Heh, we had one that was very popular for university students to work at and they did successfully unionize. The thing with university students, though, is that they’re not going to be around forever… so the store experienced pretty much complete staff turnover every few years. This store would perpetually end up in weird situations like not being allowed to make coffee because the supervisor had a family emergency and had to leave. The staff could serve cold drinks and snacks but the union regulations required a supervisor to be on-site if there was any risk of burns.

None of the people who had done the original push to unionize were still around. They had been students, graduated, and moved on. Eventually the staff got frustrated enough with their own union rules that they successfully voted to un-unionize and the store improved a fair bit. Bizarre situation.

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Gud 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Why didn’t they just change the rules?

“Having a supervisor around” isn’t necessarily a requirement from the union.

	▲	tonyarkles 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		From what I understand talking to the staff, it was because none of the staff (at the time, who weren't part of the original unionization push) actually cared enough about the union to do all of the union stuff (like going through the CBA finely and and renegotiating the rules, regular meetings, shop stewards, all of that). They all had a mentality of "this is a coffee shop I'm going to work at for a year or two, not something that I want to put any extra time into beyond the shifts I need to work to pay my way through school" Edit: If I'm remembering right, the thing that finally sealed the deal for them was that Starbucks corporate was offering better benefits to the entire company than the union (which was made up of like 10 people) had negotiated for themselves.
	▲	dpoloncsak 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Starbucks told them it was because the union