The union effort could also spread to other locations as it comes amid successful union efforts that have galvanized non-union employees at companies like Amazon and Starbucks; in just the past months, Starbucks employees have formed unions at 135 stores, with new wins coming in weekly.
“Our benefits and our pay were just less supportive than they had been previously,” Hadley employee and union organizer. “We saw a lot of changes to our retirement and our health care. We saw our wages not keeping up with increased cost of living and then the pandemic just added to that sense of feeling undervalued and unappreciated.”
Problems like decreasing benefits and increased health and safety concerns were only magnified by the way the company handled the COVID-19 pandemic, workers say. Though the company had offeredand limited the number of customers in the store at once early in the pandemic, these rules were retracted as vaccines became available but the pandemic continued to rage on.