Published by Knoxville Compass
Jesse Fox Mayshark | Oct. 5, 2022
On November’s ballot, voters will have the chance to add Tennessee’s ‘right to work’ law to the state constitution. Union members and organizers strongly oppose it.
When Ava Marlow and her coworkers at the Starbucks store on Cusick Road in Alcoa organized a union drive earlier this year, they were motivated by basic workplace concerns.
“We felt that we didn’t have a say in our working conditions,” Marlow told a room full of East Tennessee labor representatives during a meeting last month. “We were chronically understaffed, and we felt that we were underpaid. And corporate refused to cooperate with us.”
The drive worked. On July 11, 15 of the store’s employees voted to unionize, while seven voted no. The Alcoa store became the fourth union Starbucks location in Tennessee, following two in Knoxville and one in Memphis.
It was part of a nationwide wave of organizing efforts coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the National Labor Relations Board, petitions for union votes at workplaces were up 58 percent during the first three-quarters of the 2022 fiscal year from the same period in 2021.
But Marlow and her labor compatriots have already discovered a built-in challenge to expanding the union’s footprint within the store: Tennessee’s “right-to-work” law, enacted in 1947. It says that no employee can be forced to join a union as a condition of employment.
Effectively, that means that even in a...
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