An ongoing strike by Starbucks baristas has grown since it began Friday to include about 300 of the coffee giant’s stores across the United States, according to the union organizing the strike.
The strike, which is scheduled to end after Christmas Eve, seeks to pressure Starbucks during the busy holiday season to make a better wage offer on what could be its first contract for its workers. The employees also aim to push Starbucks to resolve unfair labor practice charges brought by workers in recent years.
Starbucks United Workers, the union that represents about 10,000 workers at a few hundred of the chain’s roughly 16,500 U.S. locations, said baristas in Boston, Philadelphia, Portland and Tucson stopped working on Monday as part of a plan to increase the number of workers in the United States. Starbucks workers. Employees strike for five working days. They joined baristas in Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle who went on strike and were followed by others in Denver, New York, St. Louis and other cities.
“My colleagues and I made the difficult decision to launch unfair labor practice strikes at hundreds of stores across the country because we know that investing in baristas is the only way to turn things around,” Lauren Hollingsworth, a barista from Ashland, Oregon, said in a press release from Union: “These strikes are a preliminary show of force, and we’re just getting started.”
The union said the strike is the largest in Starbucks history. The last days before Christmas are some of Starbucks’ busiest customer traffic times.
Starbucks downplayed the significance of the strike, saying it would have little impact on its overall operations. “The vast majority of our stores (97-99%) will continue to operate and serve customers, and we expect very limited impact to our overall operations,” Sarah Kelly, executive vice president and chief partner officer, said in a recently published report. Blog post on the Starbucks website About the strike.
The union said that more than 60 stores were forced to close on Monday amid the ongoing strike. On Tuesday, Starbucks said that 170 of its more than 10,000 company-operated stores in the United States had not opened as planned.
The company criticized the union, saying it ended negotiating sessions last week “prematurely.”
“It is disappointing that they are not back at the table given the progress we have made to date,” the company said in a statement.
Five stores in Southern California initially participated in the strike, including Van Nuys, Santa Clarita, Highland Park and Anaheim, said Evelyn Zepeda, organizing director for United Workers of California. This number has expanded to include locations downtown and elsewhere.
The work stoppages mark a major turning point for Starbucks Workers United, which was founded in 2021 and has made steady progress in its campaign to convince Starbucks baristas across the U.S. to join. Hopes that the two sides could reach an agreement have been high since February, when the company publicly pledged to work with the union and take a more neutral approach to the worker organizing campaign.
This conciliatory stance marked a radical change in the position of the company, which had previously strongly resisted the campaign to organize its workers. Federal regulators found that Starbucks repeatedly violated labor laws by disciplining and firing workers involved in union activity, closing stores and disrupting contract negotiations.
The National Labor Relations Board has conducted a total of 647 union elections at Starbucks stores, of which 109 were incomplete, several others were contested and 528 are currently with certified bargaining units, according to NLRB spokeswoman Kayla Blado. In California, 66 stores held union elections, and the bargaining units of 44 stores were recognized by the labor board.
Blado said workers filed more than 700 unfair labor charges against Starbucks, its subsidiary Siren Retail Corp. or its law firm Littler Mendelson, alleging a range of violations. The union has not filed any new charges against Starbucks since late February.
