Starbucks Workers Are Doing What Many Thought Was Impossible

They've forced one of the largest corporations in the world to negotiate a union contract.

By

Jordan Zakarin

, More Perfect Union

If anybody tries to tell you that they knew all along that Starbucks Workers United would wind up outmaneuvering and outlasting the world’s largest retail coffee corporation, they’re either lying or dangerously optimistic, because even the union’s original and most dedicated organizers admit that they were worried and reeling as the calendar turned to 2024.

“I think every other day I woke up feeling like, how much longer can I possibly go on?” Michelle Eisen, one of the union’s co-founders and most prominent organizers, told me in late April. “How much longer can these—at this point almost 10,000 workers—how do we get up every day and keep fighting when it doesn't look like there's an end in sight?”

Similar sentiments were expressed this spring by a fair number of other unionized Starbucks workers who have helped to unionize 428 Starbucks stores and counting since the summer of 2021, when the first stores started organizing in Buffalo, NY.

After they survived an intense and often cringeworthy early union-busting campaign by the company’s top executives—including CEO Howard Schultz, who gave a speech with a confusing Holocaust allegory—and won NLRB elections in two out of three cafes that December, they were off to the races. The campaign began spreading like wildfire while Starbucks became more and more brazen about its union-busting, to the point that it seemed as if Schultz was ready to burn it all down.

It was guerilla warfare of sorts for the young union organizers, most of whom were millennials or members of Gen Z who were often either already on the political left or just increasingly resentful of the profits that the company raked in while offering worsening health insurance, minimal raises, and plunging hours. The company’s reckless reopening during the early parts of the COVID pandemic had initially made workers open to the overtures made by the organizers working in Buffalo stores, while the continued decline of conditions and corporate arrogance kept growing numbers of workers motivated.

They’d quietly organize stores, put together smart media plans (often including leaking embarrassing and/ or incriminating videos to me), and go public to great fanfare. Whereas Starbucks once had a reputation as a progressive employer, its sheer size and ubiquity, which made it the McDonald’s of coffee, fueled resentment among the kinds of people who were likely to comment on social media and YouTube, and show up at rallies.

The campaign flourished after Buffalo workers won those two store elections. There were more than 70 Starbucks stores where workers filed to unionize in March 2022 and over 50 more that April. The union was putting up unreal, unprecedented numbers.

And then the company decided that it was willing to piss off customers and break the law in order to crush the union. Hundreds of workers were illegally fired, nearly two dozen stores closed, and the NLRB was investigating upwards of a thousand unfair labor practice charges.

The union crackdown was national news, and it didn’t reflect well on the company—Schultz, who returned as CEO to lead the assault, went from being largely seen as a clueless but mostly harmless centrist failed presidential candidate to an avatar of corporate greed—but it was effective. Organizing slowed considerably, and eventually, a kind of Cold War broke out, creating a tit-for-tat that seemed as if it would go nowhere fast.

As you can see in our new video below, which I reported and produced, things finally began changing in February when Starbucks gave in and asked to sit down and negotiate a master contract agreement. There was a lot that led up to that, obviously, but that’s what the video is about; it’s both a history of the past few years and an instructional video for other unions facing the same challenge.

The first bargaining sessions took place in late April, with more than 100 worker representatives at a few tables with a handful of executives. Both sides described it publicly as productive, while union sources said that the counterproposals were reasonable. They haven’t discussed pay yet, and that will likely be a big sticking point, but the hope is to have an agreement that can be used as the basis for regional contracts.

Meanwhile, organizing has picked up again; the union announced a record 21 new stores in one day in early February, just before Starbucks reached out to make peace, and now that there seems to be less of a threat to pro-union workers, leaders say more stores are reaching out. But they’ll have to remain vigilant—the company just announced the closure of a union store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which the company and union will have to negotiate, too.