Tampa Starbucks workers vote to unionize

Workers at a Starbucks store in Tampa voted to unionize Tuesday, joining seven other unionized Starbucks locations in Florida and over 400 Starbucks stores nationwide. Four other stores—in Oregon, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Iowa—similarly voted in favor of unionization Tuesday.

Blake Smallen, a 24-year-old barista at the Starbucks in Tampa, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that they made an effort to keep themselves “calm and composed” on the outside as the votes came in Tuesday afternoon—patiently, if eagerly waiting for the outcome of an organizing campaign that was just about a year in the making.

Seated next to a company lawyer at their coffee shop in Carrollwood at the corner of N Dale Mabry Highway and Linebaugh Avenue, Smallen wanted to jump up and down and scream. Instead, the barista “sat there politely,” they said, albeit “very filled with joy.”

According to Starbucks Workers United, the final vote count was 13–5 in favor of unionization at the Tampa location, which was shut down Tuesday for the union election. According to Smallen, a Starbucks employee of four-and-a-half years, workers first began organizing in earnest with Starbucks Workers United nearly a year to the day. However, they didn’t officially file a petition with the federal labor board to unionize until May 1 of this year.

Smallen’s store is the only Starbucks in the Tampa Bay area that has voted to unionize. In 2022, an Orlando-area Starbucks became the first unionized location in Central Florida . Workers at another Starbucks in Bradenton narrowly voted against unionization last summer.

Smallen, who uses they/them pronouns, works part-time at Starbucks, generally working the drive-thru on the evening shift upwards of 20-30 hours per week.

The process of organizing, they said, began by simply having conversations with coworkers about challenges they faced on the job. Smallen, who’s never been a union member before now, said that general working conditions—particularly understaffing—was “always the number one issue for us.”

“We're the busiest store in the district, and with the drive-thru always going, the cafe always going, and then all the [other] tasks that we still have to do, it gets extremely overwhelming when staffing is lackluster,” they shared.

Addressing staffing issues has been a key demand of Starbucks Workers United, a campaign of the labor union Workers United that first kicked off in earnest in August of 2021. The union secured its first, historic victory at a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York later that year in December.

The Seattle-based coffee chain, however, aggressively opposed the unionization campaign from the start, spending millions of dollars on legal counsel through notoriously anti-union law firms, and violating workers’ union rights by illegally firing and otherwise retaliating against pro-union workers along the way. The unionization campaign, still, spread like wildfire, slowed only at times by delays in getting company representatives to the bargaining table for contract talks.

Smallen said they and their coworkers in Tampa were inspired by the union’s tenacity, despite challenges workers have faced in moving forward with negotiating a first union contract. “It's really commendable that workers really stuck together and stuck it out, and got us to a place where now the company is willing to bargain with us,” Smallen said, referring to the collective bargaining process.

After fighting the union for years—racking up hundreds of “unfair labor practice” charges and frustrating company shareholders —Starbucks finally waved a white flag of sorts this past February, and has begun meeting with representatives from unionized Starbucks nationwide in earnest to negotiate union contracts.

At Smallen’s store, where they say the workforce skews on the younger side, building a union required being open-minded and listening to different perspectives from coworkers. “It took a lot of connecting and a lot of empathy,” they said.

Smallen was one of 15 Starbucks workers to sign a letter addressed to Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan earlier this month, announcing their decision to unionize.

At first, they carefully avoided using the term “union” in talks with other coworkers, understanding that for some, the term can draw certain, negative connotations, especially in Southern, Republican-controlled states like Florida, where union membership is dismally low, and state politicians regularly take legislative stabs at labor unions (and, by extension, their members) as it is.

Beyond improved staffing levels, workers at the Tampa-based Starbucks in their letter to the company also expressed a desire to use their collective voice to address health and safety concerns in the store, establish protections for baristas facing inappropriate customer behavior, and to increase pay to help workers afford the region’s higher cost of living.

“Many of us still struggle while the value we produce goes into corporate pockets,” their letter reads. Local job listings show a starting pay of $15-$16 an hour for Starbucks’ hourly barista positions, a pay rate far below what studies show a working adult in Tampa needs to earn to live comfortably. That is, the income a working adult or family needs to cover basic necessities like housing and grocery costs, as well as to pay off debt, put money away into savings, and—yes—maybe take your family to a movie or professional sports game every once in a while.

A social media account for Starbucks Workers United, representing more than 10,500 Starbucks retail workers nationwide, congratulated baristas and shift supervisors in Tampa on Tuesday, in addition to those at other stores who voted to unionize.

“CONGRATULATIONS to the many new Starbucks workers who are joining our SBWU union family,” a post published on X, formerly known as Twitters, reads.
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