One year after Ithaca, NY became a hotbed for the Starbucks Workers United campaign by unionizing all of its Starbucks stores, Starbucks is moving to close them in a fairly brazen act of union-busting.
The chain announced this decision on Friday to SBWU workers, with an effective date of May 26, 2023. Without intervention, the city will have just one Starbucks, which is a non-corporate Barnes & Noble location. Underscoring how obvious of a union-bust this is, union leader Evan Sunshine states that: “[...]most of the customers [who went to the now-closed College Avenue store] have migrated to the Commons and Meadow stores in different capacities, meaning that the revenues for those stores are actually higher than they were in previous years, especially because the Commons store has recently acquired a bus stop.”
Ithaca SBWU has, unsurprisingly, quickly filed unfair labor practices with the NLRB and an injunction to halt the closure of both stores. Furthermore, Cornell students are organizing to sever the university's ties with Starbucks entirely—their products are sold on Cornell's campus. Without near-instantaneous adjudication by the NLRB, however, it seems certain that Ithaca's SBWU workers will lose their jobs. They have nowhere to transfer to.
Starbucks, for its part, alleges that its actions have absolutely nothing to do with the city's stores being unionized. They gave the following quote to WENY News, for example:
“In support of our Reinvention Plan, and as part of our ongoing efforts to transform our store portfolio, we continue to open, close and evolve our stores as we assess, reposition and strengthen our store portfolio,” commented Sara Trilling, executive vice president and president of Starbucks North America.
One may ask, however, why this plan conveniently involves shutting down all-union stores in a Starbucks-friendly college town. Further, one might be inclined to doubt the words of Starbucks given its treatment of the former College Avenue store, which was permanently shut down in June of 2022 following unsafe working conditions at the store and a strike by its new union about those conditions. Starbucks supposedly shut the store down for this reason—but tell that to regional director Mallori Coulombe, who was quoted as as saying “I would like to proceed with closure as the space is not meeting our partners or brand needs” in an email. Union workers were, of course, not consulted in the store's closure.
And obviously: this does not take into account their inarguable, widespread, Congressionally-recognized union-busting and efforts to completely destroy Starbucks Workers United around the country. The move is obviously farcical, and nobody should pretend otherwise. One can only hope for a righteous outcome here, but if such an outcome does occur it is likely to take months or years—meaning the damage may, as Starbucks intends, already be done.