Reggie Borges, a spokesperson for Starbucks, directed a request for comment on the election results to a December letter by Rossann Williams, president of Starbucks North America, which said that the company does “not want a union between us as partners,” the company’s term for its employees, but that it will “respect the legal process” and “bargain in good faith with the union that represents partners.”

The latest union vote results will almost certainly fuel the Starbucks organizing drive that has spread across the country in recent months, with 109 stores in 26 states having filed petitions for union elections, according to the union. And in the process, it continued to reject Starbucks’s established legal strategy of attempting to block single-store union elections.

As it had in the case of the Buffalo union election last year—and in appeals to other NLRB decisions ordering union elections throughout the country—Starbucks argued that workers at the Mesa store should vote alongside other Mesa-area locations as a regional unit in a single election, versus as an individual store unit. Such an election would likely benefit the company by requiring more workers overall to vote in favor of unionizing. 

In their order on Wednesday, three labor board members again ruled that Starbucks had failed to meet the “heavy burden” to overcome the NLRB’s presumption that employees at a single store are sufficient for union vote. The ruling bodes well for workers at another trio of stores in the Buffalo area, who are awaiting a labor board ruling on a near-identical appeal by the company in order to proceed with their own ballot count, along with others who have filed petitions for their own single-store union elections.  

While the Mesa victory is certainly a high point in the quickly expanding Starbucks organizing drive, workers have a long road ahead. Even if all stores that have filed petitions for union elections follow suit, it would still be only a drop in the sea of corporate Starbucks stores. And even more crucial is whether unionized Starbucks stores will be able to secure contracts with the company. An analysis by Bloomberg Law reported that it takes new unions on average 409 days to ratify their first contract. 

Still, pro-union Starbucks workers are undaunted in their efforts to organize the coffee giant and, eventually, secure a contract for their store and others. 

“Every single store needs to be unionized,” Tyler Ralston, a shift supervisor at the Mesa store, told The Counter last week. “This isn’t a thing that, ‘Oh, this store can’t be because of X reason.’ It’s every single store and we’re fighting for a contract that will work for every store, and every partner as well.” 

The post Arizona Starbucks store votes to unionize, as organizing drive gains momentum across the U.S. appeared first on The Counter.

“If there’s a label on … a pound of ground beef that says Product of the U.S.A., we want to make sure that consumers understand precisely what that means,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told the House Agriculture Committee in January. “So we’re in the process of doing a fairly extensive survey to find out if consumers understand what that means and whether they place value on it.”

The FSIS outreach is the latest step in an ongoing fight over the rules governing less than a square inch of meat packaging, one that dates back at least to the partial repeal of Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) law in 2015. The legislation had mandated that processors disclose where their product was born, raised, and slaughtered. In the years since, Product of U.S.A. labels appeared to fill the void in helping consumers distinguish whether their steaks were homegrown, leading ranchers and groups like the Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) and American Grassfed Association (AGA) to agitate for reform of the contentious regulations. 

In 2018, OCM and AGA filed a petition arguing that the current FSIS rules effectively allow for imported beef to be passed off as domestic, all to the benefit of the biggest multinational meat processors. Beyond deceiving consumers who are looking to buy local meat, the groups argued, large packers cause financial harm to American cattle and hog farmers in their ability to import and sell cheap meat to retailers as American products. These positions were echoed by a bipartisan group of senators last year, who introduced the American Beef Labeling Act, which would restrict such labeling on beef to cattle that was born, raised, and slaughtered in the United States. 

Carolyn Dimitri, an applied economist at New York University who has researched food labeling, sympathized with critics’ arguments that the label is misleading to consumers. She suggested that people shopping for groceries “don’t think too much” about labels; instead, they largely rely on the government to regulate these markers and ensure the information meant to enlighten consumers is sufficiently reflective of the goods they are buying.

“If you were looking at a hamburger and it said ‘Product of the U.S.,’ I think the consumer would assume the entire production process happened in the United States,” Dimitri said. 

