About 10,500 workers at Starbucks have formed a union. Workers at a store near Burlington, Vermont won their union election July 15. “It was a great feeling,” Katie Lam told the Valley Post in a voice phone interview on July 23. She works at the store and has worked for Starbucks for almost six years.

The Northampton Starbucks is inside Stop and Shop and is one of about a dozen in the Valley. The nearest one to Brattleboro is in Keene, New Hampshire. None of these stores are union; the closest union stores to Springfield, Massachusetts are near Hartford, Connecticut. The first store to organize was in Buffalo, New York. The workers there organized in 2021. Now about 470 stores are union.

Lam said, “I would tell workers at non-union Starbucks stores, 'You should organize a union. It's fun to be part of the modern labor movement. Reach out to us through our web site.'”

The workers have a web site at https://sbWorkersUnited.org.

Lam said, “Starbucks can afford to pay higher wages.”

Business Insider wrote last year, “Starbucks' new CEO will start life at the coffee giant with a pay packet that could be worth over $28 million.”

Lam said, “The number one reason we wanted the union was speed. Starbucks has been pushing us too much. We're often under-staffed and stressed. We like our customers. We can't take care of them properly. Our wages are too low – the starting wage at the store where I work, in Essex Junction, is $16.75 an hour. It's hard to pay the rent on an apartment. If you ask for 40 hours a week, sometimes you will get 32 to 34 hours, almost never more. We don't hate Starbucks. We want the union so this can be sustainable as a career.”

In the USA, union workers make an average of $191 more per week, compared to workers who don't have a union. Reducing inequality is good for democracy, since billionaires buy politicians. In the Valley, all UPS and Stop and Shop workers belong to a union. That means billionaires make less money and workers make more.

Hundreds of workers at the Brattleboro Retreat mental hospital are union members. So are workers at hospitals in Greenfield, Northampton and Springfield; and at the food co-ops in Northampton, Greenfield, and Brattleboro.