Forbes and Atwood Starbucks workers unanimously vote to unionize

Baristas at the Forbes and Atwood Starbucks voted 10-0 to unionize last Wednesday, making it the 15th unionized Starbucks location in Pittsburgh.

“We weren’t feeling heard or well-represented as workers there. People were frustrated and it was time for a change,” Kalei Hamilton, a 24-year-old Pitt alum and barista at the Forbes and Atwood Starbucks, said.

The baristas unionized with the help of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is affiliated with the Pennsylvania Joint Board of Workers United. The SEIU also helped other local Starbucks locations such as Craig Street and Amos Hall unionize in 2022.

This location is the latest of dozens of Starbucks stores to unionize in the past two months as part of Starbucks Workers United’s national drive. Over 10,500 partners at 430 stores nationwide have now unionized with Starbucks Workers United in the past three years, according to a Starbucks Workers United press release.

According to Hamilton, some of the baristas had considered unionization before, but March proved to be a “tipping point” after a change in management at the location led to a buildup of consistent understaffing and overworking of employees.

“There were a lot of scheduling issues coming up for partners, and they weren’t able to get the hours they needed,” Hamilton said. 

Kye Neilsen, a 30-year-old resident of South Side and barista at the Forbes and Atwood Starbucks, said management wasn’t scheduling baristas fairly.

“Starbucks asks us to have a certain level of availability that they will agree upon with us and then sign off on,” Neilsen said. “Part of that is saying what minimum hours you would want, what maximum hours you would want, what your desired target would be. I think a lot of people very much were not getting even their minimum, and I feel like a lot of people felt not cared for when they had to have a written agreement to say what their minimum was, and they couldn’t even get that met.”

Gianna Dinardis, a junior at Pitt majoring in legal studies, is another barista who helped lead the unionization effort at the Forbes and Atwood location after struggling with how management handled scheduling.

“I told [the manager], with my situation I needed a minimum of 25 to 30 hours a week and he would not give that to me…even when I had classes, I would open my schedule and skip classes, but he would still never give me the hours,” Dinardis said. 

The scheduling problems then led to understaffing issues, according to Dinardis.

“He was worried about going over on labor, but we would be under[staffed] and then we’d be so short staffed and we would get so busy, and we weren’t able to accommodate everyone,” Dinardis said. “We would have 30-minute long waits during rushes when normally it would be like 10, 15 minutes when we have everyone staffed, and he just didn’t really see that as a big deal.”

Neilsen said higher wages, more consistency from Starbucks and its management and being able to band together also motivated the baristas to unionize.

“We’re trying to make the store safe for us and better for us as well as for customers, and sometimes if we pushed back on issues, it felt like we would start to face retaliation,” Neilsen said.

Dinardis said she and her coworkers have tried reporting their issues with their managers by filing ethics and compliance complaints. According to Dinardis, the problem with this process is that the district manager, who reviews the complaints, is “buddy-buddy” with the Forbes and Atwood manager.

“We’ve gone above [the district manager] at this point. We’re still trying to resolve all that stuff slowly,” Dinardis said.

The store’s manager declined to comment.

In an email response to a request for comment, Starbucks spokesperson Jay Go Guasch said Starbucks respects “our partners’ rights to have a choice on the topic of unions” and referred to the recent “significant progress” made with Workers United at a two-day bargaining session in Atlanta, Georgia.

“Starbucks is eager to reach ratified agreements in 2024 for stores that have opted for union representation,” Guasch said. “We are committed to better communicating with unions elected to represent our partners and are pursuing a path forward that would allow us to resume productive contract negotiations for our represented U.S. partners.”

Regarding scheduling, Guasch said Starbucks is “dedicated to partner-centric scheduling.”

“To achieve this, Starbucks collects a range of preferred, minimum, and maximum hours to build a complete picture of partner preferences and assist store managers in scheduling and managing their workforce. This scheduling protocol enables partners to contribute to the personalization of their ideal schedules,” Guasch said. “Partner and store needs vary from location to location and thus, scheduling will look a little different from store to store and by market to market depending on many factors including state/local laws, partner preferences and business trends.”

Hamilton said Workers United was a “great resource” that helped the baristas organize by laying the groundwork for them.

“They gave us training on how to talk to our coworkers, they were in touch with us very frequently,” Hamilton said. “They have the experience. It took off the pressure of being nervous or not knowing how to organize, and they led the way and it was really helpful to have them with us.”

Hamilton said the next steps for their store’s union will be electing bargaining delegates and “hopefully getting to the bargaining table as soon as possible.”

“The movement is very interconnected and people are very in touch with one another,” Hamilton said. “It really truly is worker solidarity. It makes it easier to organize and have common goals because we are all very in the know with one another.”