A year ago, nobody would have expected that thousands of US Starbucks workers would unionize. But they have. The pace of Starbucks workers' victories slowed slightly last month, but the union is still rolling on.
Emma Chambers tried to unionize her Los Angeles Starbucks store. As a result, she was fired and lost stable housing and health care. But she says that if she knew all that going in, she’d still have stood up for herself, her coworkers, and the working class.
Starbucks isn’t the only coffee shop whose workers are unionizing. Boston has seen a wave of organizing at independent coffee shops. The latest: 1369 Coffee House, whose workers recently filed for union recognition.
With unionization taking off at Starbucks, the company is quietly admitting that it’s in a bind: unionization threatens its low-wage model, but union busting hurts its public image as a supposedly progressive company.
Workers at Peet’s Coffee & Tea in California have announced that they’re filing for a union election. They’re not just inspired by their peers at Starbucks — they’ve been organizing with and learning directly from them.
Starbucks chairwoman Mellody Hobson runs an investment firm that’s raking in millions in fees from unionized workers’ pension funds — all while Starbucks wages an aggressive anti-union campaign against its workers.
Canada’s Starbucks organizing wave is moving eastward from British Columbia, with a store in Alberta going union earlier this month. Poetically, the Starbucks union win is on anti-labor Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s home turf.
A December 2021 missive from managers at the Elmwood Avenue location of Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, after workers voted 18 to 9 in favor of unionizing, shared by Starbucks Workers United on Twitter.
Starbucks and Amazon’s current anti-union strategy is an effective one: infinite delay. Employers can’t always stop workers from winning a union election, but labor law currently allows them to buy time to kill union support.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in a case involving Starbucks and its union, seeing all justices side with the company against workers. The decision will make it easier for employers to get away with firing workers for unionizing.
From logistics to Hollywood to higher ed to auto, 2023 saw a promising upsurge in US labor militancy. Unions must seize this historic opening to reverse decades of decline.
Bernie Sanders’s grilling of Starbucks’s union-busting billionaire Howard Schultz put a CEO in the hot seat on a national stage. It also forced Senate Democrats who might rather stay on the Democratic donor's good side to denounce his flagrantly illegal behavior.
Starbucks is “fighting dirtier and dirtier all the time” in its attempt to smash the nationwide union drive, Starbucks Workers United field director Daisy Pitkin writes. Workers are organizing and striking — they need consumers to step up their support.
Venti cappuccino in one hand and a ballot in the other, the Starbucks organizing drive is on a roll.
Starbucks baristas have made headlines for unionizing across the country. But smaller coffee shop workers have organized, too. And in Philadelphia, baristas are looking to unionize the entire city.
Labor’s ability to improve queer workers’ lives stems from its power to raise standards for all workers.
At Starbucks, Amazon, UPS, and many other workplaces, there are enormous opportunities for radicals to organize on shop floors. If you want to rebuild the labor movement, get a job and start organizing with your coworkers.
It’s not just Starbucks anymore: workers at two California Peet’s Coffee stores announced their intention to unionize. The worker-driven model at the heart of Starbucks Workers United is spreading.
We have a rare opportunity to rebuild a fighting labor movement in the United States. To take advantage of it, workers must be armed with battle-tested strategies and tactics — and that means being willing to go on strike.
Every blip in worker struggle raises a question: Is labor finally turning the corner? But our current moment features both pissed-off workers and successful militant union reform movements. Together, the two could turn worker anger into something much bigger.