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NEW YORK—With no progress in deadlocked negotiations in sight, some 12,000 Starbucks workers nationwide voted by a 92%-8% margin to authorize an open-ended strike, beginning November 13. “No contract, no coffee,” the workers say, and they’ll again ask the public to support them, starting on what the coffee giant labels its “Red Cup Day,” opening the holiday season.
The workers have been in talks with Starbucks bosses, now led by new CEO Brian Niccol, for more than a year. They had hoped Niccol would bring a more positive attitude than his predecessors, including stubborn Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, who initiated and implemented the firm’s rigid anti-unionization policy.
But Starbucks has stonewalled for six months on key issues of better pay, more hours, and more-predictable scheduling, one worker spokesperson who asked not to be named told People’s World in a telephone interview.
That’s led the workers to plan to walk. “Union baristas mean business and are ready to do whatever it takes to win a fair contract and end Starbucks’ unfair labor practices,” 15-year barista Michelle Eisen, a spokesperson for the workers, posted on the website of Starbucks Workers United.
“We want Starbucks to succeed, but turning the company around and bringing customers back begins with listening to and supporting the baristas who are responsible for the Starbucks experience.
“If Starbucks keeps stonewalling, they should expect to see their business grind to a halt.”
The firm’s last offer, in the spring, was a 1.25% yearly pay raise. The spokesperson did not give the exact pay figures the workers are demanding but said it’s equivalent, for all the unionized workers combined, to “one day of the firm’s U.S. sales.”
By contrast, the AFL-CIO’s Paywatch reports Niccol, who’s been CEO for slightly more than a year, was compensated at a $96.81 million annual rate in calendar 2024.
His CEO-to-pay ratio with a median Starbucks barista was so high last year—6666-to-1—that to equal Niccol, the worker would have had to start on the job 4643 years ago, around 1900 years before the ancient Egyptians began building the Great Pyramid.
In the stalled talks, Starbucks has not addressed another issue that irks many workers: On orders from headquarters, store supervisors schedule them for fewer than 20 hours per week, making them ineligible for company benefits. Schedules are unpredictable, playing havoc with everything from childcare to college classes that workers take when not on the job. Many stores are short-staffed, too.
The firm’s also repeatedly broken labor law against workers, they and their advisors in Starbucks Workers United, a Service Employees unit, say. Workers have filed more than 1,000 charges of unfair labor practices—the formal name for labor law-breaking—covering illegal Starbucks actions.
That’s a legacy from Schultz’s reign. Under oath several years ago, he flatly lied to the Senate Labor Committee by declaring that Starbucks never committed unfair labor practices. Actually, not only had the firm done so, the National Labor Relations Board reported, but so had he, personally, against a pro-union barista in California.
Sitting next to Schultz at the witness table was an illegally fired worker, a military veteran from Georgia, canned for being pro-union. The NLRB had ordered Starbucks to take him back and make him whole. It did. His colleagues cheered when he returned to the store.
Before the strike authorization vote, the Starbucks workers also staged job actions at dozens of stores nationwide earlier this fall. And they’re pressuring the U.S. Olympic Committee to drop Starbucks as a corporate co-sponsor for the 2028 Summer Olympics, scheduled for Los Angeles.
Those Olympics tie in with the workers’ campaign for higher pay. Starbucks Workers United reports the nationwide median pay for a barista—the point where half of the workforce is above the figure and half below—is $15.25 an hour.
Anticipating both the 2026 World Cup and the Olympics, the pro-worker majority on the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors last year mandated a $30 hourly minimum wage by 2028 for all hospitality, restaurant, fast food, and similar workers in L.A. A coalition of the city’s largest hotels is pushing a referendum to roll that figure back.
The Starbucks workers also filed an overarching unfair labor practices complaint against the whole company. That complaint says Starbucks “engaged in bad faith bargaining” with the workers by first rejecting the union’s proposal for expanded parental leave, then implementing “the exact same policy nationwide” to undermine the union.
Starbucks also unilaterally imposed a new dress code, different from the current code and from what bosses and the workers tentatively agreed to in their bargaining. And after rejecting the union’s proposal for guaranteed hours, Starbucks then surveyed all its workers on the issue, again undermining the union.
Starting just before Christmas 2024, Starbucks distributed a company-wide statement to both local supervisors and workers “that improperly implied unionization will impair the worker-employer relationship because of the value the employer places on direct relationships.” That same statement also claimed—without evidence–that Starbucks offers “best-in-class” benefits, so unionization is futile.
To top it all off, Starbucks that day barred its workers from “sharing the content of the statement with supporters outside the company,” including the union. That’s illegal, too, Starbucks Workers United said.
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