More pressing to cattle and hog farmers is the financial harm the lax policies have wrought on their business. Ranchers who spoke to The Counter were quick to point to the repeal of COOL as a major driver behind the decline of American cattle prices—a good reason to reconsider domestic labeling rules and legislation. When COOL took effect in 2009, the prices producers received for their cattle indeed went up. But Congress partially repealed the legislation for beef and pork products in December 2015, following a drawn-out battle with the World Trade Organization (WTO). The international body found the mandatory labeling requirements were discriminatory against meat imports and authorized Mexico and Canada to level $1 billion in retaliatory tariffs against the United States. 

It wasn’t long after that cattle prices plummeted, said Curt Werner, a third-generation cattle farmer in Merino, Colorado, and president of the Colorado Independent Cattle Growers Association. 

In 2015, cattle farmers’ share of retail beef prices was 51.5 percent, according to USDA, dropping to 44.3 percent the following year. The downward trend has continued even as retail prices have skyrocketed during the pandemic, with farmers earning a 36.8 percent share in 2021, seeming to track with the ranchers’ complaints. “Once [COOL] was repealed in 2016 … it’s been a downward spiral ever since,” Werner said.

But plenty of other factors beyond the repeal of COOL could have played a significant role in declining cattle prices for ranchers. Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University, said that when COOL was repealed, there was both a tight cattle supply and strong demand for beef. “If either of those conditions changed, then we would anticipate cattle prices to decline, even if MCOOL didn’t change,” he said, using an alternative acronym for the labeling policy. In the years that followed, Tonsor suggested that the tightening of packing capacity due to slaughterhouses and processing facilities closing could have played a notable role in declining cattle prices.

Still, Dimitri, the N.Y.U. economist, pointed out that the lax regulations currently in effect for Product of U.S.A. labeling are unlikely to be helping producers amid an increasingly concentrated meat market. Given that consumers likely can’t tell much of a difference between cheap, imported meat and meat derived from animals raised and slaughtered in the United States, “it’s eroding away at the domestic producers’ market,” she said.  

The FSIS survey could ultimately lead to changes clarifying what kinds of meats are allowed to bear Product of U.S.A. and other similar USDA labels. But many producers are unsure how quickly adjustments will be made that accommodate their concerns—if at all. George Wishon, a fifth-generation cattle producer in Eastern Washington state, called the survey a “time delay.” He suggested that Congress passing the American Beef Labeling Act would have a better shot at properly addressing consumer confusion and the softness of farmers’ cattle prices. 

“The study’s kind of a side deal,” Wishon said. “It can help but I don’t know how much.”

The post Do you care if your meat came from the United States? USDA wants your feedback. appeared first on The Counter.

Workers this week also organized a first-of-its-kind protest outside of Starbucks’s Seattle headquarters, calling on the company to end what they described as a pattern of union-busting practices.

“What’s disgusting? Union-busting,” a crowd of around 70 workers and supporters chanted in front of the company’s head office. The rally included speeches from two former workers from a store in Memphis, Tennessee, whom Starbucks had recently fired after they had tried to form a union. The company told local news outlets that the layoffs were due to safety concerns, but workers suspected they were retaliatory. Beto Sanchez, one of the fired workers, described his former work environment as one that was unsafe for both staff and customers. (The Counter reached out to Starbucks for comment, and will update this post if the company responds.)

“We’ve had partners that were positive and exposed to Covid that were not sent home and were instead told to stay and work with us,” Sanchez told the crowd. “We had people that were throwing up in the back-of-house, and our managers said, ‘Oh, just stay in the back, you’re fine.”

Workers who had voted in the Mesa store election said at Wednesday’s press conference that they were not deterred, and that they expected to celebrate a victory once the votes are ultimately counted. 

“Initially, today, we had this set up and we were planning to go celebrate after, but now we are kind of free,” said Michelle Hejduk, a shift supervisor. “So I say we go out and start organizing some more stores in this time, right?”

