Workers at a Starbucks in Santa Cruz filed a union petition with the National Labor Relations Board, the first California store to join a growing national push to organize baristas and shift supervisors at the coffee giant.
Twenty-two of the store’s 31 workers signed union cards, said Joseph Thompson, a shift supervisor at the Starbucks who is leading organizing efforts.
Thompson said the Santa Cruz store experiences a high rate of incidents of harassment, indecent exposure and threats of violence, and employees don’t feel supported by management or corporate executives. Union discussions began in November, and the petition was filed Friday afternoon.
In early December, a Starbucks store in Buffalo, N.Y., voted in favor of forming the chain’s first union in the U.S. Since then, workers at a cascade of stores across the country announced their own organizing campaigns to join the union, Starbucks Workers United. The organization is part of Workers United, an affiliate of the giant Service Employees International Union.
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