they got our letter. We had our amazing week, and
(28:10):
then we started to see people from Starbucks corporate flood
into Buffalo. I think we've counted over one hundred different
names to do, what to surveil and to intimidate, and
to influence.
Speaker 1 (28:28):
And to look for grounds to terminate you.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Yes, right, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
How many of the people that were perceived, whether they
signed any paperwork or whether they were completely fully expressing
their support of the unionization publicly, How many of your
fellow workers there were terminated since they commencement of the union.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Organizing the termination? I can't say exactly a number. They
did terminate one of our my friend that I met
in the coffee shop Will. They terminated Will for wearing
a suicide awareness pin. So prior to the corporate members
coming into Starbucks Buffalo locations and staying there for months,
might I add, they had changed Starbucks policy to that
(29:14):
you can no longer wear non Starbucks affiliated pins unless
it's a labor pin. This was a direct dig at
us wearing our union pins on the floor, so now
we were no longer allowed to wear them. Unfortunately, at
my location, we had a partner passed away by suicide
and we all got these pins. One of our partners
(29:37):
got these pins that say you are not Alone, and
it has like the number for the one of the
suicide foundations on it, and we asked and asked and
asked if we could wear these on the floor, if
they could just make one exception because we lost someone
that we all loved, And they said, sorry, but no,
we don't care. We're not You're not going to get
(29:59):
an exception for this not wearing it, ignorant of the
fact that even making this policy change was illegal in
the sense that they cannot change conditions in the store location.
The rules that exist when you file for union election
have to be the same throughout the union election. So
they've made this change and now they've said, we are
not going to make this exception.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Can they moved the goal post in order to find
a way to fire people.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
Absolutely, that was a change of our it's called laboratory conditions.
That was a change of laboratory conditions. So that shouldn't
have happened in the first place. And to not display
the empathy that's typically so embedded in the ethos at
this company, and saying, why can we at least wear
pins to honor a partner that's passed away, the partner
(30:45):
that everybody looked on the floor. Can we at least
have that even for a week? For a day, no
leeway was given.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Organizer Gianna Reeve. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on
the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you'll get your podcasts
when we come back. Gianna Reeve shares the public's reaction
to Starbucks workers striking. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening
(31:26):
to Here's the Thing. Starbucks union organizer Gianna Reeve attended
a meeting in Buffalo with then CEO Howard Schultz and
other members of Starbucks leadership in late twenty twenty one.
She would end the meeting confronting Schultz about the company's
labor busting practices. I was curious how such an unorthodox
(31:48):
meeting came together in the first place.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
The invite list was every partner in the Buffalo area,
So if you're barista, you were invited. They closed our
star locations early to have us go to this meeting
at a high regency hotel, as they put it, special guests.
Some of us thought it might be Taylor Swift. Others
among us were like, they're going to bring out Howard.
(32:13):
They're going to try and bring out the big guns
to convince us that what we're doing isn't the right
move for the company.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
How many people were in that room, would you guess.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
Between one hundred and two hundred. But the interesting part
of that is that about a third of the people
that were in the room were the corporate members that
had been coming to the Starbucks locations for months at
that point and surveilling and harassing and impeding on the
flow of operations in these stores. They were there as well,
wearing crisp out of the bag Green Aprons sitting and
(32:44):
listening and just eating up on this whole experience, while
there was another bunch that were just baristas from the
Buffalo's stores wondering what the hell was going on.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
How long did the meeting last?
Speaker 3 (32:59):
The lasted about an hour and a half. It was
about a half an hour of the actual talks and everything,
and maybe about ten minutes when Howard came out and spoke.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
So he was not in attendance for the whole meeting.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
No, he only came out for his speech and then
promptly left.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
So he was actually interested in talking but not listening.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yes, he wanted to talk, but not listen. And when
I believe there was there was a little bit of
tension in the room because as many as there were
Green Apron extras, there were also people in the front row.
I sat in the front row with another organizing partner
from Sheridan Bailey's location named James, and we sat in
(33:42):
the front row together because we had talked prior a
bunch of us and said, wouldn't it be crazy if
someone asked Howard Schultz after he was done speaking to
sign our set of fair election principles which provide us
more protections. It provides union workers equal time. If they're
going to have captive meetings with workers, we would be
given essentially the same time. It would be a document
(34:04):
saying that we're not going to threaten union workers anymore.
We're extending an olive branch. So he said, wouldn't it
be crazy if someone did this? And someone asked? And
for some reason in my stupid bravery or just impulse
or adrenaline, I said, yeah, wouldn't it? And I took
the paper and went and sat in the front row
(34:24):
and I listened to his whole speech so in depth.