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News of the settlement comes just a month after the Biden administration announced a $1 billion investment to bolster competition in the livestock industry. And on Thursday, DOJ and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) launched a new online portal that will allow farmers and ranchers to report their own experiences of anticompetitive behavior.

Despite this kitchen sink of federal-level efforts, however, some cattle producers and their representatives fear that the relatively small settlement will do little to slow corrupt activity in an industry that brings in an estimated $63 billion annually. Packers won’t actually feel squeezed, they say—instead, they’ll just figure such deals into the cost of doing business.

“They can profit from it, they can pay the fine, and they know they can do it again,” Joe Maxwell, president of Farm Action, said of this week’s deal, announced on Tuesday. “It’s not a deterrent. A penalty should be a deterrent for future actions.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs noted that the proposed payout was more than double what the company had agreed to pay in 2020 in a settlement with pork wholesalers, which amounted to $24.5 million. JBS also agreed last year—in two additional pork price-fixing suits—to pay out nearly $13 million to retailers and restaurants, as well as another $20 million in consumer claims. Meanwhile, the company has seen its profits continue to soar, reporting an estimated $1.8 billion in Q3 for 2021 and 146 percent year-over-year growth.

Meatpackers’ growing record of eight-figure settlements is seen by some industry groups as a mere rebate for their illegal anticompetitive activity and, worse, allows companies to avoid the admission of wrongdoing. Maxwell said that payouts over price-fixing allegations come nowhere close to reflecting the true cost of damages for industry collusion. 

“I can understand the attorneys’ zeal to settle for that kind of money but their case didn’t involve everyone that paid a price for [the market manipulation],” Maxwell said. “They represented their plaintiffs but they didn’t represent all of us consumers and farmers and ranchers, so JBS takes a walk.” 

For their part, lawyers described this latest settlement as a win—in part because it will require that JBS provide “extensive cooperation” in the plaintiffs’ pursuit of further antitrust claims against other non-settling meat packers. JBS did not respond to a request for comment. 

Cattle producers, led by the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America (R-CALF USA), which advocates for the success and rights of independent producers, brought a similar case in 2019 against meatpackers that include the Big Four, alleging that they artificially lowered the slaughter supply, resulting in depressed prices for farmers and ranchers as meat-packers raked in record profits. With that case currently in discovery, CEO Bill Bullard said the fact that beef wholesalers reached a settlement at all with JBS is slight cause for optimism. “It suggests that the case is meritorious,” he said. “And because of the similarity with our case, you could apply that there too.” 

There was more encouraging news for producers this week. Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican from Iowa and member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, used news of the settlement to push for passage of the bipartisan Cattle Price Discovery and Transparency Act, which aims to improve fairness and transparency in the beef market. Grassley, one of the bill’s authors, said in a statement that “although the settlement is a spit in the ocean compared to JBS’ record profit throughout the pandemic, it validates what cattle producers have been telling me when they try to get a fair price in the marketplace. It’s time to put an end to these price fixing schemes once and for all.”

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) was the first national organization to request an investigation into beef markets in 2019. It said in a statement that the settlement was “deeply disturbing” because it precedes the release of potentially critical information from DOJ’s investigation, which it believes is essential to determining the scope of damages done. But more than a year and a half since the department first subpoenaed JBS, Cargill, Tyson Foods, and National Beef, producers say they have received no updates.  

“It is clear from this settlement that cattle producers still don’t have all the information they have demanded and is deserved,” said Colin Woodall, CEO of NCBA. “The DOJ has an obligation to finish their investigation. Cattle producers do not have years to wait for the government to determine whether there has been wrongdoing, we demand answers now.”

Producers aren’t the only ones who don’t want to wait. In December, attorneys general from 16 states signed a letter addressed to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, requesting that USDA grant funding through the American Rescue Plan to strengthen their own antitrust investigations and enforcement in the sector. 

“State attorneys general have the potential to have significant impact on agriculture market concentration, but lack of resources is a perennial limitation on what states can do,” the group said in its letter.

