When it comes to living the union life, Mandie Cantrell is experienced. It’s been all around her and part of her life for some time. And now she’s leading her 14 or so co-workers through the process of organizing a union at their workplace, Starbucks Coffee, on Middle Street in the Old Port of Portland.
Employees started meeting at different locations away from work months ago. One of those places was Cantrell’s kitchen at the Trelawny Building in downtown Portland. There were about three or four sessions in her kitchen said Cantrell. “We realized that we needed to start a union. We need a living wage in order to live in Portland. Housing is expensive here,” said the Brunswick native.
Earlier this week the Starbucks Workers United Organizing Committee sent a one page letter to Howard Schultz, President & CEO, of Starbucks Coffee, announcing the intention of the Old Port employees to unionize “to better express our place in the company and how vital we are for the daily operations. We believe in accountability and equal partnership. We also believe that the only way to unite our strengths is to establish a union. That will bring authentic genuine, heartfelt prevailing equality to each and every single individual partner at our store. We want Starbucks to be the best it can be and we think that starts with workers real needs being addressed properly.” Cantrell, a Committee member, has not received a response yet.
Cantrell said that a lot of decisions were made during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We were not consuted about those restrictions. We would get into work and find new policies or policy updates. It was like we didn’t matter,” she said. Business has improved since word got out about our unionization efforts. People keep stopping in to wish us well in our unionization effort she said.
Cantrell lives in the Trawlany Building in downtown Portland. Tenants formed a union to deal with what Cantrell calls the “unreasonable” management of the building. The landlord and building owner Geoffrey Rice has tried to evict former Portland city mayor Ehtan Strimling from the building. Rice lives on the eight floor of the building. “He looks down on us,” she said. Unable to come to a satisfactory resolution about evicting Strimling, the matter is now headed for a trial. Her partner, Max Sardino, is a security guard at the Portland Museum of Art, that has voted to unionize. In that position, Sardino is excluded from being part of the union. “It would be nice to be part of the union,” he said this afternoon. In the meantime, he has been able to advise Cantrell on issues related to unionizing based on his experience at the Portland Museum of Art.
Although the vote to unionize the employees at Starbucks has not been scheduled by the union, Cantrell is confident of the outcome. “We have more than the majority that is required to unionize,” she said today.