Efforts to unionize Starbucks have been the focus of years of progressive activism. Judging by media coverage, you might think coffee-shop workers are also very enthusiastic about unionizing, and that their enthusiasm might be representative of a larger trend toward organized labor in the U.S. In early March, the Starbucks Workers United union, which is backed by the SEIU, celebrated an agreement with Starbucks to “build a foundational framework toward contract bargaining and organizing.”
But there are plenty of coffee-shop workers who aren’t interested in joining a union, including workers who have already been part of one and want out.
For example, workers at a smaller non-Starbucks coffee shop in Philadelphia voted out the Workers United union in September. Worker Marco Camponeschi led the effort, with help from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
“After the Workers United union was installed, there was a lot of employee turnover, and we soon found ourselves very short-staffed,” Camponeschi said. That means the union might have been using “salts” to organized the company. That organizing tactic includes having workers apply for jobs and get hired with the primary purpose of establishing a union, then quitting soon after.
Wanting out of a coffee-shop union has happened elsewhere. In 2023, Starbucks workers in New York City, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Bloomington, Minn., Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, and Greenville, S.C., also sought help from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation to decertify Workers United unions.
“Outside of coffee shops, union decertification efforts are becoming much more common,” National Right to Work reports. Data from the National Labor Relations Board “show that the number of worker-filed decertification petitions has increased each of the last three years.”
The media coverage of the decertification efforts pales in comparison with the hype around the Starbucks agreement. But media hype doesn’t change the facts: The overall U.S. unionization rate last year was at a record low of 10 percent. In the private sector, it’s only 6 percent, and half of all U.S. union members work for government. The vast majority of American workers don’t want what organized labor is selling.