The biggest morale boost for Richmond Starbucks barista Tyler Hofmann is when customers make up names like “union solidarity” to identify their orders.
“It gets printed out and [employees] have to call out union stuff in the café,” he said. That opens up an opportunity for discussion about workers’ ongoing grievances against the specialty coffee giant.
Hofmann is working at Starbucks again after having been fired last May in what his union and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) claimed was illegal retaliation for his organizing efforts at the Richmond store. A private settlement was reached between the company and the regional board of the Workers United union, according to the NLRB, and Hofmann was reinstated.
The barista battle for higher wages and better hours has spread since a group of employees in Buffalo, New York voted in December 2021 to become the first unionized Starbucks in the nation. To date, workers in nearly 300 of the more than 9,000 U.S. locations have voted to unionize, but Starbucks has yet to reach a contract agreement with any of those stores.
Five Starbucks locations in the Richmond area were the first in Virginia to vote to unionize in April 2022, becoming local units of Workers United, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union. Workers at Starbucks stores in Merrifield and Leesburg quickly followed suit. In November, employees at the Arlington Courthouse Plaza store joined the list.
But unionization efforts, while...
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