“I decided to take out the garbage,” she said, smiling. They returned to the car and had nearly given up when the worker ran up to them. Loverich and Duran tried to angle a card in the worker’s direction, only to have it intercepted by the woman in the black apron. But, over the woman’s shoulder, a young, tattooed worker in a green apron raised her eyebrows and signalled otherwise.
Undeterred, Loverich gave her spiel-the union prizes transparency-and the woman nodded coolly. The distrust appeared mutual: the woman at the register stiffened after studying Loverich’s outfit. The woman at the cash register looked friendly enough, but her black apron gave Loverich pause: black, instead of the company’s usual Kelly green, is often worn by managers. Loverich, who was wearing a union hat and T-shirt, stepped toward the counter, then hesitated. Still, he took a flyer from Duran and gave her his name and phone number.ĭuran and Loverich’s second stop, a small sit-down café in a historic section of town, was trickier. He’d heard about Starbucks Workers United, but said, “We’ve been hush-hush about it.” The store manager had called him and his co-workers into meetings to discourage them from participating. The employee seemed receptive, if frazzled, toggling between the walk-up window on one side and the drive-through window on the other. She explained that her store had voted to unionize and that she and Loverich had come to spread the word. She identified herself as a “partner,” the corporate term for a retail employee, and ordered two iced brown-sugar-oat-milk espressos. At the walk-up window, Duran craned her neck toward a bearded barista and adjusted her glasses. Their first was a to-go-only location along a busy street. On a Saturday morning, I followed Liz Duran, a barista from the Seattle roastery, and Isabelle Loverich, a barista in north Portland, as they canvassed a cluster of Tacoma stores. His part-time schedule, at fifteen dollars an hour, wasn’t enough to rent an apartment, and he soon quit for a better-paying job. (Starbucks denied these claims it settled a race-discrimination complaint last year.) One worker I spoke with, from a store north of Seattle, was living in his van. The stores were superficially distinct: some had drive-throughs and others were café-only some were nondescript, unlike the fifteen-thousand-square-foot Reserve Roastery in Seattle, which Starbucks’s C.E.O., Howard Schultz, has hailed as “an homage to our relentless pursuit of coffee innovation.” Yet, even there, baristas have joined Starbucks Workers United, expressing concerns over chronic understaffing, race discrimination in promotions, mistreatment by managers, and low pay. I interviewed workers from more than fifteen stores, both union and non-union, and tagged along on a clean play in my home town of Tacoma, Washington. In June, I drove up and down Interstate-5, the asphalt spine of the Pacific Northwest, where Starbucks is headquartered. One clean play after another could, in theory, unionize all the Starbucks stores along a stretch of freeway, or even across the country. The idea is to connect, in person, with an interested worker and guide them through the steps of organizing. Instead of relying on outside organizers, as is common in the labor movement, Starbucks employees themselves recruit new members. Workers map out their region and target cities or neighborhoods that have yet to unionize. A clean play, to members of Starbucks Workers United, the group trying to unionize one of the country’s largest employers and most recognizable brands, is an outreach maneuver to non-union stores. A clean play makes a store just right-which is why workers are using the term in a new, subversive way. When business slows down at a café, the manager assigns baristas to scrub the pastry case or rid the toaster oven of oily crumbs or scour the floor. The Starbucks “clean play” is corporate jargon for what’s essentially a very deep clean.
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