It has been a remarkable two months for pro-union workers at Starbucks. Over 100 stores have now filed for union representation elections, and the number is growing daily. In response, Starbucks has bombarded workers with anti-union text messages, launched a slick anti-union website, forced workers to attend “captive audience meetings” to tell them that unionization would hurt them individually and collectively, and fired several pro-union workers at a store in Memphis. But Starbucks appears to have been caught napping by the speed with which the worker rebellion has spread from coast to coast since the union, Workers United, first won two out of three elections in Buffalo in December.
Littler to the rescue
So far, Starbucks principle anti-union strategy appears to have been to get its law firm, “union avoidance” behemoth Littler Mendelson, to argue that the union elections should not be conducted on a store-by-store basis, but by clustering multiple stores from a single geographic region. Littler is the world’s largest management-side labor and employment law firm, with over 1,000 attorneys in the United States and annual revenues in excess of $600 million. Littler has specialized in helping employers defeat union campaigns since its creation in San Francisco in the 1940s. Arthur Mendelson, one of the firm’s founding partners, once explained its approach to union campaigns, “Our clients pay a lot of money…. If they want aggressiveness, they are entitled to it”. Littler...
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