- Starbucks’ largest workers’ union announced that it would begin an escalating strike on Friday.
- The union first announced a work stoppage in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago before expanding.
- The union said it was protesting Starbucks’ labor practices and wages.
Starbucks’ largest workers union announced that it would go on strike in cities nationwide, including Seattle, where it is headquartered, just days before Christmas.
Baristas from Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle were the first to announce their strike. On Saturday, a union representative confirmed to Business Insider that additional workers from Columbus, Denver, and Pittsburgh had joined the labor stoppage.
“We’ve been in contract negotiations with Starbucks for several months now, and things have been going smoothly up until this point — when they have now refused to offer us a viable economic package,” Shay Mannick, a barista in Denver who is on strike after working at Starbucks for two years, told Business Insider. “They just have not been offering us anywhere close to a living wage.”
In a statement made on the union’s X account, Starbucks Workers United said the strike would “escalate each day through Christmas Eve… unless Starbucks honors our commitment to work towards a foundational framework.”
On Wednesday, the union told BI that it would strike to protest what it described as the company’s failure to negotiate a sufficiently comprehensive pay package and hundreds of unresolved cases related to labor disputes.
“Starbucks baristas are going on five days of escalating ULP strikes in response to the company backtracking on our promised path forward, starting tomorrow in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle,” Starbucks Workers United said in Thursday statements.
It added that the strikes would soon be “coast-to-coast.”
The union said the strikes could reach hundreds of stores unless the company works to achieve collective bargaining agreements.
The company has 11,161 self-operated stores and 7,263 licensed stores in North America. As of October, about 500 — or about 4.5% — of all stores were unionized.
“It’s been really reassuring seeing a lot of our community members and the customers coming to support us,” Diego Franco, a barista in the Chicago area who has worked at the coffee giant for over five years, told BI. “We’ve had a lot of our regulars come by, drop off supplies, drop off food, and stuff to help keep us warm.”
In a Thursday post on Instagram, the union said, “Since February, Starbucks has repeatedly pledged publicly that they intended to reach contracts by the end of the year – but they’ve yet to present workers with a serious economic proposal.”
Starbucks said in a public statement that the union delegates “prematurely ended” the bargaining session this week and that it was “disappointing they didn’t return to the table given the progress we’ve made to date.”
“We are ready to continue negotiations to reach agreements,” the company wrote. “We need the union to return to the table.”
The union, which represents more than 10,000 baristas, said on Tuesday that 98% of its member baristas had voted to authorize the strike.
News of the strike came just days after CEO Brian Niccol announced a change in the company’s parental leave policy for US store employees.
Starting in March, Starbucks will offer up to 18 weeks of paid leave for birth parents and up to 12 weeks for nonbirth parents. The company currently offers US store employees six weeks of paid parental leave and up to 12 weeks unpaid. The increased benefit will apply to employees averaging at least 20 weekly work hours.
