Workers at the Starbucks store at Delaware Avenue and Chippewa Street in downtown Buffalo are holding a one-day strike over what they call unfair labor practices and retaliation by Starbucks over employee efforts to organize.
Their demands are for the company to extend all current and future benefit improvements to unionized stores, sign the Fair Election Principles, stop threatening and firing workers and begin fair bargaining with unionized stores.
Meanwhile, the result of a union vote at the Starbucks on Walden Avenue near the Galleria in Cheektowaga is in dispute.
Starbucks filed an objection when several ballots were excluded from the count. Those ballots changed the vote from 8-7 in favor of a union, to a 10-10 tie.
One ballot Starbucks does not want counted is under review by the National Labor Relations Board to decide if it should be opened and counted. If the vote remains tied, by rule the union loses the election.
