2022 has seen a lot of union firsts. Here are some of the most notable in retail so far

In the seven months since Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York, voted to form the coffee chain’s first union last December, employees at more than 200 individual Starbucks stores around the country have cast their own ballots (with nearly 200 more filing petitions to do so). And workers across the service industry and retail world are taking notice.

“I see workers talk about Starbucks, even when they’re in other industries, as a model,” Anastasia Christman, senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, told Retail Brew.

And while the store-by-store approach to organizing is different from the factory-era model, it’s a tactic that has seen success in high-turnover industries once considered by some to be un-organizable, Christman explained.

“I think a lot of people would sort of write off retail, thinking that those workers would move in and out,” she said. And while worker change might be high, “that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a long-term investment in the problems that they see that need to be solved. And so, they’re organizing anyway.”

Other workers appear to be following the baristas’ lead. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) reported that it received 1,174 union representation petitions in the first half of the 2022 fiscal year—a 57% increase YoY.

Among those petitions were some notable retail firsts:

• REI: Workers geared up for unionization at the outdoor retailer’s SoHo store earlier this year by filing for a union election in January. In March, the union won in an 88-14 landslide. Workers at a store in Berkeley, California, then filed a petition with the NLRB in June.
• Amazon: In April, workers at a Staten Island Amazon factory voted to become the retail giant’s first union. That win followed a failed vote in Bessemer, Alabama, where workers went back to the polls in March after the NLRB found Amazon had “improperly interfered” in the first election, held last spring, according to CNBC. While warehouses in Albany and Campbellsville, Kentucky, reportedly began making moves toward unionization in July, the Amazon Labor Union said it has paused efforts to organize other NYC-area warehouses.
• Apple: In late June, more than 100 employees at an Apple store in Towson, Maryland, voted to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. While the Towson store became Apple’s first in the country to unionize, it wasn’t the first to try. In May, a different union, the Communications Workers of America, withdrew a request for a union election at a store in Atlanta, citing “repeated violations of the National Labor Relations Act” by Apple.
• Chipotle: In June, Chipotle employees in Augusta, Maine, formed an independent union called Chipotle United and filed for a union election with the NLRB for a union election. It came after workers staged a walkout over what they said were “unsafe” working conditions, according to Reuters. The chain announced this week it was closing the location because of staffing shortages, though organizers said they would contest the decision.
• Trader Joe’s: Employees at a Trader Joe’s in Western Massachusetts became the grocer’s first to file for a union election in early June. The election is scheduled for July 27 and 28, when workers will vote on whether to join Trader Joe’s United.

New wave: Today’s organizing efforts are notably led by a much broader group of workers, said Margaret O’Mara, history professor at the University of Washington. “This is a workforce that is more diverse in terms of gender and race than historically, the traditional labor movement, which, in its heyday in the 20th century, was overwhelmingly white and male.”

The organizing trend on display isn’t just a story about individual stores or brands, but rather about the broader landscape of retail, in which “the price of convenience is being borne by the workers in many cases,” O’Mara said.

“So I don’t think this is gonna go away…It’s part of, say, a vibe shift.”