Thousands of workers at greater than 200 US Starbucks stores plan to walk off the job Thursday in what organizers say is the biggest strike yet within the two-year-old effort to unionize the corporate’s stores.
The Workers United union selected Starbucks’ annual Red Cup Day to stage the walkout because it’s often one of the busiest days of the 12 months.
Starbucks expects to give away 1000’s of reusable cups Thursday to customers who order holiday drinks.
The union said it was expecting greater than 5,000 workers to participate in its “Red Cup Insurrection.”
Around 30 stores also staged walkouts on Wednesday.
Neha Cremin, a Starbucks barista in Oklahoma City, said she was striking to protest understaffing in stores, especially during promotions like Red Cup Day.
Cremin said workers are already overwhelmed filling delivery orders, drive-thru orders, mobile orders and in-store orders; promotions add one other layer of stress.
“Understaffing hurts workers and in addition creates an unpleasant experience for patrons,” Cremin said. “Starbucks has made it clear that they won’t listen to workers, so we’re advocating for ourselves by going on strike.”
Thursday’s strike was the fifth major labor motion by Starbucks workers since a store in Buffalo, Recent York, became the primary to unionize in late 2021.
Workers at 110 stores walked out last 12 months on Red Cup Day; most recently, a strike in June protested reports that Starbucks had removed Pride displays from its stores.
However the strikes have had little impact on Starbucks’ sales.
For its 2023 fiscal 12 months, which ended Oct. 1, Starbucks reported its revenue rose 12%,to a record $36.0 billion.
Starbucks downplayed any potential impact of the strike Wednesday, saying it might occur at a “small subset” of the corporate’s 9,600 company-owned US stores.
“We remain committed to working with all partners, side-by-side, to elevate the on a regular basis, and we hope that Workers United’s priorities will shift to include the shared success of our partners and negotiating contracts for those they represent,” Starbucks said in a statement.
A minimum of 363 company-operated Starbucks stores in 41 states have voted to unionize since late 2021.
The Starbucks effort was at the forefront of a period of labor activism that has also seen strikes by Amazon workers, auto workers and Hollywood writers and actors.
A minimum of 457,000 workers have participated in 315 strikes within the US just this 12 months, according to Johnnie Kallas, a Ph.D. candidate and the project director of Cornell University’s Labor Motion Tracker.
Starbucks opposes the unionization effort and has yet to reach a labor agreement with any of the stores which have voted to unionize.
The method has been contentious; regional offices with the National Labor Relations Board have issued 111 complaints against Starbucks for unfair labor practices, including refusal to bargain.
Starbucks says Workers United is refusing to schedule bargaining sessions.
Starbucks noted that it has began bargaining with the Teamsters union, which organized a Starbucks store outside of Pittsburgh in June 2022.
However the two sides haven’t reached a labor agreement.
The Teamsters didn’t say Wednesday whether workers on the unionized store would even be striking.
Relations between Starbucks and Workers United have grown increasingly tense.
Last month, Starbucks sued Workers United, saying a pro-Palestinian post on a union account damaged its popularity and demanding that the union stop using the name Starbucks Workers United.
Workers United responded with its own lawsuit, saying Starbucks defamed the union by suggesting it supports terrorism and violence.