The Workers’ Rights Board, an initiative organized by the nonprofit advocacy group Long Island Jobs for Justice, released the report based on testimony it heard during hearings in February – right around the time workers at Westbury and Garden City locations voted to unionize. At the hearings, workers shared their concerns related to health and safety on the job, gender inequities in hiring and promotion, harassment, scheduling, and more.
“Workers asked for additional staffing to support rush hours, they were met with nothing other than having to deal with disgruntled customers and unnecessary stress,” said Diane Cantave, an organizer with Long Island Jobs for Justice, which organized a rally outside of a Starbucks store in Carle Place to share the report. “Workers testimonies revealed unofficial Starbucks staffing policies; Starbucks’ takeaway from the pandemic was that stores could operate with lower staffing levels for increased profit even when customer volume rebounded.”
Workers at as many as 400 Starbucks locations nationwide have voted to unionize in recent years, and several locations on Long Island have joined in on that effort.
Liv Ryan, a shift supervisor for more than four years at a now-unionized Lynbrook location, detailed some of these working conditions firsthand.
“Since I’ve been a worker here, I’ve had at least four store managers and two district managers,” Ryan said. “Our first manager made inappropriate comments about people’s accents or their race. One time, she even said to me and one of my gay coworkers that hurt her relationship to her child would be different than our relationship to our children. Even after we complained about that, she was still our manager for another two years. Then our second manager, who we had while that manager was on maternity leave, was more aggressively racist. She was going out of her way to schedule me more often than my coworkers who had been working there longer. And the only difference between me and [the other workers], is that they were Black.”
Ryan also claimed that she and several coworkers have lost benefits, despite unionization, and said she has been without healthcare since February. Ryan also claimed, in the official report, that there was a district manager at an Oceanside location who “used his connections to prey on high schoolers who worked at the Oceanside location,” and transferred that manager to a Farmingville location after workers there attempted to unionize.
Workers from other unions, including 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East and 32BJ SEIU, came to show support for Starbucks workers.
“Being in a union is very important to me, it’s very helpful,” Adriana Arbelaez, a Rite Aid worker for over 25 years and member of 1199, told the Press. “Union is power, so we all have to unite.”
The report’s release coincides with historic bargaining negotiations between the baristas’ union, Starbucks Workers United, and Starbucks Corporation which began in late April and lasted for two days. A second bargaining session will begin in late May.
“As a company, we respect our partners’ right to organize, freely associate, engage in lawful union activities and bargain collectively without fear of reprisal or retaliation — and remain committed to our stated aim of reaching ratified contracts for union-represented stores in 2024,” Rachel Wall, a spokesperson for Starbucks, told the Press. “Our focus continues to be on training and supporting our managers to ensure respect of our partners’ rights to organize and on progressing negotiations towards ratified store contracts this year.”
The full report can be read here.
