Starbucks Union Leader Says Company Forced Her Out

[Omaha Steve]

Jaz Brisack said her employer had refused to accommodate her scheduling requests. Starbucks said it sought to balance requests against business needs.



Jaz Brisack is a Starbucks barista and a leader of the Starbucks Workers United union in Buffalo.Credit...Brendan Bannon for The New York Times


By Noam Scheiber Sept. 13, 2022

A Starbucks employee in Buffalo who has helped lead the union campaign at the coffee chain over the past year has accused the company of forcing her out in retaliation for her organizing efforts.

The employee, Jaz Brisack, is the subject of an unfair-labor-practice charge filed by the union, Workers United, on Tuesday evening. The charge said that Starbucks had applied scheduling and availability policies to Ms. Brisack in a discriminatory fashion, and that this had effectively caused her separation from the company.

Ms. Brisack, who has a high profile among Starbucks employees because she is a Rhodes scholar and also works as an organizer for the union, said in an interview that the company had for months rejected her requests to change her work availability to one or two days a week from three.

“For seven months, you and Starbucks have been retaliating against me by refusing to accommodate my availability and my time-off requests and scheduling me when I am not available to work in an attempt to force me to quit,” Ms. Brisack wrote in a letter she gave her manager on Tuesday. “Starbucks has deliberately made my continued employment at the company impossible.”

FULL story: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/business/starbucks-union-leader-job.html