There is some hope that the new online portal launched by the DOJ and USDA this week could be another tool in the White House’s fight for a more fair industry. The portal, which allows farmers and ranchers to anonymously document any tactics that have a whiff of anticompetitive practices, could potentially lead to the departments opening formal investigations. Producers are likely to say they’ll use all the help they can get. 

The post JBS agrees to pay beef wholesalers $52.5 million in latest price-fixing settlement appeared first on The Counter.

Democratic Assemblymember Chris Holden, one of four assemblymembers who reintroduced AB 257 with amendments in late January, said Monday on the Assembly floor that the bill would help uplift workers and small business owners throughout the fast-food sector. 

“California has a chance to lead the country and address long-standing issues in the fast-food industry by creating a statewide fast-food sector council,” said Holden, a former Subway franchise owner, adding that the the bill “is about fairness, and it is about bringing all the responsible parties to the table to collaborate on solutions.”

Since its initial introduction in January 2021, AB 257 received an outpouring of support from the labor movement, with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the affiliated Fight for $15 campaign agitating for its passage. Over the past year, workers at McDonald’s and Jack in the Box locations across the state have walked off the job to hold rallies, demanding that their legislators vote in favor of AB 257 while carrying signs reading “Which side are you on?” 

Imelda Rosales, a McDonald’s worker in the Los Angeles area and a member of the Fight for $15 campaign, told The Counter (in Spanish through a campaign translator) that the bill could help pave the way for a much-needed overhaul in the fast-food industry, particularly when it comes to pay and worker safety. 

“It’s gonna be a lot easier to have a voice at the table and make changes, that way they’re not going to have to continue with the same strategy of having to do strikes,” Rosales said of her colleagues. She later added that when it comes to the bill holding fast-food brands accountable for issues like wage theft or sexual assault, “the corporations should’ve been responsible for what’s happening in the franchises to begin with.”

According to a 2021 report by the University of California, fast-food workers across the state—an estimated 557,000, the vast majority of whom are people of color and women—earn a median annual wage of just under $26,000, and two-thirds say their families rely on social safety net programs. On top of low wages, sexual harassment and regular violent encounters on the job have plagued fast-food workers, as has working in extreme heat. The Covid-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the fraught nature of fast-food workplaces, with a survey by the UCLA Labor Center of Los Angeles-area workers finding that nearly a quarter contracted the virus since mid-2020; fewer than half said they were given paid sick leave if they or a co-worker contracted the virus. During the global health crisis, almost two-thirds of workers said they experienced wage theft.

Although the fast-food sectoral council would be a first of its kind in both size and scope, there have been similar recent efforts across the United States. In 2015, New York State convened a wage board to determine whether to raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $15, which then voted to raise workers’ pay. In 2018, Seattle established a broader labor standards board for domestic workers, which would make suggestions to the city council and other legislators for improving laborers’ pay and working conditions. Detroit did the same in late 2021, with legislation covering multiple industries.  

Business groups strongly pushed back against AB 257, claiming that the legislation would severely harm franchise operators. Mark Turner, president and CEO of the Gilroy Chamber of Commerce, said in an email that new standards set by the council could create increased costs for franchisees without any increase in sales, potentially leading to a “reduction in staff, cutting hours back, and/or an investment by the franchisee in technology that replaces [workers] altogether.” 

Jeff Hanscom, vice president of state and local government relations for the International Franchise Association, told The Counter in December that beyond ceding the development and enforcement of industry regulations to unelected officials, AB 257 would discourage entrepreneurs from buying into franchises by reducing their independence from fast-food corporations. 

“Franchising provides unparalleled opportunities for entrepreneurs in California, and better wages, hours, benefits for their workers, and this misguided proposal threatens thousands of California entrepreneurs and workers,” Hanscom said in a statement after the bill’s passage on Monday.

