(Bloomberg) — Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. workers at a Michigan store voted to join the Teamsters union, the latest in a series of landmark US organizing victories.
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The National Labor Relations Board counted the ballots Thursday evening. The vote was 11-to-3, with 2 other challenged ballots, according to the NLRB. Roughly 21 employees are in the new bargaining unit.
The location in Lansing was the first among the chain’s roughly 3,000 US locations to hold such a vote. In July, Chipotle shut down a Maine site whose workers had petitioned a few weeks earlier for an election of their own. Employees there have filed a labor board complaint over the closure, alleging retaliation; the company has said the move was caused by staffing issues and was unrelated to labor organizing.
“We set out to show that our generation can make substantial change in this world and improve our working conditions by taking action collectively,” Lansing Chipotle employee Samantha Smith said in a statement from the Teamsters.
The vote follows a wave of labor victories at major retailers. Employees at a New York Amazon.com Inc. warehouse, a Maryland Apple Inc. store, a pair of Trader Joe’s markets in Massachusetts and Minnesota, and hundreds of Starbucks cafes across the country have voted in recent months to unionize for the first time. The NLRB announced Thursday that REI workers at a Berkeley, California site had voted in favor of unionization at their sporting-goods store, after counterparts in Manhattan did the same in March.
In an emailed statement, Chipotle said it was “disappointed” that employees “chose to have a third party speak on their behalf” at the Michigan store. “Our employees are our greatest asset, and we are committed to listening to their needs and continuing to improve upon their workplace experience,” chief corporate affairs officer Laurie Schalow said.
Restaurant companies, including fast-food chains, have successfully resisted organizing for years. The Service Employees International Union’s “Fight For $15” campaign has tried unsuccessfully for a decade to secure national agreements with major chains that would make it easier for workers across the country to organize. SEIU organizers have been wary of petitioning for elections at individual stores, which carry the risk, even if a union prevails, that management would illegally stonewall contract talks or retaliate by shutting down sites.
Efforts to change working conditions through collective bargaining at a company such as McDonald’s Corp. would also be complicated by franchise structures, under which brands say they aren’t the legal employer of most workers in their systems. Chipotle owns and operates its own stores, removing that obstacle.
The Teamsters’ victory could spur a slew of additional petitions at other stores, like the movement sweeping through Starbucks cafes, said former NLRB member Wilma Liebman, who was chair of the agency under President Barack Obama. But winning a collective bargaining agreement is likely to prove difficult, given the labor board’s limited remedies to force good behavior and conflicting incentives between the two sides.
“The employees are going to want to do really well in contract negotiations to prove to other workers that unionization is worth it,” said Liebman, “And the company is obviously going to be hesitant to give too much, for that very same reason.”
(Updates with comments from Teamsters, former NLRB member in fourth and last paragraphs.)
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