Hello and welcome to a special Baba bonus episode of Chapo.

Today we have convened a special round table discussions of the efforts to unionize a Starbucks

that classic establishment that brings the taste of the Palazzo Cafe to every neighborhood

in every corner of the world.

And to do that, we have brought in a team of three union organizers spanning our great nation.

So please welcome to the show. We have Vic from Buffalo. Say hi, Vic. Hi.

We have Alicia from Oklahoma. Hey, and Quentin from Portland, Oregon. Hey, I'm also here.

It's well. Hi. Oh, yeah. Will is also here. We're not going to pull a classic Matt style interview where it's 40 minutes into the

minutes into the episode. Yeah, it says one word. So yes, Will is here as well. So I just kind of wanted to start this by saying

I know this is a very broad prompt, but could you guys each kind of fill us in on how the unionization effort is going in each of your locations, both your specific stores that you're working at and kind of the city location that you're based out of in general.

And we'll start with you, Vic. Okay, so I'm from the East Robinson location in Buffalo, New York. We were the nine store in the city to unionize.

And we hit 10 a couple of weeks after. So Buffalo's half unionized. And it's been going really well. They did fire me about two months ago.

So other than that, it's been going great. That was not going great. But my co workers have done a great job of like carrying on the union at my store and fighting all the tactics that they're doing now that I'm gone.

And then Buffalo is a whole is doing really well. We're very cohesive, very doing a lot of stuff together, planning a lot of actions. It's good. It's good.

Alicia. Hey, so I'm from Oklahoma City. And I'm one of the three unionized stores in Oklahoma City. And we were the first ones who filed an organized, but we were the last to win our election.

I think Starbucks disputed and contested. I think about like five of our ballots. And so it took like the NLRB and Starbucks and us about like three months to get those counted.

But we finally won our election. And so right now we're just kind of like working on getting reorganized and dealing with Starbucks is, you know, union besting and whatnot. And then in Oklahoma, it's been pretty slow with like organizing.

So we're really hoping that we'll pick up. And other than that, it's going pretty well. Like we haven't had any severe union besting here so far yet.

Great. And Gwen. Yeah. So I organized the first shop in Portland, well in the Portland Metro. It's in Beeper Dink back in February. And was pushed out shortly thereafter.

So I'm just kind of coordinating like regional organizing efforts at this point. My stores completely fucked. We affectionately call it the non-union, union shop in Portland.

They eventually won their count three months later. But all of the rest of our stores are in a much better position.

And just in general, could you guys maybe walk us through a little bit of what it was like going from the union being just an idea that one of you had in your stores to it going to an actual vote in the stores that you worked at.

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