But Brian Callaci, chief economist at the Open Markets Institute who researches franchises, pushed back against this framing. He noted that with the modern franchising model, franchisees already are extremely limited in their ability to deviate from the strict provisions written into their franchising agreements. In addition to paying royalties and marketing fees to brands like McDonald’s and Taco Bell, franchisees are contractually obligated to abide by a host of specific requirements, including menu pricing, authorized ingredient suppliers, and many other operational considerations. Beyond minimizing franchisees’ ability to make decisions independently from corporations, these requirements often leave labor costs as the only means by which to eke out a profit, ultimately putting a downward pressure on workers’ pay and disincentivizing the franchisees from providing better benefits, potentially pushing them toward breaking employment laws. 

By having workers negotiate together with franchisees and franchisors on minimum standards that would apply to franchisees across the industry, Callaci said, AB 257 could ultimately relieve the competitive pressure that ultimately leads to a race to the bottom on pay and other conditions. For instance, franchisees would be able to tell fast-food brands that to pay a higher minimum wage while maintaining market competitiveness, they may have to loosen up on requirements like mandatory pricing for suppliers. Furthermore, AB 257 not only holds franchisees responsible alongside franchisors for violating the council’s standards or existing labor laws, it also enables them to sue fast-food corporations if a franchise agreement’s policies essentially coerce them into breaking these regulations. “The whole reason that [fast-food companies] do franchising, the motivation for developing the business structure, is to get that control that they like and avoid the responsibility,” Callaci said. “Making the franchisors own it helps them behave more responsibly.”

Should the bill ultimately become law, David Madland, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said it’s possible that other states would establish their own sectoral councils to tackle the issue of working conditions across the fast-food industry. 

“It would be the first of its kind for fast-food workers that really transforms an industry with the kinds of challenges that many other states and the whole country are trying to figure out how to deal with,” Madland said. “That really could spur others to act. That would be, I think, one of the most important things that could come out of this.”

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Online crowdfunding has swelled in popularity over the past two decades, helping artists and entrepreneurs raise modest sums to construct prototypes or fund their art projects. But in 2016, the implementation of Title III of the JOBS Act enabled anyone to become a bargain-bin venture capitalist, allowing non-accredited investors to buy equity and debt securities from startups and other small businesses financing their operations. There are limits, including a cap on how much individuals can invest and the total amount businesses can raise (currently $5 million per year), and a requirement that securities be purchased online through SEC-registered funding portals or broker-dealers. Companies must file information disclosures with the SEC as well as with the intermediary and investors. 

Neiss of Crowdfund Capital Advisors says that this kind of capitalization has caught on in the restaurant industry because of customer loyalty. “There’s been a general trend among restaurants to leverage the power of their customers to provide the financing for their growth,” Neiss said. “Layered on top of that is these customers that love these restaurants didn’t want to see them go under during the pandemic and so have been the financiers of their comeback.”

Lashauna Jones co-founded the hot dog company Sporty Dog Creations in Baltimore, Maryland, together with her daughter, Daejonne Bennett. For years, the pair operated out of stalls at farmers’ markets around the city, hawking sausages dressed with piles of arugula and feta or black-eyed pea chili and caramelized onions, the latter inspired by the city’s historic Negro League baseball team. Jones said that when the pandemic put an indefinite pause on sales, they began to look at the possibility of mounting their return with a permanent sit-down location. Like so many other small business owners, Jones and Bennett were concerned about the challenges—or even the likelihood—of qualifying for a bank loan. But with assistance from the local nonprofit Community Wealth Builders, the pair turned to their community for financial support. 

Having the backing of dozens of investors through crowdfunding, Jones said, provides a proof of concept that could help convince banks to loan her an estimated $120,000.

“At that point, I think it holds or bears more weight,” Jones said, noting that Sporty Dog raised over $31,400 through a Mainvest campaign last year. “If the bank sees that you’ve raised $30,000, or $50,000, through crowdfunding, they’re like, ‘Okay, they have supporters.’ That could transcend over into something else.” 

