Strike Captains and Practice Pickets: Starbucks Workers Aim to Bring a Contract Home
Starbucks strike captains gathered to plan a practice picket in St. Louis, Missouri, on October 2. Eighty more stores plan pickets starting October 25, limbering up for a possible strike. Photo: SBWU
Unionized Starbucks workers are electing strike captains and getting customers to pledge they won't cross picket lines. They’re amassing in front of stores with picket signs, borrowing a slogan that UPS Teamsters used during their 2023 contract campaign: “Just Practicing for a Just Contract.”
Thirty-eight stores held practice pickets in early October, and starting October 25, 80 more stores plan to hold pickets and sign up customers to a “No Contract, No Coffee” pledge, promising not to patronize any Starbucks in case of a strike.
“We're all strike-ready,” said Jhoana Canada, a barista in Nashville. She said that when they practiced picketing at her store, many customers learned for the first time that they were unionized. “It's just basically an ongoing, overpouring amount of support,” she said.
Starbucks agreed to bargain starting February 2024 and negotiations progressed for eight months, then stalled. “Most of our contract was already agreed upon,” said Diego Franco, a Des Plaines, Illinois barista. “It's just the aspects related to pay and scheduling guaranteed hours that the company has been stonewalling us on.”
Over 12,000 workers are members of Starbucks Workers United, part of Workers United/SEIU, at 650 U.S. stores. But Starbucks operates 10,000 stores in the U.S., so asking the public to shun all stores in a strike is an important escalation.
The union carried out short unfair labor practice strikes at 300 stores right before Christmas last year, after a 98 percent strike authorization vote. Previously, they struck regularly to get the company to the bargaining table, and have carried out many single-store walkouts for egregious safety violations or severe understaffing.
WRONG CHANGES
The strike threat comes at a time when Starbucks has been losing customers—long waits have contributed to a drop in sales, and so has rising coffee prices. Starbucks buys 3 percent of the world’s coffee supply for its 40,000 stores worldwide, and bean prices have more than doubled since 2021. Climate change has damaged global yields, including droughts and flooding in Vietnam and Brazil.
The stagnant growth caused the Starbucks board to abruptly dismiss CEO Laxman Narasimhan, whom they’d hired in 2022 with a $28 million compensation package. In August 2024 they hired Brian Niccol, former CEO of the burrito chain Chipotle. He negotiated a $97.8 million compensation package for himself and became chair of the board, which means he’ll be harder to fire.
Niccol immediately rolled out a restructuring plan called “Back to Starbucks,” which fixes none of the problems workers have identified, and adds a few more. The changes appear aimed at making Starbucks more upmarket: raising prices, refurbishing stores with more comfortable seating, and tightening rules for uniforms. The plan also eliminates free bathrooms and water, and requires baristas to write a personalized message on every drink order.
The new policies are missing the point, union baristas said. “None of our customers care about us having a new uniform,” said Franco. “And you’re waiting 20 minutes on the drink. What’s the last thing you want to see the barista have to do? Write a message on every cup.”
But workers face discipline if they don’t write messages. “I either write a message on the cup or I have a manager breathing down my neck,” said Franco (see box below).
IT’S THE UNDERSTAFFING, STUPID
The main problem, baristas say, is rampant understaffing, which seems to be getting worse under Niccol. Canada and Franco both said that their stores had drastically cut staff in the last year.
In Jhoana Canada’s Nashville store, they’ve gone from 24 to 14 baristas. “Most of the time when we clock in for a shift, we have to do the job of two or three people, especially as a closer,” said Canada. “Now it’s to the point where we have lines all the way out the door.”
This is not because Starbucks can’t hire enough workers. In fact, current workers are constantly asking for more hours, she said. Workers can’t get health care coverage and other benefits unless they work an average of 20 hours a week over six months. If they drop below that, they can’t get coverage back for six months, no matter how many hours they work.
The Des Plaines store went from 30 staff last year to 14, and now has long lines and waits of 15 to 20 minutes, Franco said. “People are on their way to school or work. They don’t have the time to wait that long. Nor should they. It’s coffee, for crying out loud. They should be able to get it and go on with the rest of their day.”
“The only way we can ensure that happens is if they staff us properly,” Franco said. “We work at the largest coffee chain. I would like to be able to make more per hour than what I see in one order out the window.”
Workers said that once they accumulate seniority raises, management often targets them for reduced hours. Then they become ineligible for benefits and have to look for jobs elsewhere.
Though the company is spending a billion dollars on “Back to Starbucks,” including $850 million to remodel 1,000 stores, baristas said broken equipment is an ongoing problem. They mentioned damaged floors, pitcher washers that break down “every other day,” a machine that leaks “a lot of cold brew” every night. At one union store, they had no refrigeration for 10 days, and workers had to store milk on the counter, a worker said.
