Credit: Eddie Velazquez | Central Current

Editor’s note: This story was edited at 1 p.m. to reflect a comment from the company regarding the decertification effort and a response to allegations of union busting.

Employees at Salt City Coffee have voted to decertify their union just six months after forming the union.

The employees voted 20-9 to decertify the union, according to employees and a labor organizer.

Wednesday night’s vote followed months of employees from the Salt City Coffee and Bar location in downtown Syracuse organizing against the union effort. Workers who filed the petition to disband the union said they never fully trusted the way the union came together. Union representatives say they will respect the results of the vote and disband the bargaining unit.

Employees voted to unionize all Salt City locations in May under the name Salt City Workers United. The company voluntarily recognized the union at the time, making the chain the first set of local coffee shops with a unionized workforce in the city.

Kirstin Dunlap, the assistant manager at the Market location who filed for the decertification petition in July said she was not clear on what the union’s platform was. Workers at the downtown location rarely had contact with union representatives from Workers United, the larger union helping Salt City workers organize, she added.

“I was wary not knowing what we were getting into within bargaining,” Dunlap said. “All of us here, at least, were surprised to hear that the union was being started, we would not have started one on our own.”

Organizers and workers interviewed by Central Current during the union drive said they needed better wages, more transparency around benefits, and overall better workplace stability.

Some of the employees who were part of the initial unionization effort, including three who were interviewed by Central Current during the union drive, have since left the company.

Dunlap did not take part in the initial union vote because she was not included in the bargaining unit by the company, according to documents and correspondence exchanged between attorneys representing the company and union officials reviewed by Central Current.

The National Labor Relations Board ultimately decided that Dunlap belonged in the bargaining unit because another assistant manager had also been included in the unit, Dunlap said.

When the union initially formed, Salt City Workers United galvanized around former employee Connor Thornton. The union alleged Thornton had been unjustly fired for attempting to organize workers, filing an unfair labor practice claim with the NLRB.

The union withdrew its claim in August when the NLRB determined Thornton was not fired in retaliation for his organizing efforts.

Dunlap said the union used Thornton’s alleged unfair dismissal as leverage, which employees downtown saw as a red flag. She accused organizers of only visiting the other three locations, which she said were in favor of the union.

“That was always a bit of a red flag to us,” she said. “For me, it was happening too quick, too sporadic to necessarily trust it immediately.”

Casey Moore, an organizer with Workers United who helped coordinate unionization efforts at Salt City, said in a statement on behalf of union workers that the decertification effort was a successful attempt at union busting.

“After months of productive collective bargaining where progress was made, Salt City Coffee decided to fight the union,” Moore said in a statement. “The company’s anti-union campaign included: spreading misinformation about the union, threatening that conditions would be worsened if the union continued, and instructing managers to conduct one-on-one meetings urging workers to vote against the union. Salt City Coffee and Bar could have been the first proud union strong company in Syracuse. Instead, they chose to union-bust.”

Aaron Metthe, a co-owner and co-founder of Salt City, refuted workers’ claims of union busting in a statement, calling them false accusations.

“The (NLRB) has repeatedly found those claims to be baseless and finally moved forward with the election yesterday,” Metthe wrote. “As we now know, the vast majority of our employees voted to remove this union.”

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Chris Libonati is the former managing editor of Central Current. He was a founding editorial member of the organization and was hired as Central Current's first reporter. He previously worked at the Syracuse...

Eddie Velazquez is a Syracuse journalist covering economic justice in the region. He is focused on stories about organized labor, and New York's housing and childhood lead poisoning crises. You can follow...