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Starbucks Attempts to Halt Union Election in Mesa, Arizona


Earlier this week, Starbucks filed an appeal with the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) and requested that the union election currently underway in Mesa, Arizona be halted while the company seeks to have union elections occur regionally rather than with each individual store.

Readers will recall that the first successful unionization of a company owned location was met with surprise by some earlier this year.  Those two successful elections resulted in two Buffalo area Starbucks locations overturning the apple cart and successfully unionizing.   That has led to other Starbucks workers around the country making moves to unionize as a result.

However, these union elections are only occurring because of a prior ruling that allowed individual union elections at each Starbucks locations, rather than having regional elections which would likely dilute the vote and make unionization less likely.  Nevertheless, these individual elections have commenced with a Mesa, Arizona location currently doing a mail in election as we speak.

In the appeal filed by Starbucks earlier this week, the company has urged the Mesa vote be halted while the NLRB considers whether or not to allow these individual elections to continue or instead only allow for a regional vote.  At this time, the NLRB has not issued any ruling nor have they halted the vote in Mesa.  With ballots due back in the Mesa election next week, the clock is ticking in regard to what (if anything) the NLRB will do here.  If I had to guess, I would suspect these individual elections will be allowed to continue.  Stay tuned.


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