Starbucks Baristas Are Accusing the Company of Homophobic Worker Suppression
This Pride Month, amid a wave of protests targeting LGBTQ-friendly brands, Starbucks workers say they’ve been asked to take down Pride decorations. Workers say it’s part of a larger trend of undermining and demoralizing baristas, who are unionizing nationwide.
Starbucks Workers United members took part in “Strike with Pride” actions across the country on June 25. (Starbucks Workers United)
At the New York City Pride March on Sunday, June 25, Starbucks Workers United members jumped in front of the Starbucks corporation’s Pride contingent. They raised banners that read “Starbucks took down Pride Decorations & LIED about it” and “STARBUCKS UNION-BUSTING IS HOMOPHOBIC.”
The union’s delegation, already outnumbering the company’s official ranks, grew as people left the corporate contingent to join them. The resonant chant of “What’s disgusting? Union busting!” echoed down Fifth Avenue and across the thoroughfares of Greenwich Village, Manhattan’s historic gay neighborhood.
Maria Flores, a queer barista and union member at the Astoria Boulevard Starbucks, attended her first ever Pride march — alongside more than seventy other workers from ten different stores across the tristate area — on strike in protest of Starbucks’s removal of Pride decorations in stores across the country.
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