Bradley Rohlf, who worked at the Starbucks in Ladue at Lindbergh Boulevard and Clayton Road, was fired Friday morning for wearing a union shirt to work. Rohlf and most of the workers at that store are members of the Starbucks Workers Unite union.
LADUE — As Alex Barge was walking into work at the Starbucks here at 6:30 on Friday morning, her co-worker was already heading out.
“I’ve been fired,” Bradley Rohlf told Barge, allegedly for wearing a union T-shirt at work.
For the past several months, workers at this Starbucks and several others in the St. Louis region have been organizing under the Starbucks Workers Unite union. The store at the intersection of Lindbergh Boulevard and Clayton Road is one of five local stores to have officially formed the union.
As soon as Barge heard Rohlf’s news, she got to work, texting her union colleagues. By 7 a.m., the store was shut down, as the union staged its second strike in the past month.
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“We knew it was a possibility,” that management would fire workers for wearing their union T-shirts, even though that is protected activity according to the National Labor Relations Board, Rohlf says. “But I was kind of surprised in the moment it happened.”
Rohlf and several other workers, including Barge and Jon Gamache, all union organizers, were first disciplined for wearing their shirts on Sept. 28. That was the day I wrote about their first one-day strike, which was held mostly to protest inadequate scheduling in the store. The workers say they’ve been working shifts with far too few workers, even though the store has plenty of employees.
On Oct. 13, the employees say, several of them got written up for wearing the shirts again. And on Friday, Rohlf was fired. The firing follows a trend across the country, from New York to Chicago to San Antonio to Memphis and now St. Louis, where workers have been fired ostensibly for participating in protected union activity. Workers in several stores across the country have been reinstated with back pay after filing NLRB complaints, which Rohlf says he plans to do here.
The Ladue store had a sign on it saying the store was “temporarily closed,” while the workers who were on strike formed a picket line with signs along Clayton Road. The manager inside the store declined to open the door to answer questions when I knocked on the door.
A sign on the door of the Starbucks in Ladue indicates it is closed, as the workers went on strike on Oct. 21, 2022.
Nationally, spokespeople for Starbucks have defended the various firings, suggesting they were unrelated to union activity. “I’m not an anti-union person. I am pro-Starbucks, pro-partner, pro-Starbucks culture,” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said in April. “We didn’t get here by having a union.”
Just last week, the NLRB reinstated a Starbucks union employee in Ann Arbor, Michigan, after the labor judge determined the company “acted with animus” in firing the employee. Similarly in August, a federal judge in Memphis agreed with an NLRB ruling reinstating seven union workers there.
“Such tolerance before union activity, but terminations resulting thereafter, supports an inference of discriminatory motive,” the judge wrote.
Rohlf has worked for Starbucks for the past year, and previously worked for four years at the same store. He says while he wishes he still had his job, he’s “energized” by the firing, and the response of his union colleagues.
“I’m glad it was me, and not anybody else in the store,” Rohlf said. “I’m fully confident that our filing at the NLRB will be accepted and I’ll eventually be reinstated with back pay.”
As the workers held their signs on the sidewalk by Clayton Road, drivers honked their car horns in support. A couple of regulars stopped by to get the scoop and support the workers. A retired union pipefitter stopped by to give them some cash for lunch.
Gamache said the strike might last through the weekend this time. He’s prepared for the possibility that he and Barge and others who have been wearing their union T-shirts to work could face the same fate as Rohlf.
“If we had a union contract in place before we started, a firing like this couldn’t have happened,” Rohlf says. “Me being fired by Starbucks is a perfect example of the environment they are creating in their stores.”
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October 22, 2022 at 01:25AM
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Messenger: Ladue Starbucks workers strike after colleague fired for union T-shirt - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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