On Thursday, Nov. 13, Starbucks workers across the country kicked off an indefinite strike spanning 65 stores in response to the company’s failure to meet negotiation deadlines, with over 1,000 employees organizing the mass walk-out.
Union leadership chose to start the strike on Starbucks’ Red Cup day, typically one of the company’s busiest days of the year, in which stores offer free reusable holiday cups to customers who order certain beverages.
In Dec. 2023, Starbucks promised to finalize an agreement with the union by 2024, but since then, former CEO Laxman Narasimhan was replaced by Bryan Niccol, under whom negotiation progress has stagnated. Starbucks workers have expressed overall dissatisfaction with working conditions, including low pay and understaffed, overcrowded stores.
Company leadership maintains that Starbucks provides extensive benefits, including 18 weeks of paid family leave and 100 percent tuition coverage for a four-year college degree, yet these benefits are inaccessible to many employees.
Dochi Spoltore, a barista from Pittsburgh, said in a union conference call on Nov. 13 that it’s difficult for Starbucks employees to be assigned more than 19 hours, leaving them short of the 20 needed to receive certain benefits.
Meanwhile, Starbucks reports continuously rising sales and revenue, including an overall 13 percent increase in the 2023 fiscal year to 36 billion dollars in revenue.
Starbucks locations that have voted to unionize span the country, including nearly 50 in California and two here in Riverside. As of now, locations in ten Californian cities have participated in the strike, including San Diego, Long Beach and Anaheim.
Unionized stores account for just 550 of Starbucks’ roughly 10,000 company-operated locations, leaving workers to rely heavily on visibility and customer solidarity to increase their leverage. Since the strike began, unionized workers have picketed vigilantly, protesting in front of non-unionized stores and working to ensure the strike gains public support.
As Todd Vachon, a union expert at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, stated, retail companies like Starbucks rely heavily on their public image to make sales. Even with limited participation, a highly visible strike could give the union a great deal of sway in terms of bargaining.
Key unaddressed demands include better hours to combat understaffing and allow greater access to benefits, higher take-home pay as baristas struggle to get by and resolution for labor law-related charges against the company. The union cites a failure to negotiate in good faith and participation in extensive union busting, with over 100 complaints issued against Starbucks by regional offices of the National Labor Relations Board for unfair labor practices.
In a letter to employees, Starbucks’ Chief Partner Officer Sara Kelly claimed union members walked away from the bargaining table and that certain union demands would require drastic changes to Starbucks’ operations, such as allowing workers to shut down mobile ordering if too many orders are in the queue. She also wrote that the union has proposed a 65 percent pay increase immediately and a 77 percent increase over three years, which she considers unreasonable.
Union representatives posit that this is a misrepresentation of their demands: “That allegation is not true. We presented a set of economic proposals as options to negotiate over and ultimately get to more pay and benefits. Starbucks simply said ‘no’ to all of them, and then disingenuously added up all the options as if they were one cohesive demand,” Michelle Eisen, a Workers United spokesperson and union bargaining delegate, said in a statement to ABC News.
So far, Starbucks has rejected the workers’ proposals and has shown reluctance to negotiate, but workers remain hopeful as the open-ended strike pushes forward and stores continue to unionize, joining the 475 that have done so since 2021.
