Rafu Staff and Wire Service Reports
Starbucks could be forced to reopen two Little Tokyo stores that the company closed in 2022.
Although the company cited safety concerns, federal regulators allege the stores were shuttered to suppress unionization efforts by employees.
The two Little Tokyo locations — First and Los Angeles streets (inside the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel) and Second and San Pedro streets (on the ground floor of the Wakaba Apartments) have been closed for almost a year and a half.
Other stores referenced in the National Labor Relations Board complaint on Dec. 13 were: Hollywood and Vine, Hollywood and Western, Santa Monica and Westmount, and Ocean Front Walk and Moss in Santa Monica.
Little Tokyo’s first Starbucks on Central Avenue between First and Second streets opened in 2001 and quickly became one of the most profitable Starbucks locations west of the Rocky Mountains. It was allowed to remain open.
West Hollywood Mayor Lauren Meister said she doesn’t know if “Starbucks has any more reason to be concerned than any other store in the neighborhood or in the city.”
The NLRB complaint questioned the closures of 23 Starbucks locations nationwide, noting that workers at more than a half-dozen of those stores had already voted to unionize with Starbucks Workers United.
The NLRB called on Starbucks to reopen the locations, although the matter is expected to go before an administrative law judge sometime next year, **The New York Times** reported.
Mari Cosgrove, a member of Starbucks Workers United, issued a statement calling the NLRB complaint “the latest confirmation of Starbucks’ determination to illegally oppose workers’ organizing. It adds to the litany of complaints detailed in the company’s own report released this morning. If Starbucks is sincere in its overtures in recent days to forge a different relationship with its partners, this is exactly the kind of illegal behavior it needs to stop.”
A Starbucks representative told The New York Times, “Each year as a standard course of business, we evaluate the store portfolio” and typically open, close or alter stores.” The company told the newspaper it opened hundreds of new stores last year and closed more than 100, of which about 3% were unionized.
Workers at more than 350 corporate-run Starbucks locations nationally have voted to unionize.
The closures of the six Southland stores included in the NLRB complaint were announced by the company last summer. At the time, Starbucks vice presidents Debbie Stroud and Denise Nelson wrote a letter to employees suggesting that the closures were the result of safety concerns at the locations being targeted. They said that issues facing the nation as a whole — including “personal safety, racism, lack of access to healthcare, a growing mental health crisis, rising drug use and more” — were impacting some of the coffee chain’s locations.
“With stores in thousands of communities across the country, we know these challenges can, at times, play out within our stores, too,” they wrote. “We read every incident report you file — it’s a lot.”