Baristas Ask Organizations to Boycott until Starbucks Signs a Contract

No contract? No Starbucks coffee at the union hall.

Seeking to pressure Starbucks to finally sign a contract with its 12,000 unionized baristas, Starbucks Workers United announced a boycott of the chain August 25. In addition to individual customers, they are asking organizations and unions to stop patronizing the coffee giant, including avoiding catering and sponsorships, until they get a contract.

The AFL-CIO has already signed on, and the 25,000-strong Chicago Teachers Union voted to boycott on August 26.

Starbucks Workers United members conducted their largest and longest strike yet last November, demanding that the company resolve its 550 unfair labor practice charges and negotiate in good faith. Three thousand baristas in 100 cities struck, in some cases staying out into January. They asked customers to delete their Starbucks phone app and avoid patronizing all stores.

The company seemed ready to bargain for a moment, but then went back to stonewalling, baristas said. “They will continue to stonewall and stall for as long as they believe they can get away with it,” said Campbell Marusa, a five-year barista in Greeley, Colorado.

Sporadic strikes have continued. August 15-16, workers in California, Missouri, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania walked off the job. The walkouts came during Unicorn Frappuccino weekend, when the stores briefly offered a complicated multicolored drink that spiked sales and exhausted workers. Baristas were told they had to work that weekend and could not take time except for emergencies.

In Nashville, baristas walked off August 15 to raise the alarm about a new blending powder the company rolled out in mid-July that became easily airborne and was giving workers sore throats, coughs, and headaches from breathing it.

Starbucks baristas have been fighting for a first contract for nearly five years. Workers started an organizing wave with union election wins in Buffalo, New York, in late 2021. Since then, over 700 stores have voted union—affiliating with the Service Employees’ Workers United division—but that’s still fewer than 5 percent of the company’s 16,000 outlets in the U.S.

To stop the union’s spread, the company has racked up the largest number of unfair labor practices in U.S. history, with 550 still unresolved. Despite well-documented management intimidation, the union continues to grow by several stores a month.

THREE AT ALL TIMES

A key contract demand is around understaffing. Workers are demanding three people on the floor at all times, and they want available hours to go to current baristas, rather than the company’s prevailing practice of hiring more people and keeping established workers starved for hours.

Striking Nashville barista Baylor Baucom told the Nashville Banner that his store sometimes has only two workers. “That’s unacceptable, in my opinion, considering how many different positions we have on our floor—making drinks, making the food, taking orders, taking orders in the drive-through.”

Many longer-term baristas report that staffing has worsened in the last five years. “The working conditions and food service are getting worse while prices are getting higher,” said Marusa. Many workers report that even when they are available to work more, managers keep their hours below the number required to receive benefits.

Marusa said a co-worker in Greeley keeps asking for more hours but is being kept at the minimum. “After asking the manager for more hours, my store manager told her that there are resources to help her budget her money,” said Marusa. “With the hours that she's getting scheduled, she's getting paid less than $800 a month. The issue isn't how she's budgeting her money, the issue is that she is being chronically under-scheduled.”

Pay has improved since the union started organizing, but in 43 states the starting wages are still below $16. The union is asking for $17 an hour starting pay and 4 percent annual raises.

GRUELING PACE, ANGRY CUSTOMERS

Because there is not enough staff for the workload, baristas say they are forced to speed up their work to a grueling pace, while customers face long wait times. Customer frustration is absorbed by the workers.

“Everyone in my store was being scheduled less than their stated preferred hours because of our ‘labor budget,’” said Marusa. Because of this, workers can’t take sick time, lest they drop below the required hours limit.

When a co-worker was shoved and stomped by a customer in June, she had to go to the hospital, Marusa said. “Her ribs were bruised, but she came into work the next day.” She couldn’t take time off because she would lose precious hours and risk being fired, said Marusa.

The workers want health and safety addressed in the contract, including procedures to protect against assaults by customers. More robust staffing would make attacks less likely, they said.

“It honestly affects your mental health sometimes,” Baucom told the Banner, “because you’re understaffed, you’re being told that you need to go faster, and then you turn around and a customer is yelling at you because they’ve been waiting too long.”

Another sticking point is the annoying requirement to write something cheery and spontaneous on each cup. Workers face discipline if they don’t do it. One wrote on Reddit that they had been fired for “not including required markings on cups put in handoff plane.” Another responded, “Nothing irks me more when I’m running a shift and I have a callout, I’m supporting on bar and I’m running around doing a million things and my manager approaches me and says ‘there should be no excuses for not writing on cups.’”

‘INHALING DRYWALL DUST’

The union chalked a win in mid-August when Starbucks withdrew its new Blending Powder Beverage Mix, used in cold “refresher” drinks, that was making many baristas sick with respiratory symptoms. Many took to social media with their reactions to the powder.

The union asked an occupational health professor at the University of Illinois Medical Center, Peter Orris, to evaluate the powder’s ingredients. He found that three of them—gum arabic, xanthan gum, and amorphous silica—are associated with respiratory issues when inhaled. He recommended masking, special ventilation, and special cleanup procedures to handle the product. Workers who have reactions should avoid the product, he wrote.

Baristas took to social media to celebrate the product’s withdrawal, commenting “No more inhaling drywall dust!!” and “I can finally breathe on cold bar again,” and “Thank the lord, my asthma was tweaking… it was effecting me so bad but I felt weird saying anything about it at work.”

“We need to turn up the pressure,” said Marusa, citing the boycott. She encouraged unions and other organizations to pass a resolution to run “a Starbucks-free organization [and] encourage your community members to boycott Starbucks.”

[For more on the boycott, and to pass a resolution in your union, go to boycottstarbucks.net.]