PLAINFIELD, Ind. — Two Starbucks locations in Plainfield are looking to form a union. If successful, the stores would be the first ones to do so in the Indianapolis area.
It includes the stores on State Road 267, near Interstate 70, and at the Plainfield Commons shopping center.
“All these promotional things they are putting on us and the workload is getting heavier, yet we are not gaining help,” Ryan Smith said.
Smith is a shift supervisor at the Starbucks on State Road 267. He has been working for the company for 15 years.
He previously worked at a store in Oregon that unionized. He said that inspired him to be a part of the movement in Indiana.
“We really have to do something to get past that management level and get up to the corporate level to make a change,” Smith said.
The union would include baristas and shift supervisors. They are pushing for higher pay and better working conditions, which includes being fully staffed and having consistent hours.
Smith said, at first, he was not aware another store in the area was also looking to unionize until it came time to file.
“We didn’t correspond until we found out we were both kind of filing at the same time, so it’s kind of cool. It felt like it was meant to be,” Smith said.
The employees from both stores are organizing through Starbucks Workers United.
So far, 372 Starbucks stores in 43 states have won union elections across the country. Just 83 stores have lost an election.
The movement was inspired by workers at a Buffalo, New York store, who were the first to successfully unionize in December 2021.
Three stores in Indiana have since unionized, including one in Bloomington last summer. The two other locations are in Clarksville and Valparaiso.
13News reached out to a professor of economics at Indiana University Southwest campus about this surge in Starbucks unionization.
“Boom is a relative term. There’s been a blip,” Eric Schansberg said.
He said if you look at the history of private sector unionization, it has declined since the 1950s. He said most unionizations nowadays are in the public sector.
“If you think about what a union is, it is a labor market cartel. It’s a group of suppliers of labor that get together, and they want a higher wage or price for the things they sell,” Schansberg said. “They are always attractive; they are just usually very difficult to put together.”
He said the push behind Starbucks unionization is somewhat of a mystery, especially since the industry is such a competitive labor market.
“If people don’t like working at Starbucks, there are hundreds or thousands of places they can work instead, so it’s not the sort of thing you would expect to find exploitation,” Schansberg said.
He believes part of the influence to unionize is coming from other states.
“There’s also other parts of the country where there is tremendous energy for that because they tend to be unionized already, and then maybe it bleeds over into Indiana,” Schansberg said.
When it comes to unions being successful, he said unions usually work well in less competitive enterprises, when there is monopoly power that generates profits and also in government.
Starbucks workers at the State Road 267 location in Plainfield will vote on whether or not to unionize on Jan. 4.