Starbucks Workers Win a Monumental Breakthrough

After a scorched earth union-busting campaign, Starbucks appears ready to come to the bargaining table with over 300 union stores and thousands of workers.

In December 2021, Starbucks workers at a store in Buffalo, New York successfully won the first union at the company in decades. Since then, more than 390 stores across the nation have voted to unionize.

In the two and a half years since the first win, however, collective bargaining has stalled, a result of what the National Labor Relations Board described as a “virulent, widespread and well-orchestrated” campaign by Starbucks to slow the overall unionization effort.

But on Tuesday, the company and the union said in a joint announcement that they had agreed to begin talks on a “foundational framework” to establish collective bargaining contracts with unionized workers.

This includes an agreement to create a single master contract that applies to all unionized stores, which could be supplemented by contracts touching on specific local issues where necessary, the American Prospect reported.

In addition, as a show of good faith, the company said it will finally award union Starbucks workers with raises and other benefits, including the ability to receive tips from credit card orders, that it has been illegally withholding from unionized stores since 2022.

“By agreeing to credit card tipping and new benefits for union workers, PLUS a national framework for a contract, Starbucks is surrendering almost all of its leverage,” wrote Jordan Zakarin, who has covered the Starbucks organizing drive since its inception for More Perfect Union. “It’s as close to a white flag as it gets. Organizing will skyrocket. The end is near. The union is winning.”

History of union busting

Starbucks has been leading one of the most aggressive nationwide union-busting campaigns in modern history.

Federal courts and regulators have repeatedly found that Starbucks has illegally surveilled, punished, and fired employees for supporting the union, shuttered stores because workers had chosen to unionize, and refused to bargain in good faith as required by law.

Starbucks founder and former CEO Howard Schultz vowed in 2022 that the company would never engage with a union. After Schultz was brought before the Senate for questioning under threat of subpoena, the campaign intensified, with multiple workers fired, including the founder of Starbucks Workers United. 

Starbucks even teamed up with the right-wing National Right To Work Foundation to run decertification campaigns in stores that had voted to unionize.

The NLRB, which has already determined that Starbucks violated labor law well over 100 times, last month filed a complaint against Starbucks for “failing and refusing to bargain collectively with the union” at nearly 400 stores.

Starbucks has also sued the union for copyright infringement and over the union’s public support for Palestinians. The union countersued for defamation. 

Schultz stepped down as CEO last March and retired from the company’s board in September.

A landmark victory

Starbucks workers have led hundreds of strikes and walkouts against management to demand the company stop union-busting and come to the bargaining table. The company has even faced backlash from some investors over alleged union-busting. 

Tuesday’s breakthrough at Starbucks doesn’t simply mark a new chapter for the bold and impressive union of baristas that took the nation by storm. It places new pressure on retailers whose workers similarly began organizing story-by-store — Trader Joe’s, REI, Apple, Wells Fargo, and more — to affirm their workers’ right to unionize and come to the bargaining table. And it validates a set of organizing strategies that can be invested in across industries.

“SWU’s victory is proof of concept for other workers in low-wage, high-turnover industries,” writes Alex N. Press in Jacobin. “Traditional wisdom in the US labor movement saw such workers as unorganizable, the ease with which bosses could replace them and the short tenure of the average worker a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to the arduous, lengthy process of unionizing. No longer. Starbucks workers have now shown that, with the right support from organized labor and the freedom to take the lead on organizing themselves — a means of scaling up a campaign in a fashion that moves faster and costs less in organizing resources — it can be done.”

“All signs point to a simple if still-hard-to-believe conclusion: Starbucks workers are going to win a first contract,” writes Eric Blanc, labor studies professor at Rutgers University. “Not only have they taken on and beaten one of the largest corporations in the world, they’ve inspired a grassroots labor effervescence that could upend some of the pillar’s America’s political economy — especially if other workers follow suit and established unions finally rise to the moment.” (Blanc shares six lessons from the Starbucks victory here.)

“This is what we’ve always wanted,” Buffalo barista Michelle Eisen told the Prospect. “We wanted Starbucks to actually be the company they always said they were.”

Since the earliest fights in Buffalo, More Perfect Union has produced over 50 videos and original pieces on the Starbucks organizing drive while documenting the 390+ stores that voted for a union by creating a map of their locations. Watch more of our coverage here.