Pay, hours and breast-pumping privacy; why Wichita Starbucks workers want to unionize
Twenty-four and pregnant, Maia Cuellar Serafini looks at the breast-pumping area at the Starbucks where she works at 21st and Amidon and sees the need for change.
“The breast-feeding area is also our boss’s desk,” explains the young barista. “And there’s just a shower curtain, no locked door.”
It’s not private and its not comfortable for the one nursing mother who has to pump there now — a need exacerbated by a nationwide shortage of baby formula — and her pumping time gets deducted from her break time.
Serafini sees herself pumping there a few months from now, and it’s one of the reasons why she supports unionizing the shop.
On Friday, Esau Freeman, business representative for Service Employees International Union Local 513, turned in paperwork to start bringing the employees into the union fold.
Seventeen of the 26 eligible workers have signed cards supporting the union drive — more than enough to force a vote on it.
If the majority votes yes in a month or so, 21st and Amidon will become the first unionized Starbucks in the Wichita metro area.
Serafini said she realizes there are worse places to work.
She likes the customers and her co-workers, many of whom are LGBT persons who work there because Starbucks — to its credit — doesn’t tolerate discrimination like so many Kansas businesses do.
But the shop is regularly understaffed and at the same time, management has gone on a tear to serve customers faster. “We don’t have the staff that we need to meet those goals,” Serafini said.
It’s not a labor shortage thing, because just about everyone in the place would work more if the company would just give them the hours.
Employees get an average of 20 hours a week and most have to work second jobs to make ends meet. That’s complicated by inconsistent scheduling where a worker might get 10 hours one week and 30 the next.
Pay starts at $12 an hour. Serafini says its tough, even with her second work-at-home job for a nationwide pilates and health company and her husband’s income as a hotel clerk.
Freeman said diversity is also an issue.
The coffee shop is surrounded by the largest concentration of Latino people in Wichita and the employees would like more Spanish-speaking colleagues and maybe some basic language lessons so they can communicate better.
I know what a lot of you are thinking right now because we’ve all heard it a million times before: These service jobs aren’t for adults raising children, they’re for teenagers living at home to get work experience and earn movie money.
My observation has been that people who make that argument are also the first to whine when their Venti Iced Brown Sugar Oatmilk Shaken Espresso doesn’t come out exactly the way they want it.
I believe in the dignity of work. If a job needs doing, the people who do it should be paid at least enough to afford basic shelter and sustenance.
And no one is so low on the corporate totem pole as to be undeserving of human respect.
Starbucks is fighting hard to stop unionization.
On Thursday, The Guardian reported that the company has fired 20 union leaders nationwide, including three at the Overland Park Starbucks that was the first in Kansas to say Union Yes.
And Starbucks’ billionaire CEO, Howard Schultz, got caught a month ago in a leaked management pep-talk video calling unions “a new outside force that’s trying desperately to disrupt our company.”
To that I would reply: Mr. Schultz, if your business model is reliant on young mothers pumping their breast milk behind a shower curtain, maybe a little outside disruption is exactly what you need.
