Starbucks workers, on full mobilization, roll out plans for national boycott

WASHINGTON—Fed up with four years of Starbucks stalling in bargaining, combined with the firm’s setting of an all-time U.S. record for breaking labor laws, Starbucks baristas and their rep, Starbucks Workers United, have decided to call for a nationwide boycott of the monster coffee chain.

The decision set no start date for the boycott. The workers and SWU urge the firm’s “customers, allies and organizations” to join it as soon as it is officially launched. 

Starbucks workers struggle with low pay, erratic schedules and company decisions to minimize their hours below the weekly 20 hours each needs to qualify for the firm’s benefits, their statement says.

Given that, “It is no longer possible to be both a Starbucks customer and [to be] in support of the workers,” it adds.

In boldface type, it declares: “Choosing to spend money at Starbucks is choosing a lawbreaking corporation over the baristas who make your coffee every day exactly as you ask for it” and whose work provides Starbucks with its revenue and profits.

The nation’s largest labor federation, the AFL-CIO, and the Service Employees, which funds Starbucks Workers United and provides legal and organizational advice to the workers, are losing no time getting on board with the national strike and officially joined the boycott today, which is becoming a steamroller by unions and their allies. The federation’s Union Label and Service Trades Department added Starbucks to its national boycott list effective September 1, and posted a list for customers of alternative coffee shops with collective bargaining agreements.

“America’s unions are proud to endorse [the] boycott of stand-alone corporate Starbucks stores,” the federation said. “Workers are fed up with unchecked corporate greed, and we’re standing with them in their fight for a fair contract.”

The workers believe the threat of “No contract, no coffee” will have such an impact on Starbucks sales—and its stockholders’ value—that the firm will finally bargain in good faith with the 12,000 unionized Starbucks workers in more than 600 stores nationwide.

The nationwide boycott is a serious step in the baristas’ drive to unionize the coffee giant. It also comes as Starbucks struggles with flat sales in its two largest markets, the U.S. and China, and an ad campaign in the Republic of Korea that boomeranged so badly that Starbucks is actually losing money there. 

The flat sales have drawn the attention of shareholders, including a labor-backed investment fund, who realize management’s obstinate refusal to bargain in good faith hurts the firm’s bottom line—and the fund’s investment.

“What we are fighting for is simple: A $17/hour minimum wage, enough hours to live on, better staffing in our stores and basic workplace protections,” the workers and SWU said in their statement posted online on August 25. It adds wages aren’t keeping up with inflation while “corporate greed accelerates unchecked in our country.”

The workers realize the company’s millions of daily customers wield the real clout in the struggle for decent wages and working conditions, and that Starbucks “is banking on customers’ blind loyalty to the company and the values it once stood for”—but doesn’t follow any more—“to keep squeezing them for profits.”

This boycott is not the first that Starbucks workers have called against their employer, but the workers intend it should become the widest. There were earlier “don’t buy Starbucks” drives during special company rollouts in prior years, the Red Cup days.

A boycott in New York City drew political support from both Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt.—Congress’s longest and strongest supporter of workers—and then-mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Both walked picket lines with the workers, and Mamdani exhorted voters not to buy Starbucks, either. 

And during picketing at Starbucks stores in the Chicago area, picket captain Melissa Lee-Litowitz got word that Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol was scoping out the marching workers. When she tried to ask him to have Starbucks bargain in good faith, he fled, dodging traffic—and almost causing accidents—on Chicago’s busiest shopping street, North Michigan Avenue.

When Lee-Litowitz finally caught up to Niccol, after chasing him by cursing drivers, frigid temperatures, snow piles, and honking horns—she didn’t want to get hit—she identified herself and launched her question. Niccol slammed his SUV door in her face.

Starbucks has also overtaken both Amazon and Walmart as the champion labor law-breaker of all time, at least in numbers of violations, the workers and SWU say. 

National Labor Relations Board administrative law judges “have found Starbucks has committed hundreds of violations and there are 550 currently pending” complaints about the firm’s unfair labor practices, the legal name for labor law-breaking.

“Instead of finalizing a fair and reasonable union contract, Starbucks has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of care for the workers who fuel the company’s profits by wasting millions of dollars on AI (artificial intelligence) and technology that doesn’t work” in an attempt to reduce human interaction—and the need for more workers—at its stores. 

The firm also tries to shore up flat sales by “launching countless gimmicky drinks that distract from real problems” Starbucks faces—competition from other coffee retailers—“and inventing pointless policies that do nothing but make our jobs harder.”

This ongoing irrational behavior by Starbucks and its refusal to settle a fair contract leaves us no other choice but to call for a boycott,” the workers’ open letter concludes, followed by their slogan throughout this struggle: “No contract, no coffee.”

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