Starbucks workers hold signs as they picket in Burbank, Calif., on Friday.
Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
Starbucks’ union says workers are walking off the job at hundreds of stores across dozens of cities on Tuesday, the last planned day of what it is calling “the strike before Christmas.”
“Starbucks Baristas at over THREE HUNDRED stores have walked off the job to demand Starbucks bargain a fair contract from coast-to-coast,” Starbucks Workers United (SBU) wrote in an Instagram post, touting it as the largest unfair labor practices strike in the coffee chain’s history.
Workers United told NPR that “nearly 300 locations and growing are fully shut down” across 45 states as of midday Tuesday. Starbucks offered a different figure, telling NPR that only around 170 Starbucks stores did not open as a result of the strike.
The union says the strike is in response to Starbucks backtracking on its commitment to negotiate a “foundational framework” — for collective bargaining and resolving outstanding litigation on unfair labor practices charges — by the end of the year.
“Our unfair labor practice (ULP) strikes will begin Friday morning and escalate each day through Christmas Eve … unless Starbucks honors our commitment to work towards a foundational framework,” it said last week.
The strike began on Friday in three cities: Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago.
It has expanded every day since, with the list of participating stores now including Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, Seattle and San Jose.
Starbucks said Monday that about 60 stores nationwide were closed due to the strike, but stressed that that the “overwhelming majority” of its more than 10,000 U.S. locations remain unaffected. It said some of the stores that closed during the weekend had already reopened.
“The public conversation may lack the important context that the vast majority of our stores (97-99%) will continue to operate and serve customers, and we expect a very limited impact to our overall operations,” Executive Vice President Sara Kelly said in a statement.
The union is urging customers to boycott Starbucks stores during the strike and show up at picket lines to show their support for workers.
Why baristas are striking
SWU, which first unionized in 2021, represents some 10,000 employees across 535 U.S. stores. It celebrated a milestone in February when Starbucks said it would work with the union to reach a labor agreement and resolve litigation by the end of the year.
But last week, with matters still unsettled ahead of the last scheduled bargaining session of 2024, a whopping 98% of union partners voted to authorize a strike to “to protest hundreds of still-unresolved unfair labor practice charges (ULPs) and win a strong foundational framework for union contracts.”
The union acknowledged that both sides have engaged in “hundreds of hours of bargaining” and “advanced dozens of tentative agreements” in recent months.