From Bloomberg:
“Baristas at an experimental Starbucks-Amazon Go store in New York say the tie-up between the coffee chain and e-commerce giant has doubled their workload with no additional pay.
“Some 30 Starbucks Corp. employees at the Times Square location will decide Dec. 15 whether to join Starbucks Workers United, which has already unionized hundreds of cafes in cities around the US. Amazon.com Inc. itself has been roiled by labor activism at its warehouses, but this is the first time workers have sought to hold a union election at one of its retail locations.”
The story goes on:
“Starbucks workers stock Amazon inventory, such as prepared hot foods in the morning, which they say is a safety hazard. Employees claim they have been mildly burned while heating up Amazon foods. Management’s only response was to provide ointment, they said.
“Employees also clean both the Starbucks and Amazon areas. Amazon representatives worked frequently in the store when it first opened, but now only come in a couple of times a week to check on the technology, the workers said.
“Employees, who filed for the union election in October, say the difficult nature of the job, compared with working at a regular Starbucks, has fueled high turnover.”
KC’s View:
In some ways, this seems to be emblematic of all the union issues that Starbucks is having, and probably those of Amazon as well. The format has created twice the work, but the pay has not kept pace – which means that management is out of touch with the realities of this format’s demands. I think it can be fairly argued that often, when workers consider unionization, it is because they feel they have no voice, and that management has no ears.
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