Another Louisville-area Starbucks could become unionized. Here's what's going on

Employees at another Louisville-area Starbucks are moving toward unionization.

"An overwhelming majority of workers" at the store in Clarksville, Indiana, signed authorization cards and filed their petition to unionize with the National Labor Relations Board, according to a statement Tuesday from Mary "MC" Floreani, a staff organizer for the Chicago & Midwest Regional Joint Board of Workers United.

The workers now will vote on whether to organize in an election overseen by the NLRB. If the union effort prevails, the workers at the store, 1231 Veterans Parkway, then could become the first group of Starbucks employees in Indiana to join a national unionization effort that already includes roughly 135 of the chain's stores across the U.S., Floreani said.

Just last week, employees of a Starbucks store in Louisville became the first in Kentucky to win their vote to be represented by a union. Seattle-based Starbucks has more than 60 stores in the Louisville area.

"Issues that other unionizing Starbucks across the country have been unionizing for, we have all of those problems too," Mila Wade, a barista of the Clarksville store, told The Courier Journal.

"We are short-staffed, we are overworked," she said, adding that she believes her coworkers are underpaid.

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Starbucks has said that average hourly pay at the chain's locations will be nearly $17 an hour nationally as of Aug. 1. All partners who were hired on or before May 2 will get either a 3% raise or $15 an hour, whichever is higher.

Starbucks' leadership is not supportive of the unionization efforts.

"We are listening and learning from the partners in these stores, as we always do across the country," a spokesperson said in an email to The Courier Journal on Tuesday night. "Starbucks success — past, present, and future — is built on how we partner together, always with Our Mission and Values at our core.

"We’ve been clear in our belief that we are better together as partners, without a union between us, and that conviction has not changed."

Starbucks Executive Vice President Rossann Williams has said the corporation respects workers' rights to organize and will bargain in good faith.

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"The vote outcomes will not change our shared purpose or how we will show up for each other. … We will keep listening, we will keep connecting and we will keep being in service of one another because that’s what we’ve always done and what it means to be partner," Williams wrote in a letter to employees after a store in Buffalo, New York, was the first to organize in December 2021.

If the Clarksville workers vote to unionize, workers there would be able to choose representation to negotiate pay and working conditions with the company. The company would be required to bargain with the union representative, according to the NLRB.

Wade, a 32-year-old former teacher, said unionization efforts in Southern Indiana have been ongoing since the Buffalo vote.

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She said that employees are excited because of "the realization that we do have some power within our workplace, if we work together."

Wade said that most of the people that work in the store are employees of the chain because of Starbucks' healthcare benefits or the tuition offered through Arizona State University. But she said younger coworkers could lose that tuition money if they are fired.

"Anything that I can do to try and ensure that they are treated better, that it what I personally am interested in," she said.

Reach Ana Rocío Álvarez Bríñez at abrinez@gannett.com; follow her on Twitter at @SoyAnaAlvarez

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Starbucks workers at another Louisville-area store want union vote