Portside

Starbucks Workers United (SWU) won its third store election February 28 in Mesa, Arizona. The vote was an overwhelming 25-3.

Workers at a “high-incident” Starbucks in Eugene, Oregon, are often expected to manage in-store conflicts and crises on their own. They say they're unionizing in response to the company not training or compensating them well enough for the task.

Between 2019 and 2021, the overall percentage of U.S. union members stayed flat. But the percentage of workers ages 25-34 who are union members rose from 8.8% to 9.4%, or around 68,000 workers, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Petitions to organize have come faster than even those involved first believed possible, according to Richard Bensinger, union organizer with Starbucks Workers United and a former organizing director of the AFL-CIO.

Today's labor upsurge could simply evaporate, but it's also possible that we're at the dawn of a new era, one in which the working underclass is drawn, like the industrial workers of the 1930s, into the mainstream and the labor movement is empowered.

Since the initial victory in Buffalo, workers at several other Starbucks stores throughout the country have filed for union elections, including in Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Knoxville, Tenn.

Starbucks corporate fought the Buffalo organizing effort. Massachusetts workers are preparing for a similar campaign by Starbucks.