IWW Labor Organizers Take On Starbucks in the Big Apple

THE
AGRIBUSINESS
EXAMINER
July 8 2004, Issue #358
Monitoring Corporate Agribusiness
>From a Public Interest Perspective

EDITOR\PUBLISHER; A.V. Krebs
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WOBBLIES (IWW), STARBUCK'S
FACE OFF IN THE BIG APPLE

THOMAS GINSBERG, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS: Starbucks Coffee, a corporate icon of success and style since the 1990s, is confronting a legendary warrior for labor rights from the 1920s.

The Wobblies, otherwise known as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a leftist labor organization founded in 1905 and now based in Philadelphia, has taken initial steps toward unionizing a Starbucks coffee shop in New York City --- the first in the United States.

If it succeeds, the group could score a notable public-relations victory for labor. It might even encourage more organizing in the hard-to-unionize service industry.

Or maybe it will just spawn more catchy phrases, such as "ergonomic minefield" --- its term for contortions at the espresso machine. After all, it was an IWW leader who coined the phrase "pie in the sky" in 1911 to parody the lofty rewards offered to workers.

"This isn't a quaint neighborhood coffee shop," said Daniel Gross, 25, an organizer of the effort at Starbucks' Madison Avenue and 36th Street location in Manhattan.

The company and a group calling itself the Starbucks Baristas Union each presented its arguments in June to the New York office of the National Labor Relations Board.

A labor-board assistant regional director, Elbert Tellem, said the board hopes to decide within days which workers, if any, are eligible to vote: just workers at the Madison Avenue shop, as the union wants, or all workers and shift supervisors in the company's 50-shop lower Manhattan district, as Starbucks counters.

The union also might test Starbucks' scheduling system, in which workers change their shifts day by day --- either by choice or by assignment.

"Partners," as Starbucks calls its workers, "like it because they can go to school, they can do different things," spokeswoman Audrey Lincoff said.

But few if any of the hourly workers have regular schedules or are allowed to amass more than 40 hours a week, according to the IWW. Organizers also cite hazards: 200-degree steaming milk, wrist-wrenching movements on the coffee machine and pressure to work ever faster.

It's unclear whether any major U.S. union has tried to organize Starbucks. With $4.1 billion in revenue last year, Starbucks has roughly 8,000 coffee shops worldwide, half outside the United States. Only nine --- all in Canada
--- are unionized, Lincoff said.

Gross said many Starbucks workers have contacted him since hearing about the organizing effort, formally led by Local 660 in Portland.

Lincoff said internal surveys show that 86% of Starbucks employees are "satisfied" with their jobs. But if Manhattan workers do form a union, she said the company would abide by the law.

"We've bargained in good faith in Canada," Lincoff said, "and so we would bargain with them, too."

The IWW, based in a ramshackle Philadelphia storefront since 2000, is striving to regain its 1920s heyday and even its 1960s folklore fame. With just roughly 1,000 members, the Wobblies have goals far beyond Starbucks.

"We would not call ourselves Marxist or anarchist," Buss said. "But we do say there doesn't need to be such a thing as bosses. We think workplaces should be run in a democratic fashion, and workplace democracy means that workers have control over industries."

The Wobblies were the left wing of the Northwest labor movement and were involved in several violent confrontations in the Northwest early in the 1900s. In 1916, when IWW members went to Everett to support a strike, six workers were shot by sheriff's deputies. And in Centralia, on Veterans Day in 1919, members of the American Legion marched to the union hall of the Wobblies, seen as a threat to the local establishment, intending to attack it. A fight broke out, and four Legionnaires were shot and killed. One of the arrested Wobblies was later lynched by a mob; others were convicted and sent to prison.

Information from Seattle Times archives is included in this report.