National Labor Relations Board Administrative Law Judge Geoffrey Carter ordered Starbucks to reopen “within a reasonable period of time” two Ithaca locations that closed after employees formed a union, stating that its move to “chill unionism” violated the National Labor Relations Act.
Carter ruled on Friday that the May 2023 permanent closures of the Ithaca Commons and Meadow Street Starbucks locations and failure to bargain with the union were unlawful, as the board found the stores were closed for “antiunion reasons” and in an effort to quell unionizations elsewhere.
The NLRB similarly ordered on July 6, 2023, that the third Ithaca Starbucks location on College Avenue — which closed on June 10, 2022 — must reopen “immediately.” The store remains closed.
Discussions surrounding the Ithaca Commons and Meadow Street store closures occurred only a few months after the stores unionized. On April 8, 2022, all three Ithaca stores voted to unionize. In the summer of 2022, Starbucks regional leadership began weighing the closure of the Meadow Street and Ithaca Commons locations, citing high turnover and low profitability metrics, according to the NLRB ruling.
Carter found that profitability metrics were affected by union activity — including “economic losses” during employee strikes. He also found that employee turnover data included employees unlawfully fired for being union supporters and turnover connected to stricter enforcement of workplace policies that coincided with the start of the unionization effort.
The company can present evidence that was unavailable at the time of the unfair labor practice trial — which ended on April 25 — that could demonstrate reopening the two locations to be “unduly burdensome.”
In a statement to The Sun, Michelle Eisen, the Starbucks Workers United national organizing committee co-chair and bargaining delegate, wrote that SBWU is “pleased to see the NLRB continue to stand up for the law and support Starbucks workers’ union rights” and is “moving forward and focused on the future.” Eisen works as a barista at the first unionized Starbucks in Buffalo.
After the store closures, students protested Cornell’s partnership with Starbucks, occupying Day Hall on May 11 and May 12, 2023, to demand that the University stop offering Starbucks products in its cafés and dining halls.
In August 2023, Cornell University announced it would cease its partnership with Starbucks by June 2025, when the current contract expires.
In an email sent to the student body at the time, then Student Assembly president Patrick Kuehl ’24 denounced Starbucks’s actions.
“Cornell doesn’t support labor violations,” Kuehl stated.
The movement to pressure Universities to end their partnership with Starbucks has since spread to other universities across the country, including Georgetown University and the University of Washington.
Nick Wilson ’26 — who writes a column in The Sun about activist issues at Cornell and in Ithaca — applied to the Ithaca Commons Starbucks location in September 2022. Despite his clean disciplinary record and punctuality at a Starbucks location in Illinois, Wilson — an outspoken union supporter on social media — was not hired for the Ithaca Commons location, which had high employee turnover at the time.
This move to reject Wilson’s and other union supporters’ applications for the Ithaca Starbucks locations was cited in the ruling as evidence of “union animus” by the company.
Wilson, who participated in the May 2023 Day Hall takeover, celebrated Friday’s ruling, calling it a “good sign of hope” for the national Starbucks unionization movement.
“[The Ithaca Starbucks workers] have been subjected to, as is detailed in the ruling, really brutal and aggressive union-busting,” Wilson said. “I think this is further evidence that this is not keeping them down, that people are willing to fight and that there’s still an opportunity for change in Ithaca as a result of this and for some leverage to the national campaign.”
In a statement sent to The Sun, Starbucks spokesperson Jay Go Gaush wrote that the company was “reviewing the administrative law judge’s decision,” working on training “managers to ensure respect of our partners’ rights to organize” and “progressing negotiations towards ratified store contracts this year.”
Update, Sept. 14, 2:35 p.m.: This article has been updated to include a statement from Nick Wilson ’26, an activist cited in the ruling.
Update, Sept. 17, 12:25 a.m.: This article has been updated to include statements from Starbucks and Starbucks Workers United.