The employee, Jaz Brisack, is the subject of an unfair-labor-practice charge filed by the union, Workers United, on Tuesday evening. The charge said that Starbucks had applied scheduling and availability policies to Ms. Brisack in a discriminatory fashion, and that this had effectively caused her separation from the company.

Ms. Brisack, who has a high profile among Starbucks employees because she is a Rhodes scholar and also works as an organizer for the union, said in an interview that the company had for months rejected her requests to change her work availability to one or two days a week from three.

‘For seven months, you and Starbucks have been retaliating against me by refusing to accommodate my availability and my time-off requests and scheduling me when I am not available to work in an attempt to force me to quit,’ Ms. Brisack wrote in a letter she gave her manager on Tuesday. ‘Starbucks has deliberately made my continued employment at the company impossible.'”

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