This Starbucks store just voted to unionize. It’s the first in Sacramento to approve a union
Workers at a Starbucks store in downtown Sacramento voted to unionize this week, becoming the first unionized store in the region and 300th nationwide.
Employees of the store at 630 K St. in Downtown Commons joined Starbucks Workers United via an 11-2 vote last Friday.
A midtown Starbucks at 19th and J streets simultaneously voted 7-7 on unionization, just shy of the 51% majority required to form a collective bargaining unit.
Downtown Starbucks employees voted to form a union mostly due to safety concerns, barista and union organizer Maizie Jensen said.
“We’ve seen a lot of aggression toward different people (working) in our store or toward different customers, and we decided at one point that enough was enough,” Jensen said.
Starbucks trimmed the DoCo store’s hours, locked bathrooms and removed all seating after what Jensen decribed as a “safety incident” in February, making it open exclusively for to-go orders. She declined to elaborate. While those changes have helped, Jensen said, employees were still unnerved enough to file paperwork that week for a future union vote.
Coffee shops around Sacramento’s urban core have become de facto — sometimes reluctant — refuges for the city’s homeless population and worries about crime have followed. Starbucks closed a store on Broadway in August due to neighborhood safety concerns, a first for the chain in Northern California.
The DoCo store recently closed for a day for employees to receive deescalation training, review safety protocols and get guidance on how to report incidents. Yet union organizers say Starbucks should hire security guards to handle problem abatement, not task baristas with that responsibility.
“Most of the time I feel fine, but the times that we experience crime or violence in our store are severe, and we don’t have the training or protocols to handle them — nor should we have to,” Jensen said. “I’m a barista. I’m there to serve coffee and talk to people about their day and be a bright spot in their day
About the Writer
Benjy Egel, a Sacramento native, covers local restaurants and bars for The Bee.
Only 1.2% of food service industry employees had unionized as of 2021, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. That rose slightly to 1.4% in 2022, a small but palpable shift coming out of the pandemic.
Unions formed out of Chipotle Mexican Grill, Trader Joe’s, McDonald’s and other chains across the country. California voters will decide later this year whether to create a government council that would set standards for fast food workers’ pay and workplace safety.
Momentum has built locally as well, with a Peet’s Coffee shop in Davis becoming the chain’s first unionized location in January. But collective action hasn’t been a slam dunk. Another Peet’s in Davis voted against unionization at that same time.
Starbucks employees — or partners, as the company calls them — at an El Dorado Hills location previously voted against unionization last July, and a petition to organize a Roseville store was withdrawn two months after being filed last February.
Then there’s the midtown Starbucks, which decided not to unionize last Friday. That’s the outcome Starbucks would prefer to see, director of corporate communications Rachel Wall wrote it an email.
“We believe that a direct relationship with our partners — where we have the flexibility to share success, as we always have — is the right path forward for our company, one another and the millions of people our brand uplifts,” Wall wrote.
“To that end, our partners at our 19th and J street store voted to maintain a direct employment relationship with Starbucks. For the 3% of our U.S. stores that have elected representation, we are committed to engaging in good faith collective bargaining wherever a union has been appropriately certified.”
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