Revolution in Buffallo: Starbucks employee Eisen (3rd from right) promotes the establishment of a union.
Build: AP
Starbucks, Amazon, Apple: In more and more US companies, employees want to form unions. But is this really the beginning of a new era of co-determination? Or are the big companies preventing the growing popularity?
Dhe revolution began in Buffalo. Here in the US state of New York, not far from Niagara Falls, Michelle Eisen has been employed in a Starbucks branch since 2010. It’s not a bad job, it comes with benefits like health insurance that she doesn’t have in her other job as manager of a theater company. And yet she pricked up her ears when, about two and a half years ago, employees at another coffee chain in Buffalo voted to form a union. “That gave me the flea,” she says.
Would it be conceivable to do the same at Starbucks? Where so far not a single one of the 9000 branches in the USA is unionized? In a company that prides itself on being a good employer and calls its employees “partners”? Eisen, on the other hand, thinks that something is wrong at Starbucks, and the impression has been reinforced during the pandemic. The workload has increased, for example due to additional tasks such as disinfecting the branch, on the other hand there was only a short-term hazard allowance.