A rolling strike for Starbucks baristas has expanded since it began on Friday, targeting about 300 of the coffee giant’s stores across the U.S., according to the union organizing the work stoppages.
The strike, scheduled to end after Christmas Eve, is aimed at pressuring Starbucks during the busy holiday season to offer workers better pay than their original contracts. The employees also aim to push Starbucks to resolve unresolved unfair labor practice complaints brought by employees in recent years.
Starbucks Workers United, a union representing about 10,000 workers at several hundred of the ubiquitous chain’s approximately 16,500 U.S. stores, announced Monday that baristas in Boston, Philadelphia, Portland and Tucson have joined the union. The company announced the resignation as part of a plan to increase its workforce. Strike employees during the five-day action. They joined baristas in Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle who went on strike, followed by baristas in Denver, New York, St. Louis and other cities.
“My colleagues and I know that investing in baristas is the only way to turn things around, so we made the difficult decision to launch an unfair labor practice strike in hundreds of stores across the country. These strikes are our first show of strength, and we are just getting started,” Lauren Hollingsworth, a barista from Ashland, Oregon, said in a union news release.
The union says the strike is the largest in Starbucks history. The last days before Christmas are traditionally some of Starbucks’ busiest times for foot traffic.
Starbucks downplayed the significance of the strike, saying it would have little impact on overall operations. “The majority (97-99%) of our stores will remain open and serving customers, and we expect the impact to our overall operations to be very limited.” Vice President and Chief Partner Officer Sarah Kelly said in a recent blog post. Post about the strike on the Starbucks website.
On Monday, more than 60 stores were forced to close amid the ongoing strike, the union announced. And on Tuesday, Starbucks announced that 170 of its more than 10,000 company-operated stores in the United States did not open as planned.
The company has criticized the union for ending negotiations “prematurely” last week.
“Given the progress to date, it is disappointing that they did not return to the table,” the company said in a statement.
Evelyn Zepeda, California organizing director for Workers United, said five stores in Southern California initially participated in the strike, including Van Nuys, Santa Clarita, Highland Park and Anaheim. Their numbers have expanded to downtown and other locations.
The latest work stoppage marks a major turning point for Starbucks Workers United, which was formed in 2021 and has been steadily pushing forward with a campaign to persuade Starbucks baristas across the U.S. to join. Hopes that the two sides could reach a deal had been growing since February, when the company publicly committed to working with unions and taking a more neutral approach to promoting worker organizing.
This conciliatory stance is a complete reversal for companies that had previously fiercely resisted employee organizing efforts. Federal regulators found that Starbucks repeatedly violated labor laws, including disciplinary firings of employees involved in union activities, store closures, and stalled contract negotiations.
The National Labor Relations Board has conducted a total of 647 union elections at Starbucks stores, of which 109 were unsuccessful and several others had ballots contested, according to NLRB spokeswoman Kayla Vlad. Currently, 528 are affiliated with certified bargaining organizations. In California, 66 stores held union elections, and 44 of them had their bargaining units recognized by labor boards.
Vlad said employees have filed more than 700 unfair labor charges against Starbucks, its subsidiary Siren Retail Corp., or its law firm Littler Mendelson, alleging a variety of violations. . The union has not filed any new charges against Starbucks since late February.
