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Kansas City and Overland Park Starbucks join national trend to unionize

Starbucks workers around the country are banding together to form unions at their respective cafés.
Joshua Bessex
/
AP Photo
Starbucks workers around the country are banding together to form unions at their respective cafés.

The Plaza Starbucks, along with the shop at I-35 and 75th in Overland Park, filed for union elections on Monday.

The two Kansas City area stores now join a group of more than 50 other locations around the country who want union shops.

In December, workers at a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, became the first U.S. location of the coffee chain to unionize. The story made national news, energizing others who work for the company to follow suit.

That first unionization came together in a matter of months, according to business correspondent Alina Selyukh who has been covering this story for NPR. At a time when restaurant workers are among the least unionized professions in the country, the trend that the Buffalo café started is giving unions substantial visibility.

"This is a company that, you know, everyone will recognize," she explains. "To see this kind of wave of stores suddenly unionizing, or attempting to unionize anyway, for labor experts, they're saying if anything, even if the numbers are small, this raises union awareness among regular Americans."

Emma Baldridge, an employee at the Overland Park location, says this idea was something she had talked about with coworkers at her store in the past.

"It was always a lot of hypotheticals," she recalls. "Before Buffalo started, we never really thought we would get anywhere with it. We figured there was no real chance of it getting off the ground. So, once we heard that there were Starbucks that were successfully getting the ball started rolling, and successfully petitioning to become a union, we realized that, 'Hey, we could make this a reality.' We could actually do this."

  • Alina Selyukh, NPR business correspondent
  • Emma Baldridge, employee at Overland Park Starbucks
  • Josh Crowell, employeee at Plaza Starbucks
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