Starbucks union battle goes before labor board

[Omaha Steve]

http://ny.metro.us/metro/local/article/Starbucks_union_battle_goes_before_labor_board/9294.html

Starbucks union battle goes before labor board

by michael rundle / metro new york

JUL 10, 2007

LOWER MANHATTAN. When Joseph Agins Jr. joined the Starbucks Workers Union, it was clear his days as a barista were numbered.

“The conditions inside the store were terrible. That’s the reason I joined,” he told Metro yesterday. “But after that, things changed. My boss didn’t talk to me. You could feel the intimidation.”

Agins was fired roughly a year later, in December 2005. It was the culmination, he said, of a long process of alienation and anti-union discrimination. Since then he has worked with the Starbucks Workers Union to fight what he said is a systematic and illegal suppression of unions by the coffee giant.

“I saw that unions could help me, and help others in future,” he said.

Starbucks began its defense against those claims, and others, at a National Labor Relations Board trial that began yesterday. The board has accused the company of intimidating union activists at four locations in Manhattan, firing pro-union employees, banning workers from wearing union pins and giving unfairly negative performance evaluations.

FULL story at link.