Following the successful unionization votes at two Starbucks stores in Buffalo, New York, a wave of organizing has emerged in shops from coast to coast. Currently, workers at twenty-eight Starbucks shops across fourteen different states are in the process of holding union elections through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This wave of organizing is being led by millennial and zoomer workers, many of whom were inspired by the grassroots organizing of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns.

While Starbucks maintains a public reputation as a progressive company with some of the best benefits available to workers in the service industry, workers report increasing costs and a decline in quality over the last several years. The company has waged an intense union-busting campaign in an attempt to prevent workers, or “partners” in corporate lingo, from gaining power in the workplace. Starbucks workers disagree.

Jasper Booth-Hodges is a member of the Organizing Committee at Starbucks #2827, which is located on Chicago’s South Side. Workers in his store feel that the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the company’s lack of regard for their safety on the job. Despite the high level of exposure they face in the workplace, and the company’s record-breaking profits in 2021, Starbucks workers have not received hazard pay since May 2020.