Starbucks Wayne, New Jersey store moves through union election process

The Wayne Starbucks case reached the vote-count stage on June 25, with the National Labor Relations Board listing a tally in case 22-RC-387087 for the store at 1809 State Road. The petition, filed May 15, covered 19 workers and remains open, putting one New Jersey location into the standard union-election track that can end in certification and bargaining.

The proposed bargaining unit is narrow in the way Starbucks elections usually are: all full-time and regular part-time baristas and shift supervisors are included, while store managers, assistant store managers, office clericals, guards, professionals, and supervisors as defined by the National Labor Relations Act are excluded. In practice, that means the people ringing orders, making drinks, and running the floor on shift are the ones in the unit, while the managers who direct labor and have authority over discipline and staffing decisions are kept out.

That split matters inside a Starbucks store because it draws the line between the workers who can vote on a contract and the people management uses to carry out corporate policy. For baristas and shift supervisors, the immediate issues are the ones that shape every shift: how many hours are available, how schedules are posted, whether staffing levels match demand, and how discipline is handled when a rush hits or a drink gets remade. If the unit wins, those topics move from day-to-day disputes into bargaining over wages, scheduling, staffing, safety, and shop-floor expectations.

Starbucks Workers United has spent more than four years trying to turn that kind of store-level organizing into a companywide bargaining push. The union says it has won elections at nearly 700 locations and represents more than 12,000 workers at more than 700 stores nationwide, a scale that traces back to the first Starbucks union victory in Buffalo in December 2021. Its bargaining timeline says Starbucks and Workers United announced a framework for bargaining in February 2024, but the core demands have stayed the same: pay, hours, staffing, and protections locked into a union contract.

That is why a single-store case in Wayne is more than a local procedural step. Each new filing adds another store to the map, and each tally either moves a unit toward a contract fight or leaves the organizing effort in place for the next round.