Opinion: The sudden firing of a seven-year Starbucks worker shows the disregard corporations have for their workers.
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On March 2, a Starbucks worker was fired in the middle of her shift during peak ordering hours with the justification that management were acting on a month-and-a-half old write up that the worker had never been notified about. In protest, the other employees on shift went on strike for the rest of the day, leaving a large amount of mobile orders unfulfilled, though a sign with a link on how to get a refund was taped to the counter. This was shortly after the firing of university dining worker Will Garrahan and follows the pattern of Starbucks anti-union tactics seen nationwide.
The National Labor Relations Board has told Starbucks many times to reinstate workers that were wrongfully fired. Starbucks is also known for spreading anti-union propaganda in their training materials, such as the website one.starbucks.com, which was started by Starbucks to convince its employees to vote against unionization and contains a copious amount of misinformation, such as claiming that having employee interests represented by a union would make communication harder and that union leadership would be “inflexible.”
Eugene is a particularly strong Starbucks union area, with all but one of the locations in the city unionized. Starbucks corporate loathes this. It sees its employees gaining better conditions and benefits as a threat, even though it is a multi-billion dollar business. Starbucks workers in Eugene have pointed out that the company is excluding unionized stores from receiving benefits, such as pay raises, faster sick time accrual, and credit card tipping. The NLRB have reported that the tactics corporate has employed include retaliatory firings, having managers closely monitor workers and their conversations, closing stores that have voted to unionize and refusing to negotiate with union members.
Owen Wach, a fellow EMU Starbucks employee who has been a barista for three-and-a-half years, was on shift at the time of the firing.
“When I first started working [at Starbucks], unions weren’t a thing there. We were aware we could do it, but it was unheard of to have them in fast food in general,” Wach said.
According to Watch, the busy morning shift was like any other, but employees were already wary when they saw that the district manager was there. The store manager and district manager then pulled the employee, Alice, off the floor and sat down with her at a table in the EMU Fishbowl. She was in sight of all her coworkers when they fired her. The managers’ reasoning was that she had a write up for swearing in front of a manager from January, something she doesn’t recall even happening. She had never been informed about this write up or given a warning, which is a breach of company policy.
“I think there was an amount of shock; it’s one of those things you talk about but don’t really expect,” Wach said. “We were angry. It was the middle of a rush, and Alice was a hard worker and really good at her job.”
EMU Starbucks workers voted unanimously to unionize last year. Since then, they have tried to go to the bargaining table but have been met with nothing satisfactory from corporate.
“It was incredibly frustrating because even during the meetings, we would tell them what they were saying about unions was false,” Wach said, recalling what they had seen in unsuccessful bargaining meetings.
Starbucks often brags about how good its benefits are for its employees compared to other coffee chains. However, it is still far less than what workers need and deserve, especially when working in such a stressful environment. Baristas are usually paid minimum wage or slightly above it, which doesn’t adequately cover the ever-rising cost of living.
“If you’re the cream of the crop, then the entire crop is bad,” Wach said. “Starbucks and UO would rather have people be worse at their jobs and not be there as long than to pay them or respect them.”
The unjust firing of Alice is a symptom of a much larger issue in the way Starbucks is run. It is also troubling that it happened so soon after the firing of Garrahan. The university itself and the businesses operating on campus feel they have full license to mistreat their employees. Now that workers have come together to demand better conditions for themselves, all these institutions and corporations do is wield their power in increasingly petty and destructive ways, often to their own detriment.
