AFTER A UNION ELECTION VICTORY COMES THE HARD PART.

• Author: Jaffe, Sarah
• Position: WORK WON'T LOVE YOU BACK

On the morning of December 16, workers from about 100 Starbucks stores across the United States began a three-day strike. They were protesting the company's closure of unionized locations and its refusal to bargain with workers at more than 260 stores who have already voted to become part of Starbucks Workers United.

That same morning, workers from Planned Parenthood North Central States (PPNCS) held a virtual press conference to tell reporters how their bargaining process was going. Ashley Schmidt, a training and development specialist for Planned Parenthood clinics in Nebraska and Western Iowa, noted that the desire to unionize among clinic workers was a sign of the need for change at the organization, and it "deserves to be met with goodwill and without stalling."

These were just a few of the workers who have voted to unionize in recent years, in an upsurge of victories in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections, but who are still struggling to secure their first contract. In some cases, like at PPNCS, workers have been able to meet with management. But,as worker Grace Larson--who was featured in this column last September--says, the meetings left workers "generally disappointed" in their employers response to the process.

At other companies like Starbucks, workers attempting to bargain are met with a scorched-earth, anti-union campaign that can, at times, make the tactics used before the election look soft. And while a lot of attention has been paid recently to election victories, comparatively less is paid to the bargaining process, even though bargaining is where the win at the ballot box turns into real change in the workplace.

"When you win your union, that is such an awesome moment," says Chris Brooks, field director at the NewsGuild in New York, which has organized dozens of new union shops in recent years. "It's like poetry in motion. It's just incredible, but then bargaining often feels like sausage making."

That feeling of being put through a meat grinder is deliberate, Brooks says. "Their plan is to delay, delay, delay. They want to drag things out to the point where either you feel like bargaining is futile and you are just going to have to accept whatever management is going to give you, or they're capable of supporting a de-certification drive."

And management, particularly at a massive, multi-billion-dollar corporation like Starbucks or Amazon, has lots of resources to do the delaying. Just one complaint last May against Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, where the current unionization wave began, included more than 200 alleged violations of the National Labor Relations Act. The violations...