In their combined 34 years at Starbucks, Heather Clark and Gail Kleeman had just two disciplinary write-ups between the two of them — until they told managers they wanted a union. Within 10 months of signing cards to join Starbucks Workers United, both were fired, allegedly for violating Starbucks policies.

On Nov. 27, a federal administrative law judge found that the coffee giant’s real reason for firing them was their support of the union, and ruled the firing illegal. Judge Sharon Levinson Steckler ordered Starbucks to give Clark and Kleeman their jobs back and pay them any wages and benefits they lost.

It’s the first Oregon case where a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) judge has reinstated pro-union baristas, but it likely won’t be the last. Since the first baristas unionized two years ago in Buffalo, New York, Starbucks has been accused of unfair labor practices in 698 separate cases, including 41 in Oregon. The NLRB has reviewed and sided with workers on about 400 of those cases so far. And judges have ordered Starbucks to reinstate 36 workers at stores across the nation. Starbucks has appealed most of those decisions, but no NLRB rulings against Starbucks have been overturned.

“Starbucks is going to delay everything out as long as they can,” Clark said. “They want people to be discouraged by that…. This took a long time, but I’m still here. Everyone needs to see that.”

‘Treating me differently’

Clark started working for Starbucks in 2009, and appreciated the company culture and benefits, including health insurance for part-time workers. But over time, she saw Starbucks ask workers to take on more job duties with less support. For example, her store started training baristas how to protect themselves from an active shooter, but it rarely lets workers turn away customers who make them feel unsafe.

Clark came to feel that she was expected to be a bodyguard and to clean up blood spatter, not just make coffee. When she heard about the Buffalo baristas unionizing, she decided to lead a campaign at her own store, the Johnson Creek Crossing Starbucks at 9610 SE 82nd Ave. in Portland. She announced the union campaign in a letter to then-Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz signed by her coworkers. And when she was in an interview for a promotion to assistant manager, she asked managers what they thought of the union campaign. A supervisor later told her she didn’t receive the job because Starbucks wasn’t looking for pro-union managers.

In mail-in ballots tallied July 8, 2022, workers at her store voted 16-0 to unionize with Starbucks Workers United, the SEIU affiliate that now represents more than 8,500 baristas nationwide.

Clark’s excitement about the union inspired her coworker, Gail Kleeman. Kleeman signed the letter to Schultz, voted “yes” in the union election, and talked up the union to customers and coworkers. She’d worked at Starbucks for 20 years, about half that time at the Johnson Creek Crossing store.

“What (Heather Clark) said made sense,” Kleeman told the Labor Press.“That the union would be good for us, and we had the right to have the union. That Starbucks was not all-powerful…. I thought it was a good idea. I guess I didn’t realize quite the repercussions.”

After workers filed for a union election on May 2, 2022, then-Store Manager Sarah North became stricter with those who had vocally supported the union. North and an assistant manager pulled Clark aside twice demanding she change her clothes. The first time, Clark was wearing a T-shirt with a union logo. The second time, she was wearing a “Black Lives Matter” shirt that she had worn at work at least once a week for two years. Clark got her first-ever write-up in May 2022 — for telling a drive-thru customer who had an infant on their lap to put the child in a car seat for safety. A month later, she got a “final written warning” — for misplacing her keys to the store.

North also began finding fault with Kleeman, whose only previous write up was more than a decade earlier at a Starbucks in Illinois. North wrote Kleeman up for not following the exact recipe to make vanilla sweet cream. She wrote her up for touching a sandwich without gloves. Testifying later in front of the NLRB judge, North admitted she wouldn’t normally have issued written warnings for such small mistakes.

“I never had a writeup at this store ever, until after the union vote,” Kleeman said. “And then everything I did was wrong,” Kleeman said. “They were constantly hounding me. They made my life kind of miserable…. It felt like I was walking on eggshells all the time.”

