The pandemic caused a union boom in Utah: Will it help employees or hurt them?

• Author: Bagley, Judd

IT FEELS STRAIGHT OUT OF an episode of Seinfeld: In 2019, someone in Wuhan, China, caught a virus from a bat. One thing led to another, and in 2022, workers at a Starbucks in Cottonwood Heights, Utah voted to unionize. While quite a few things had to happen to get from a virus in China to a union on Fort Union, the story of 2022's resurgence in interest, approval, and affiliation with labor unions--following decades of steady declines on all three fronts--cannot be told without acknowledging multiple profound impacts of the pandemic.

"COVID is the reason this movement is happening nationwide," says Jacob Lawson, a Starbucks shift supervisor at the coffee giant's Cottonwood Heights location. "When COVID hit, Starbucks raised everyone's pay by three dollars an hour, calling it 'catastrophe pay.' If you didn't want to work, they paid you to stay home. In Starbucks' own words, they doubled what they spent on labor but saw their profit margins decrease by five cents."

As the initial waves of the pandemic subsided and consumerism strongly rebounded, Starbucks eliminated across-the-board catastrophe pay and the company saw profits soar. At the same time, in many markets, the return to pre-COVID wages failed to keep pace with a rapidly increasing cost of living. Lawson says this, combined with the sudden loss of their previously elevated status as "essential workers," left many Starbucks employees feeling like the victims of a rug pull. This was made more acute by the sense that the company's 2020 financial disclosures seemed to reveal it could absorb significant wage hikes without excessively upsetting the balance sheet.

Then, in December 2021, COVID further highlighted the perceived contrast between Starbucks management and front-line workers. Lawson learned that his Cottonwood Heights store was the only Starbucks location on Salt Lake Valley's east side with full lobby service and seating. Concerned for their health, given the high transmissibility of the then-raging Omicron variant, the site's 19 employees unanimously voted to close the lobby and return to grab-and-go. Lawson presented the poll results to company leadership, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the vote was overruled.

"My district manager said, This is not a dictatorship, but you don't get a vote,"' Lawson recounts. "Then, lo and behold, we very quickly got COVID. It went through all of us, and the lobby closed anyway."

Just days before this particular abortive effort, a more successful attempt was made when Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York--also motivated in part by COVID safety concerns--made history...