(The Center Square) — A South Carolina Starbucks Coffee employee wants the National Labor Relations Board to hold a vote asking store employees whether they want to remove the Starbucks Workers United union from the store.
Kacie Bory, who works at a Starbucks near Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport, filed a petition with the federal board, one of more than a dozen Starbucks workers nationwide have filed.
“My coworkers and I are very disappointed with the performance of SBWU union officials,” Bory said. “They’ve done a lousy job of communicating with me and my colleagues and also haven’t stood up for our interests in the workplace.”
According to the National Right to Work Foundation, which is representing Bory for free, the petition contains enough signatures to trigger a union decertification election under the NLRB’s rules.
“The well-funded and highly politicized campaign to install union power at Starbucks is fast unravelling, as more and more workers are discovering that their interests deviate from those of union organizers, many of whom left soon after installing the union,” National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix said in an announcement. “While SBWU officials nationwide are using every trick in the book to try to block the workers they claim to ‘represent’ from voting on whether the union deserves to stay, Foundation staff attorneys will continue to fight for the exercise of this essential free choice right.”
Starbucks Workers United derided the move.
“The National Right to Work Foundation, an extremist organization, is partnering with Starbucks’ virulent and illegal anti-union campaign,” Starbucks Workers United said in a statement to The Center Square.
“Starbucks illegally refuses to bargain with our union, illegally disciplines and fires union supporters, and illegally changes working conditions, then the National Right to Work Foundation piggy-backs on this activity in an attempt to decertify our union,” the union added. “The National Labor Relations Board so far has dismissed every decertification filed at Starbucks stores because they are irreparably tainted by Starbucks’ illegal conduct. We expect the same result with the current decertification.”
In an email, a Starbucks spokesperson told The Center Square that while the company continues to make “good faith efforts to negotiate first contracts for certified stores,” partners at 16 stores nationwide have filed petitions to decertify Workers United as their bargaining representative. The spokesperson said the company has no affiliation with the National Right to Work Foundation.
“Unfortunately, in each instance where partners have appropriately filed petitions to hold a decertification vote, Workers United and the NLRB have sought to deprive those partners of their right to choose whether they want to maintain union representation through a secret ballot election,” the spokesperson said.
“Union representation is a personal choice upheld by the complex framework of U.S. labor law, and we respect the right of our partners to decide whether they want to join, or refrain from joining, a union,” the spokesperson added. “Workers United and the NLRB should equally respect the rights of all partners regardless of their views.”
