Since Nov. 13 of last year, 12,000 Starbucks workers from 670 stores — out of 17,000 in the US — have been on strike in an effort to pressure the company to return to the bargaining table. Since the first Starbucks Workers United union local was organized at a store in Buffalo, New York in December 2021, the union has grown and is still adding new stores weekly.
The union’s demands include: increasing staffing levels, as too few workers at stores leads to longer wait times for customers, higher-take-home pay to provide all workers a living wage and resolution of hundreds of outstanding unfair labor practice charges for company union busting. The union says Starbucks has committed more labor law violations than any employer in modern history.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Silvia Baldwin, a barista who’s worked at a Starbucks store on the university of Pennsylvania campus in West Philadelphia for the past 3 1/2 years. She’s an elected bargaining delegate and a strike captain. Here she explains her decision to work at Starbucks and then to go out on strike — and what the union is demanding.
SILVIA BALDWIN: Yeah, I got a job at Starbucks in 2022. I had heard that it was, as far as retail goes, a pretty stable job with good hours, good benefits, that it was a good environment for queer people and I really, I just desperately needed the job. When I was hired, I learned in the interview after I had already been offered the position and accepted and been hired at the location, the manager told me that it was a union store and I don’t think I did a very good job containing my glee. I didn’t know a lot about the campaign and why workers were organizing besides why any worker would organize for better conditions.
It became very clear very quickly why Starbucks workers were choosing to create and join a union because the situation in the stores was just a disaster. Understaffing was systemic. Workers didn’t have a say in the operations at all and management was negligent and workers were not able to access the benefits that were so touted by the company. And in fact, more than half the store, more than half the workers at the store when I was hired had been forced out after the initial election period, after they fought for and won their election. There was less than half of the staff leftover people who had been fired illegally or constructively dismissed by having their conditions worsened so much that they had to quit themselves.
MELINDA TUHUS: It sounds like there’s just been stonewalling the whole time. Has there been any good faith bargaining at all?
SILVIA BALDWIN: Workers at this company, like I was saying, organized around like pay, staffing, scheduling more hours and also health and safety issues, dignity, discrimination, job stability and those are still the main issues for most Starbucks workers. And we ran a very successful pressure campaign for years and did successfully bring the company to the table in early 2024. After years of stonewalling and union investing becoming the most unprecedented violator of labor law in temporary history, they did start bargaining with us and we bargained in good faith for about nine months and we made a lot of progress on all of what we call the non-economic issues.
So all those things like health and safety, democratic participation mechanisms for holding the company accountable and forcing the contract, non-discrimination, those things, we have made a lot of progress on. The company though, did start stonewalling again after many months of good faith bargaining around those economic issues like pay and staffing, which is when bargaining broke down. They made it very clear that they were uninterested in moving at all towards our position and unwilling to put any money into the contract. That’s when we started building towards this strike. That is, in many cities in the country, still ongoing. The longest unfair labor practice strike the longest work stoppage in the history of the company.
MELINDA TUHUS: One article I read said that the company was claiming that workers were being paid $30 an hour.
See more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter.