St. John Frizell, owner of Fort Defiance in Brooklyn, decided to try crowdfunding in the hope that it would be quicker than applying for an SBA loan, which can take two to three months, with some predicting double that. That’s if a business owner even qualifies, which Frizell thought would be unlikely given his pandemic-laden debt. He launched his WeFunder campaign on a Friday last March, assuming it would take six to eight weeks. But by the following Monday, he’d raised over $100,000 from friends and neighbors.

“I threw out my calendar and I said, ‘Well, okay, I guess I can work on other things,’” Frizell said this past November.

Still, asking for neighbors’ and customers’ buy-in has added an additional layer of stress that would not have accompanied a traditional bank loan. Some of the customers who stop by Fort Defiance to buy sundries and sandwiches are among the 107 people to whom he owes thousands of dollars. And they were on Frizell’s mind in December, when he made the tough call that it would make more economic sense to hibernate Fort Defiance through at least February while waiting for a new liquor license, a move that had an impact beyond just himself and his staff. 

“This was not an easy decision, and not easy to explain to our neighbors/investors,” Frizell wrote in an email, adding, “Knowing my investors were watching forced me to face facts and do what was right for the company, even if it was difficult.” 

But crowdfund investors can sometimes see a windfall as secondary to their desire to promote community building or salvage their local social hub, said Matthew Josefy, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Indiana University who has researched crowdfunding. 

“You have a decent number of young professionals with some disposable income who desire to be generous, and this is a need that they can see themselves being excited about but also still potentially benefiting from, in perpetuating community and creating the kind of spaces that they’d like to be part of in,” Josefy said. “A restaurant kind of is at that boundary of need and desire.” 

Following the 2020 protests over race and policing in Baltimore, Patricia Adams, director of neighborhood development for a nonprofit developer, sought to support local Black-owned businesses with money she had made through real estate investments and refinancing her home. After learning that Jones was looking to expand Sporty Dog into a full-service restaurant near where Adams works, she handed over $5,000, with little interest in the advertised returns.  

“I was looking for a way to invest in a business where I could see the results instead of writing a check and sending it to someone,” Adams said. She later added, “If I actually get this money back, I’ll just find another business to invest in and just keep that rolling.”

But restaurants fail: The median lifespan of restaurants, according to a 2014 estimate, is 4.5 years, and closure rates, both temporary and permanent, have soared over the past two years. If a restaurant financed through investment crowdfunding defaults before it fulfills its loan obligations, creditors could work out a deal to give the restaurant more time on repayment, or could even forgive the collateralized loans, if they are feeling moved by the communal spirit. Should they feel less charitable, they could choose to hire a collections lawyer and carve up the business, likely for pennies on the dollar. 

For Adams, there’s little desire to go after Sporty Dog should the business fall behind on its repayments or, worst-case scenario, have to close.   

“When I give people money, I don’t have the expectation to get it back,” Adams said. “If I don’t, it’s for a good reason.” 

Blazin of Driftwood Oven said that thanks to last year’s crowdfunding campaign, the pizzeria has expanded its hours of operation to include lunchtime and weekend bakery service, and increased its prep space to take on larger catering contracts. 

“I just think it is really neat to use your own customer base and your own energy to fund what you want to do,” Blazin said. “If we had failed the Honeycomb campaign, that would have been like, ‘Wow, the customers don’t really want that. Let’s just stay where we’re at.’”

The post What if you could invest in your favorite local restaurant and actually make money in the process? appeared first on The Counter.

At the municipal level, similarly sweeping policies have been implemented for the first time over the past month. New York City, for instance, now requires nearly all private businesses to verify that their in-person workers are vaccinated or face financial penalties, with exceptions for religious and medical reasons. Large, private corporations have also given employees the option of the jab or their job, including United Airlines and, just this past week, Starbucks. 

In a letter to employees announcing that they would have to show proof of vaccination or submit to weekly testing in accordance with the federal vaccine mandate, Starbucks chief operating officer John Culver wrote, “My responsibility, and that of every leader, is to do whatever we can to help keep you safe and to create the safest work environment possible.”

