to file for a union petition in the state, citing grievances regarding pay and poor working conditions.
“[A]s it stands currently, corporate is severely out of touch with what goes on inside our cafe,” the workers wrote in their letter to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announcing their union effort in March. “Every opportunity for improvement is met with pushback by corporate as the [company] seeks profit over ethics.”
The union’s victory is especially remarkable in South Carolina, the state with the lowest union density in the U.S., at unionized in 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The overall union membership rate across the country last year was already low, at just 10.3 percent.in South Carolina in Greenville, which voted 8 to 1 for the union. Greenville has been described in previous decades as one of the “most relentlessly anti-union cities in the nation,” John Logan noted for