Eugene is a labor town, a fact that will soon come to the heart of campus as the EMU Starbucks unionizes. Not only will this be a great win for the employees, but also sets a precedent for all student workers to leverage their own conditions. If your fellow students in the EMU make $15 an hour with benefits, why should your position be any different? But until that point, we must practice solidarity with workers and make it clear that union-busting is not welcome at our university.
Our Starbucks’ efforts to unionize is one in a national trend and represents a shift to give those that actually do the labor — the workers — just compensation.
Of course, Starbucks would prefer its stores not unionize and will union-bust however possible, such as firing staff like in a Memphis store earlier this month.
Trinity Smith, a student worker at the EMU Starbucks spoke to me about the store’s decision to unionize. “We look at the work we put in, and the pay doesn’t reflect that,” Smith said. “We are left to drown.”
The store is cramped and not designed to handle the magnitude of orders, and because it serves broke college kids, it receives few tips. But the outlook was good among the Starbucks employees I talked to, including Owen Wach, a supervisor at the store.
“It’s hard because Starbucks portrays themselves as a progressive company that meets the needs of everybody, but then you see what it really is, and it’s people being paid as little as possible,” Wach said.
Because no matter how many times your boss says you’re “partners,” they’ll just as quickly turn around and publish anti-union propaganda with quirky corporate art — like Starbucks did.
However, there is still cause to worry, as both employees shared a story of a coworker who was overheard talking about unionizing by the district manager. The worker was promptly fired for a violation that happened a year prior while working at a Starbucks in California. This is blatant union-busting and has no place on our campus or any workplace.
I asked Saul Hubbard, the UO media and communications manager, in an email if the administration has a position on Starbucks unionizing. To which Hubbard replied: “The University is not involved in the labor relations of outside businesses.” But don’t view the university’s non-interventional rhetoric as neutrality, as the current organization of student labor on campus has almost certainly been intentionally designed to operate as covert union-busting.
Across campus student workers are divided arbitrarily within positions to keep them isolated and to make it difficult to map a workplace. For instance, take the EMU, which employs catering, information services and janitorial workers; they’re kept separated despite being paid by the same employer and working in the same space. I spoke to Avery Summers, a student worker in EMU event services who asked to be referred to by pseudonym, about how their workplace is setup.
“My job is very insulated and does not interact with other student workers,” Summers said. “Even if it’s not intentionally against organizing, it is inherently preventative of organizing.”
Summers described feeling like an “independent contractor,” as according to documents shared with me event services staff regularly work above the weekly limit of 25 hours for student workers. Moreover, because scheduling is handled digitally, it is common to not see the same coworkers for weeks at a time.
Or take residence assistants; RAs are essential for the operation of residence halls but are not designated as university workers. They’re just assistants and don’t receive hourly pay or fair compensation for their integral labor.
Related: “Opinion: RAs are underserved”
UO has always been adamant that its workers should see themselves as students first, a phrase I initially thought was a positive message promising security in their academic career. Now I see it as an obfuscation of their real role as the workers who do essential labor. If students are not conscious of themselves as workers, they are less likely to bargain for their rights on the job. Because of that, UO’s union-busting is more insidious to me than Starbucks’; it is clandestine and structural, never overt.
So show solidarity to the workers who make our campus function. Don’t let the university alienate you from those in similar conditions, for an injury to one is an injury to all. And a win for one is leverage for the rest.