Culver may be in the mandate minority, but even without the new policy, his company has far outpaced many other national food-service brands in getting its employees vaccinated, according to a December study by the Shift Project, a collaboration between Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). 

The Shift Project has been surveying employees since 2016 to understand working conditions across the service and retail sectors. In their latest snapshot, the study’s authors sought to capture not just different industries’ employee vaccination rates, but also those of individual large firms. 

“We’re able to identify employers by name, which is pretty unique,” said Kristen Harknett, one of the study’s authors and a professor of sociology at UCSF, “and then do the compare-and-contrast across employers, which can be really illuminating.” Although the study’s authors found large variations in vaccination rates among employers, only around half of food-service sector workers, which includes those at fast-food, fast-casual and casual sit-down chains, were vaccinated on average last fall. “Rates of vaccination remained stuck at the levels last seen in the general population in the Summer of 2021,” the study’s authors wrote about many large food brands. 

To determine vaccination rates, the researchers conducted online surveys with more than 4,300 workers employed across large companies in the retail, food-service, grocery, delivery, and other service sectors between late September and November of 2021. Among the 37 companies included in the study were fast-food giants like McDonald’s and Subway, as well as grocery and department store chains. Besides asking workers about their vaccination status, the researchers wanted to know what companies themselves were doing to incentivize their employees to get vaccinated and—perhaps more important—what might be dissuading them from getting the vaccine.  

Retail sectors, including grocery, reported vaccination rates between 60 and 86 percent, with Whole Foods and Safeway turning in some of the highest numbers. Walmart and Target showed comparable numbers, at 66 percent and 83 percent, respectively. 

The food-service sector, meanwhile, showed much lower vaccination rates. Waffle House employees, for instance, were at 50 percent, Chick-Fil-A’s were at 53, and 56 percent of the McDonald’s workforce was vaccinated. Subway and Taco Bell ranked lowest, with 43 percent and 46 percent of their workers vaccinated, respectively. ​​Starbucks stood out as the industry leader, at 79 percent.

“When you see some of these service sector employers getting up to the 80s and others down below half, then you have to scratch your head and wonder … why is fast-food so much lower?” said Harknett. 

Harknett noted that there were a number of factors contributing to the lower vaccination rates among restaurant and fast-food brands. Workers across the board were skeptical of the vaccine, with a little over half of all unvaccinated survey participants saying they didn’t trust the vaccine, and 49 percent citing concerns about side effects. But older age correlates to higher vaccination rates, Harknett said, and food-service workers were on average 10 years younger compared to the rest of the survey participants. Younger workers, she said, are more likely to be vaccine hesitant or disinclined to get their Covid shots because they tend not to be as concerned about getting infected with the virus. 

Another crucial factor in vaccine uptake—or lack thereof—is whether or not employers had implemented policies to entice or accomodate their workers with getting vaccinated. Additional survey data provided by Harknett showed that only 22 percent of food-service brands aided or incentivized workers to get the vaccine, compared to 56 percent of non-foodservice companies. The vast majority of workers who reported to the study’s authors that their companies had provided some incentive also said that they’d gotten the vaccine. 

“When employers grease the wheels, they make it easier by giving paid time off for the vaccine, offering the vaccine on site, giving a bonus if you get the vaccine. That makes a big difference,” Harknett said. Starbucks, for example, has provided two hours of paid time off for each vaccine dose, along with four hours for related side effects. “If we compare the things that employers do to encourage vaccination and split that out by fast-food, fast-food employers really do very little,” she added.

But Robert Fullilove, professor and associate dean at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, who is not involved in the Shift Project, said it’ll be difficult to draw too many conclusions from this study because it doesn’t tell us enough about the myriad reasons behind personal vaccine decisions. A complex web of factors—including race, geography, and gender—can influence whether a person will or will not get the shot. Those variables may have much less to do with who a person is employed by, and much more to do with the world they live in outside of work.

“If it is unique to where you work, I would want to see something in addition to that to have me feel that we’re not just looking at something that we already know: that there’s a lot of variation, depending on a variety of different factors, as to who’s vaccinated and who’s not,” Fullilove said. 

