Starbucks workers stage walkout, threatening annual sales bump
The union said the company isn’t nearly as eager to pay its baristas more as it was when it penned its new CEO’s pay package.
Starbucks workers in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle plan to walk off the job starting Friday morning in a strike that could reach hundreds of stores across the country by Christmas Eve.
The strike comes after Starbucks and a union that represents thousands of workers at its corporate-owned stores, Workers United, failed to agree on a contract, which was supposed to happen by the end of this year. The strike so far has impacted at least 10 stores but will increase each day that an agreement isn't reached and may eventually shut down hundreds of stores.
The walk-out would hit Starbucks during its busiest season and at time when its facing declining same-stores sales.
Starbucks has staunchly opposed unionization efforts at their stores since their workers first started to organize in 2021, and have faced several complaints from the National Labor Relations Board. Earlier this year — after a looming boardroom fight — the company signaled that it was ready to move forward and return to the bargaining table.
But with two weeks left until the deadline, the two sides seem as far apart as ever. Though they have reported making progress on some aspects of the contract, the impasse largely boils down to disagreements over how much baristas should get paid.
Starbucks’ new CEO, Brian Niccol, joined in September with fresh ideas on how to refresh the coffee chain, and this is one of the first public kerfuffles with the union. Niccol, who was most recently at Chipotle, was tapped to spark new sales growth after a few sluggish years for the coffee giant.
His pay package is reportedly worth up to $113 million. That's “a shocking 10,000 times the median hourly wage for a barista,” Michelle Eisen, a Starbucks barista and union delegate said in a statement.
According to the union, negotiations fell through because Starbucks proposed an economic package “with no new wage increases for union baristas now and a guarantee of only 1.5% in future years.” (The rate of inflation currently sits at 2.7%.)
In its own statement, Starbucks said the union is calling for “an immediate increase in the minimum wage of hourly partners by 64%, and by 77% over the life of a three-year year contract. This is not sustainable.”