I also listened to the podcast episode he was on
with you Alec, and I noticed a lot of the
same beats, the same story of this is the company
that he wanted to be, that he modeled this after
what his father didn't have. He wanted this to be
a company that his father would be proud to work from.
The projects yes, as often likes to say yes. And
(34:51):
so going into that and just listening and hearing the
same story now over and over again now that I've
heard it, and wondering, wouldn't his father have wanted union
membership for himself and wanted representation and protections at work.
And during this Congress meeting with Howard, Senator Ed Marquis
brought this up, and that was another point in which
(35:13):
Schultz bristled and became visibly annoyed or frustrated with this
line of questioning, even though it's something that baristas have
been thinking for a while now, because you can't separate
Howard from Starbucks, and this message and this idea is
embedded into the company. And as we're looking for ways
(35:34):
to meet the company better by having a worker focus,
you just can't help but think of that and wonder
what's happened. And I think what's happened is that the
workers don't have a voice, and we need to see
that shift.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Shultz step down.
Speaker 3 (35:48):
Correct, Yes, he's replaced. He went from Howard to Kevin
Johnson to Howard to now Laxman.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
Where is the effort now? Where's the unionization at Starbucks? Now?
Speaker 3 (36:00):
Right now we are at over I believe three hundred
unionized locations and counting where filing petitions nearly every day.
We are continuing to build power within the Starbucks locations
and find baristas that are experiencing the same problems that
we have because after Buffalo, and we won in Buffalo,
(36:22):
just a monumental win.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
So the Buffalo location is unionized, yes, and everybody that
works there is in the union. Everybody, Yes? What union
are they affiliated with?
Speaker 3 (36:32):
We're affiliated with Workers United, So we aren't Starbucks Workers United?
Affiliated with Workers United. We don't pay dues until we
have a contract, and that's been kind of the sludging point.
Starbucks has not really been bargaining in good faith with us.
There have been times where we'd come to the table,
we'd set up a meeting, it would be the briests
coming in and Starbucks' lawyers would show up for two
(36:55):
minutes and then leave and gone. Nothing negotiated, nothing really discussed.
And we've been seeing that sledge happen time and time
again with these bargaining sessions that we've been trying to have.
We have our non economic proposals all ready to go,
they're just not coming to the table.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
How can you compel them to sign the contract? How
does that work?
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Well, I'm so glad you asked. That's going to come
from building power within our consumer base. Consumers. You think
that they would be jumping at the chance to sort
of vote with their dollars and say no, I can
take a stand by not buying Starbucks. But the thing
is is that a lot of customers still don't know
that this is happening within Starbucks locations. They don't realize
(37:35):
that Starbucks has been putting on one of the most
aggressive union busting campaigns in modern history. So a lot
of the next steps are going to be educating consumers
and moving forward and letting them know what's happening in
these store locations and saying like, are you going to
not cross the picket line when you see us out
on strike? And we've had large strikes where there's been
(37:56):
over one hundred locations on strike at any given point
during some of the companies largest days of like Red
Cup Day. You come in, you get a free red cup,
you get your holiday drink, and you go. We had
strikes going at over one hundred store locations across the
country on days line.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
And the strike entail people just not working, yeah, work stop.
It was just no service.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
People can't say coffee, wow, No, you cannot.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
What was the public's voice in that? What would people
say to you while you were striking?
Speaker 3 (38:21):
There's always a couple of people that aren't too happy
when they see a picket line for whatever reason or other.
But a lot of the times it was customers being like, wow,
I didn't know that. I had no idea. I've been
coming here for the past however long, and I just
had no knowledge of this. I'll go to Spot coffee
or something instead, or like we point them to one
of the unionized coffee shops in Buffalo. Points like that.
On strikes, a lot of people are enthusiastic, and especially
(38:43):
in the Buffalo area. Buffalo's a union town. We have
higher union density than a lot of other locations across
the country. So chances are that you are in a union,
or you know someone that's in a union, or family
members in a union. So you see a picket light
and you're you're not crossing that.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Well, let me just say thank you so much for
your courage and your intelligence. I mean, you really really
are are somebody who you've obviously examined this from every
angle and you've brought about what's important. Changed because when
I saw those people at the Manchester Vermont Starbucks, I
mean working themselves, I mean just it was crazy. It
(39:20):
was crazy. And when you sit there and say you'd
like to have those conditions be improved. You're to be
committed for it. You've done. It's really, really truly amazing.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Thank you. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
My thanks to Starbucks Workers United organizer Gianna Reeve. This
episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hobin.
Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is
Daniel Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing that is
(39:56):
brought to you by iHeart Radio
Host
Alec Baldwin
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