For now, Klein, the Taco Bell employee, is hoping that, whether or not the federal mandate holds, his store will soon start to require that all employees get the vaccine.

“I kind of wish that they enforced it more sooner because the people that get up in arms over stuff like vaccine mandates are like, a very loud minority,” Klein said. “I feel like your common layman would just shrug and get the vaccine if they had to.”

The post Study shows Starbucks, Whole Foods employee vaccination rates above 70 percent. Taco Bell, Subway under 50 percent appeared first on The Counter.

Madison VanHook, a shift supervisor at the West 6th Street Starbucks in Cleveland, which filed its petition on Monday, said the organizing efforts at her store were inspired by the union campaign led by their colleagues in Buffalo. There wasn’t any one particular issue that pushed workers at her store, whom she estimates roughly 80 percent of have signed union cards, to begin organizing. Rather, many were attracted to the idea that a union could give them a say in company decisions that have a direct impact on their workplace. 

“There’s not really anything to lose and a whole to gain,” she said about unionizing, citing complaints such as low wages and understaffing that have plagued other stores around the country well before the pandemic. Many workers also complained about a five-day general training process that those on both ends say is rushed and leaves them feeling like they “are simply cogs in a machine.” VanHook said she was concerned with the company’s shifting Covid-19 safety protocols for workers, which currently do not allow workers to use their paid time off for isolation in some circumstances. “You have to either cut into your sick time or your personal time off if you want to take time off or just come into work and risk it,” she said. 

Rebecca Givan, an associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, said the rate at which Starbucks employees are organizing their stores is “unprecedented.” 

“This is clear that workers are paying attention and they’re starting their own organizing drives,” Givan said. “They’re talking to their coworkers, and they’re quickly getting enough signatures to file a petition. And many of the locations are places where the workers have a good chance of success.”

Last year’s months-long organizing campaign in Buffalo also offers a roadmap for the possible corporate opposition that stores around the country could soon face. The company shuttled in executives and outside managers to lead meetings that workers said were aimed at dissuading them from voting to unionize. Management even temporarily shut down locations that had sought to organize workers. Starbucks has also repeatedly pushed against store-by-store union elections in favor of market-wide votes. The NLRB, however, has continued to reject the company’s arguments, most recently for the Mesa, Arizona, store, whose employees are scheduled to vote this month.

Employees in Mesa have said that the company is now using a similar playbook to undermine their campaign. Among the allegations are that Starbucks has flooded the store with new managerial staff and that the company has directed higher-ups to hold meetings with employees to convince them to vote “no” on their election ballots. 

Starbucks has previously said that it dispatched company executives and outside managers to Buffalo to help with staffing issues, not to undermine the organizing efforts. Reggie Borges, a spokesperson for Starbucks, said that the company is “not anti-union” and that it wants to ensure that every worker “is informed and that they make the right decision for themselves.” 

On Monday, Starbucks organizers notched another significant gain, with the NLRB ruling that seven challenged ballots in the Genesee street election were ineligible, giving the union a 15-9 win. The union lost an election at a third Buffalo area store in December, 12-8. 

“Today we put an end to Starbucks’ delay attempts and formed our union,” Alexis Rizzo, a shift supervisor at the Genesee Street location, said in a statement following Monday’s ruling, adding, “We demand that Starbucks stop their union busting in Buffalo and across the nation immediately. No other partners should have to endure what we went through to have a voice on the job.”

Borges said on Monday that the company is currently evaluating its options for appealing the ruling, and that the company believes its employees’ voices deserve to be heard. 

The year has only just begun, but Givan, the Rutgers professor, predicts that at the current clip Starbucks coffee shops have been announcing their intent to unionize, it’s quite likely that many more will join them in the near future. 

“We have to assume that if a dozen are advanced enough in their organizing that they have enough signatures from the NLRB petition, and they’re going with more signatures than they need, that there have to be dozens more that are working towards filing,” Givan said. 

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