MANY VICTORIES
Even without a contract, the union drive has pushed up pay at Starbucks stores nationwide as the company sought to deter additional union votes. Starting pay ranges from $15 to $19 an hour, depending on location. In some places it is higher to comply with minimum wage laws.
The union effort has also won electronic tipping at all stores. At first the company illegally punished union stores by excluding them from the tips, but a court ordered that retaliation stopped. Starbucks agreed to extend tipping to all stores in February 2024 and provide back pay and benefits for the union workers who had been excluded.
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Getting the company to the bargaining table at all was a tough fight. Beginning in 2021 when the first stores organized in Buffalo, Starbucks engaged in a record number of unfair labor practices, including firing over 100 union activists nationally and closing all three union stores in Ithaca. In 2022 and 2023, court dockets nationwide filled with Starbucks unfair labor practice cases.
Still, the wins keep coming. When negotiations started in February 2024, the union represented workers at 400 stores, now it’s 650. And last December, the company doubled parental leave for store workers, to 18 weeks. The change came shortly after the union had proposed it at the table, though Buffalo bargaining delegate Michelle Eisen said the company did not formally respond to the proposal.
Last year the union proposed minimum pay of $20 a hour, with 5 percent raises each year, while the company proposed no immediate increase and 1.5 percent raises in future years.
The union stresses that Niccol’s compensation alone would more than cover the cost of the union’s pay proposal for 12,000 union workers. But the company likely fears that if it doesn’t raise pay in all 10,000 U.S. stores, it will risk an avalanche of union organizing.
CHAOTIC RESTRUCTURING
In September, as part of its restructuring plan, the company closed 500 stores, including 59 union stores, saying that these locations can’t be brought up to the new standards. But the plan is more expensive and chaotic than it needs to be, union members said, because the quick roll-out has meant breaking leases and paying severance. Workers generally got two days’ notice they would be laid off.
But union protection helped in this case, too. At union stores, workers have been able to negotiate severance for all laid-off workers. In a non-union store, Franco said, “if you reject the transfer [to another store], you don’t get severance. Whereas in a union store, you can reject the offer to transfer and still get severance.”
“Our movement has outlived the past four CEOs,” said Franco, who has been elected strike captain for his store. “We’ve out-organized, we’ve out-fought. You can throw another four CEOs our way. We’re still going to be here.”
To be updated on pickets near you, sign the Starbucks workers No Contract, No Coffee pledge here.
Eighty Heartfelt Messages per Hour
As part of CEO Brian Niccol’s “Back to Starbucks” campaign, baristas are now required to write something personal on each cup. That can amount to 80 messages or more an hour during peak times, said Jhoana Canada, a barista in Nashville.
Before the policy, customers might ask, “Can you write happy birthday, can you write this message for someone?” recalled one barista. “So, it was a fun thing to do when it did come up, and we could be really nice with it.”
Now a smiley face or ‘Enjoy!’ are about all anyone has time to write, and at Canada’s store those options have been banned. “Anything that you write should be, you mean it,” said Canada. “You shouldn’t be forcing someone just because of a rule.”
‘NO POLITICS’
When Starbucks rolled out the new policy, workers were instructed to write nothing political. So in mid-September when a customer in Yucaipa, California, near San Bernardino, asked a barista to write the name of slain right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk on her cup, the barista declined, following policy, and offered to write “Charlie” instead. The customer, who was videoing the interaction, canceled the order and left.
After the customer posted the video, workers at the store received a barrage of threats and harassment. Two workers took leave, and one left the job entirely, said Ash, a barista at the store who asked that we not use their last name because the store has been targeted.
A day later, Starbucks caved to right-wing pressure, claiming it was fine for the workers to write the name and even call out “Charlie Kirk” if customers requested it.
“We were told no politics, no religion, no pop culture references, because it all could be taken badly,” said Ash. “So, the cup-writing policy was very strict, and it’s very disappointing that they switched the rules to cover their own skin.”
YES UNION
Soon, 70 percent of the Yucaipa workers signed cards and filed for a union election. “We’ve relied on each other a lot, and so we all decided to file for a union very quickly,” said Ash. “We would like to actually have somewhere where we feel safe and respected to be working in.” The NLRB is not operating during the government shutdown, so it’s unclear when they will be able to vote.
Understaffing and broken equipment helped fuel the union drive, Ash said. But customer behavior was also a big factor. “Management doesn’t really step in to deter them. They just keep coming back,” said Ash. “I have been called slurs. I’ve been told I'm going to hell a lot, and nothing has really been done about that.”
The uproar was frightening, Ash said, but “fear shouldn't stop you from protecting yourself and the people you care about.”