‘There are protections’

On Jan. 5, 2023, North fired Clark for having taken a photo of a man who screamed at workers in the drive-thru. Clark wanted the photo so coworkers could recognize and refuse service if he came back to threaten them again. She’d seen photos of customers on a no-serve list at other stores.

At first, Clark felt maybe she deserved to lose her job. But two days later, when the shock wore off, it clicked: “The glaring thing here was that they were treating me differently than everyone else in the store,” Clark said. She reached out to Workers United, which helped her file an unfair labor practice charge.

Then on March 7, North fired Kleeman because she’d made her own drink before a shift. Starbucks policy allows free drinks, but workers must get a coworker to prepare it for them. Kleeman said the drink policy had not been enforced before, and hasn’t been enforced since.

“I still have some friends that work at that store,” Kleeman said. “They’re all making their own drinks.”

Given the sheer number of claims against Starbucks, the NLRB has been consolidating multiple complaints to speed things up: Clark and Kleeman’s ULP charges were combined with other complaints about managers at Johnson Creek Crossing — that they’d prohibited union T-shirts and taken down “union strong” flyers in the store. The NLRB judge heard the consolidated case in August. Workers United lawyers say that’s one of the quicker turnarounds for a case like this.

While they waited for the hearing, Clark and Kleeman found ways to make ends meet.

Clark applied for food stamps and signed up for the Oregon Health Plan so her medical insurance wouldn’t lapse. She applied for unemployment benefits and was denied because Starbucks said she was fired for misconduct, but she successfully appealed the denial.

“I just went into deep survival mode. It was like, ‘OK, I’m having to count my pennies at this point.’ But for me, there was nothing to do with my time other than look for work,” Clark said. In April, she started a new job as an insurance broker with Century Benefits.

Kleeman and her husband cut back on how much they spent on non-essential items, and they’re relying on his Social Security payments to get by.

“I was not in good shape for a little while right after I was fired,” Kleeman said. “It was very rough on us. …. We’re hanging in there.”

What Starbucks owes Kleeman and Clark for lost wages will be calculated based on past NLRB standards and was not immediately available in the judge’s decision. The store also must post a notice for at least 60 days announcing that it violated labor law.

Starbucks has until Dec. 26 to appeal the decision, and Starbucks spokesperson Andrew Trull said the company plans to do just that. Clark and Kleeman were prepared for an appeal, because that’s been Starbucks’ standard procedure, so they’re not letting the threat of an appeal diminish their win.

“It’s just so nice to have actually gotten our point across,” Kleeman said. “I hope it shows all the other people that are fighting Starbucks with the union that the union will stand behind them, too. There are protections, and we deserve to be in the union if we want to be.”

Starbucks gift card? Don’t do it, says union

Starbucks Workers United is calling on customers to refrain from buying Starbucks gift cards this holiday season. “Unionized baristas are asking for you to support them by not buying Starbucks gift cards this year,” the union said in a Dec. 1 statement.”Starbucks has shown their true colors this year in more ways than one. From a ruthless union-busting campaign to attacking their workers for standing up & doing the right thing, Starbucks has demonstrated that their positive public image just doesn’t hold water.”

Breakthrough in bargaining? Or PR?

Two years after the first U.S. Starbucks store unionized, not a single one of the 360 union locations has a union contract. On Dec. 8, Starbucks “Chief Partner Officer” Sara Kelly sent a letter to Workers United President Lynne Fox saying the company is ready to restart bargaining and wants to finalize contracts for all stores in 2024. But Kelly didn’t say whether anything had changed in the impasse that has prevented the two sides from meeting. Union and management have been unable to agree on ground rules for bargaining. Starbucks negotiators walk out of bargaining sessions every time union negotiators launch a Zoom session … and union negotiators do that pretty much every time they meet with Starbucks to bargain. The union insists that it’s to make it easier for participants to take part remotely. The company says it refuses to bargain on Zoom because it doesn’t know who else might be listening or recording.