Her first workday after handing out union cards at the Starbucks where she works, Laila Dalton found herself in a meeting with two managers. The managers had brought a list of complaints against Dalton, typed up the previous day.
The managers said Dalton, 19, had “failed to fully meet performance expectations” of her job as a shift supervisor. Dalton offered a different account: she was the leading voice of a union effort at her Phoenix, Arizona, store. She is just one of multiple Starbucks workers across the country accusing the coffee chain of harassing its pro-union employees.
“They’re just trying to make me quit at this point,” Dalton alleged to The Daily Beast.
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Spurred by pandemic-era working conditions, Starbucks employees across the country have moved to unionize their stores. They’re asking for better workplace safety, more transparency around pay and scheduling, more negotiating power in dealings with the coffee corporation. But some of those workers accuse Starbucks of retaliating against them, leading to a wave of firings, disciplinary write-ups, and work-hour reductions.
Starbucks denies the allegations, while pro-union workers say they’re coming to expect retaliation.
“I think anyone who’s been at any store that’s unionized has felt retaliated against in some way by this company,” Will Westlake, a pro-union Starbucks barista in Buffalo, New York told The Daily Beast.
Starbucks denied that the disciplinary measures were retaliatory.
“A partner’s interest in the union does not exempt them from the standards we have always held,” a spokesperson told The Daily Beast. “We will continue to enforce our policies consistently for all partners […] Claims of anti-union activity are categorically false.”
Danny Rojas, who worked at a Buffalo Starbucks until early March, disagrees. Rojas had worked at Starbucks for more than three years and became involved in union efforts last fall, when Buffalo became a hotspot for the Starbucks union movement.
“Buffalo is a union town and I think that that’s part of this town’s culture,” they told The Daily Beast. “Also, Starbucks presents themselves as a very progressive company, so a lot of [workers] come in who are progressive […] They are drawn to the values that Starbucks claims to have. They’re drawn to the ethics and they think that they’re gonna find an employer that will stand beside them in that way.”
But on March 3, Starbucks managers fired Rojas, citing two occasions on which Rojas had arrived late to work: once, the previous day, when car troubles had delayed Rojas for 26 minutes and once in January when snow plows blocked Rojas’ driveway, making them 20 minutes late for work. (Rojas says they texted managers about the snow plows at the time of the incident.) Rojas said managers also cited an incident from the previous year, in which they accused Rojas of “unwelcoming behavior” for discussing a desire to finish college and quit Starbucks.
In a video of the firing, first reported by the site More Perfect Union, Rojas describes their termination as retaliatory. “Respectfully, this wouldn’t be happening if I wasn’t part of the organizing committee,” Rojas tells their manager in the clip. “There are other partners who are late, other partners who are not in dress code, other partners who are not following standards, partners who are misgendering me at work.”
Rojas’ concerns were not unprecedented. The previous month, another Buffalo-based Starbucks union leader also claimed retaliation.
Cassie Fleischer, a Starbucks worker of more than four years, hasn’t technically been fired. “I’m technically still in the Starbucks system,” she told The Daily Beast last weekend. “But on Feb. 20, it was made evident that I would not be in the system in three weeks.” (She is still in the system, she told The Daily Beast on Friday, but has “not been allowed to return to work.”)
Fleischer, who became involved in the union in November due to concerns about her store’s COVID-19 precautions, said the coffee company dramatically reduced her working hours, essentially pushing her out of the job.
After workers at her store voted to unionize in December (making them the country’s first unionized Starbucks), Fleischer alleges that management hired a glut of new baristas, effectively diluting the pro-union workforce and eating into longtime employees’ work hours. “Now no one’s getting full-time, everyone’s getting part-time,” Fleischer alleged. “Some people are still getting the same amount of hours they’re used to, and then other people are getting 10 hours a week. It’s not enough to live on.”
Meanwhile that month, seven pro-union workers were fired from a Memphis, Tennessee, Starbucks, prompting similar accusations of a crackdown. Starbucks denied retaliating against the workers, pointing instead to those employees conducting union business in the store after business hours—a violation of Starbucks rules.
Westlake, who works with the group Starbucks Workers United, said the wave of firings surprised union organizers. The mass layoff in Memphis came the same day before workers in Oklahoma planned to announce their union campaign. Westlake, who was advising those Oklahoma employees, had to break the news.
“I said ‘guys, we need to talk about this,’” he recalls warning the Oklahoma workers. “We really didn’t think that the company was going to be capable of behaving in this kind of way.”
Westlake said Starbucks Workers United had filed approximately 20 National Labor Review Board complaints about alleged retaliation, “involving hundreds of incidents across the country.”
But none of those complaints had government backing until last week, when the NLRB issued a formal complaint accusing Starbucks of retaliating against Dalton and another pro-union worker in her store.
Dalton takes her job seriously, she told The Daily Beast. The full-time Arizona State University student has worked for the coffee company since she was 17, earning her way to a shift manager position. She had recently raised concerns about her store with management, she said, but felt stymied, especially after she was unable to secure a different schedule to address a health issue in January. Inspired by union efforts in other stores, she and a colleague started their own organizing committee. Dalton passed out cards with union information on Jan. 22, she said.
On her next day in the store, Jan. 25, two managers sat her down and “gave me a whole page of write-ups that went months back.”
The write-up, reviewed by The Daily Beast, includes infractions from a missed shift in November to an incident in January during which she was nine minutes late. Dalton said she was particularly surprised by the company’s allegations that she had engaged in “inappropriate, negative documentation” earlier that month. Dalton said those incidents represented times when she had approached a manger with concerns about ongoings in the store.
“Every time I’d brought that meeting to them, it was turned around and I was the bad guy,” Dalton said of the incidents in the writeup.
She said the disciplinary complaints had continued, in a way she believes constitutes harassment.
The NLRB appears to agree, describing Dalton’s writeup and the termination of another pro-union colleague, Alyssa Sanchez, as retaliatory. The NLRB is seeking to restore Sanchez’s lost wages, and to compel Starbucks to inform employees of their rights.
“We will follow the NLRB’s process to resolve this complaint,” the Starbucks spokesperson said.
Westlake, the Starbucks Workers Union organizer, said sometimes the disciplinary measures might intimidate pro-union employees—but other times it provided more fuel for their cause.
When he called the Oklahoma workers the day after the Memphis firings, he expected to provide a pep talk to spooked employees.
Instead, “they felt more resolved in unionizing. It angered them and they were going to, now more than ever […] make sure that their store had a union and won a union,” he said.
“I was expecting to go into a conversation where I was going to be consoling people and like trying to cut down fears. But no, really the opposite was the case.”
