Behind the scenes, the SEIU is orchestrating the Starbucks unionization campaign.
Behind the scenes, the SEIU is orchestrating the Starbucks unionization campaign.
J ust over a year ago, employees at the Elmwood Avenue Starbucks in Buffalo, N.Y., became the first in the country to unionize.
Since then, employees at about 350 Starbucks locations have filed unionization petitions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), over 270 of which have voted to unionize. Though only a fraction of the approximately 15,000 stores licensed and operated by the company in the U.S. have moved to unionize, and the pace of new petitions has slowed significantly in recent months, with employees in some stores already seeking to decertify the union, there’s no denying that the wave of unionization has been unlike anything faced by a similar nationwide chain in recent memory.
However, while most reporting about the union drive has depicted it as an organic, worker-led groundswell, almost no attention has been paid to the role of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — one of the nation’s largest and most militant labor unions — in orchestrating and bankrolling the nationwide campaign.
On its website, Starbucks Workers United — the entity filing the union petitions with the NLRB — describes itself as “a collective of Starbucks Partners across the United States who are organizing our workplaces with the support of Workers United Upstate, a union with experience building barista power.”
For its part, Workers United Upstate, also known as the Workers United Rochester Regional Joint Board, is one of the 13 joint boards that comprise Workers United. According to its website, Workers United is “an affiliate of SEIU” that “represents more than 86,000 workers in the apparel, textile, industrial laundry, food service, manufacturing, warehouse distribution, and non-profit industries. . . .”
Pursuant to an affiliation agreement reached in 2009, Workers United functions as a “conference” within SEIU. Both the affiliation agreement and its own constitution require Workers United to pay a “per capita tax” to SEIU from the dues it collects from each member.
According to publicly available annual financial disclosures filed with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Workers United affiliates paid more than $7.5 million in per capita taxes in 2021. Only $276,259 went to Workers United’s national headquarters; presumably the rest was paid to SEIU.
And the money flows both ways. According to its 2021 DOL filing, SEIU International granted $4.3 million back to Workers United affiliates last year, mostly as “support for organizing.”
Further, the president of Workers United, Lynne Fox, was paid nearly $211,000 in 2021 and also serves as an SEIU International vice president.
When workers at the Elmwood Starbucks voted to unionize on December 9, 2021, Workers United celebrated the results as “historic” and “monumental,” describing itself as “the parent company that will be representing Starbucks Workers United.”
While Workers United did not detail its involvement — presumably preferring that attention be focused on Starbucks employees for PR reasons — the effort would not have succeeded without it, at least according to Jaz Brisack, the most prominent Starbucks employee and organizer involved in unionizing the first Buffalo-area cafés. As reported by the Washington Post, Brisack — whose childhood hero was American socialist Eugene Debs and whose stated goal is to “overthrow capitalism” — participated in an unsuccessful 2017 effort by the United Auto Workers to organize a Nissan facility in Mississippi.
During her time with the campaign, Brisack met prominent union organizer Richard Bensinger. Before Brisack departed for Oxford University in 2019 on a Rhodes Scholarship, Bensinger invited her to work on a campaign to organize coffee shops in upstate New York. According to CBS MoneyWatch, Brisack agreed to do so after completing her studies. She returned to the U.S. and started work as a Starbucks barista in late 2020.
While she bristles at being described as a “salt” — someone who takes a job with a company with the intent to help a union organize it from the inside — the financial disclosure filed with DOL for 2021 by Workers United’s Rochester Joint Board shows that the union paid Brisack $68,884 last year.
It’s unclear the degree to which the Starbucks campaign has featured salts, but Brisack isn’t the only one. Articles in union and socialist publications Jacobin, In These Times, and Labor Notes all reference the organizing role played by employees who “consciously took jobs at Starbucks to organize.”
Outside the workplace, Workers United also funded an array of consultants, organizers, and attorneys to support the campaign.
When organizing her co-workers, Brisack would introduce them to professional organizers such as Bensinger “to show the baristas that she had a real union backing her,” according to the Washington Post.
Also, in a podcast interview with Jacobin, Brisack credited Workers United for the Buffalo victory, stating that “Starbucks Workers United would never have been possible if Gary Bonadonna, the leader of Workers United in upstate New York, hadn’t decided to back us up” and “really commit the resources to the fight.”
Indeed, in addition to paying Brisack, federal records indicate that Workers United funded an array of consultants, organizers, and attorneys associated with the early Starbucks wins:
- Bensinger was paid $82,500 in “consulting fees” by Workers United in 2021, according to its DOL disclosure. The Workers United Rochester Regional Joint Board paid Bensinger another $69,622 for “consulting services.” Bonadonna, the board’s manager and a Workers United vice president, was paid $143,277 in 2021.
- Workers United also paid $277,000 in “consulting fees” to Cuff’s Point LLC, the president of which, Christopher Chafe, was described by Yahoo News as “a strategic advisor to the Starbucks Workers United campaign.”
- The New York City–based pro-union law firm Cohen Weiss & Simon LLP was paid $115,533 by Workers United last year. Its website noted in March that the firm was “representing Workers United in more than a half dozen pending representation petitions for Starbucks stores around the NYC metro area.”
- Workers United paid $14,400 in consulting fees to Patrick Bruce, a Maine-based labor and socialist activist whose Twitter account suggests involvement in various union organizing campaigns, particularly Starbucks and Trader Joe’s.
Except for the initial Buffalo stores, all the Starbucks union elections occurred in 2022, meaning these 2021 examples just scratch the surface of SEIU’s involvement in the Starbucks campaign. More details about the extent of its support should become available when SEIU files its 2022 DOL disclosures later this year.
Though it can’t be denied at this point that a consequential number of Starbucks employees are open to unionization, SEIU’s external campaign, combined with credible and troubling allegations that NLRB officials are bending and breaking rules to assist union organizers, makes it difficult to determine just how organic the Starbucks unionization campaign really is.