Starbucks has fired over 20 union leaders amid organizing wave

Nabretta Hardin worked as a barista at Starbucks in Memphis, Tennessee for over a year before she was one of 7 workers who were fired shortly after launching a union organizing campaign at her store, including five other coworkers who served on the organizing committee. 

Since her firing in March 2022, Hardin explained it's been difficult to find other work, especially due to the nature in which she and her coworkers were terminated. She also lost the stock options she had just recently qualified for at Starbucks after hitting her one year mark as an employee. 

Hardin noted that union organizing became a topic of discussion in her store in late December 2021 in the wake of the first Starbucks corporate store union win in Buffalo, New York, with her store’s union campaign going public on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January 2022, and then Starbucks’ began their anti-union campaign at the store. 

“We started getting heavy surveillance, spies from Corporate, an increased presence of our district and regional managers,” said Hardin. “We also started getting heavy scrutiny from the company, constant surveillance, it was scaring partners, partners were scared to talk to us sometimes because they were fearful of management being on the floor and nitpicking them for little things that they had never been told before.” 

In March 2022, the Memphis area was hit with an ice storm that knocked out power for much of the area, including the Starbucks store that shut down and had to run on a generator for several days. Hardin said workers were called into the store to meet with management to hear about Starbucks’ resources for partners, where she and her coworkers were given termination slips. 

She expressed dismay toward Starbucks for how they’ve responded to the union organizing campaigns around the US by strongly opposing it, claiming its a third party trying to get in between corporate and workers, and trying to scare workers from unionizing, but that the recent NLRB decision in their favor is an exciting sign in hopes that those efforts by Starbucks are failing. 

“It shows people that we were wrongfully terminated, that the government also thinks that we were wrongfully terminated, and we will get repercussions,” added Hardin. 

A spokesperson for Starbucks claimed the Memphis workers were terminated following an investigation over safety and security violations. 

In an email, the spokesperson said “Starbucks does not