By Nick Lavin
This holiday season, two of the labor movement’s brightest lights—Amazon workers newly affiliated with the Teamsters and Starbucks baristas of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU)—are putting the bosses on notice.
Starbucks workers walked out this week in a multi-day strike set to end on Christmas Day, launching pickets at hundreds of stores across the country, including three in the Boston area—Cleveland Circle, Brighton Village, and Allston Continuum. The SBWU members braved temperatures in the single digits to raise picket lines from 7am to 2pm, and plan to do so again on Christmas Eve.
Representing over 500 stores and 11,000 employees, SBWU is demanding the nation’s third largest employer come to the table with meaningful wage increases. In the last round of bargaining, Starbucks offered a paltry 1.5 percent increase—equivalent to about $3 per week for the average employee.
For SBWU members like Hannah Rafferty, who works at the Brighton Village location, the proposal comes as all the more offensive given how much the company’s CEO rakes in.
Negotiations have been ongoing since February, after more than three years of aggressive union-busting failed to stall SBWU’s explosive growth. The five day strike wave is the latest escalation to demonstrate to Starbucks that SBWU is serious about making serious gains for what would be their first contract.
“Brian Niccol makes somewhere between 50,000 and 57,000 an hour,” Rafferty told Working Mass, explaining that such a small increase is ”not a viable proposal, that’s not being serious at the bargaining table.”
Two other hot button issues at stores across the country are understaffing and incompetent and occasionally even discriminatory management—readers might remember the 64-day Starbucks strike at 874 Commonwealth Ave that demanded the removal of a store manager they alleged was transphobic. While battling at the bargaining table, SBWU has simultaneously lodged thousands of Unfair Labor Practices violations as yet left unresolved by Starbucks.
Ready for 2025
SBWU is not the only union to go on strike this holiday weekend—Amazon Teamsters across the country also stopped work during the peak shipping season. While these strikes are far from the final bargaining table escalation, they disrupt supply chains and eat away at profit margins while raising visibility for the union and training strikers in a rehearsal of the bigger battles to come.
The moment workers step off the floor and onto the picket line, they feel their strength. Says Rafferty: “it’s incredibly empowering to know you’re not alone in your working conditions, and being able to collect together with other people to make the world better, tangibly.”
The strike also garnered both unions vital organizing contacts at nonunion locations, both through media visibility and direct worker-to-worker conversations. The highly visible nationwide effort carried a holiday message of worker militancy into the homes, and eventually the workplaces, of millions—including many working at non-union shops and warehouses.
In addition to broad media coverage, the strike enabled union organizers to reach nonunion workplaces in face-to-face conversations. Flyering nonunion shops has long been a critical tactic for both SBWU and the Teamsters, and while this weekend SBWU mostly picketed the stores it had shut down, the Teamsters took the opportunity to spread the Good Word of unionized logistics by picketing many nonunion Amazon warehouses as well.
Continuing the Struggle
Boston DSA has long supported SBWU flyering efforts at nonunion stores across the metropolitan area, and for the first time, supported flyering at an Amazon location in North Andover. SBWU is encouraging supportive community members to follow their social media pages, boycott Starbucks during the strike, and to join flyering efforts at non-union stores. Readers can join Boston DSA’s flyering efforts across the city by signing their interest form at https://bdsa.us/join.
Nick Lavin is a Boston Public Schools paraprofessional and a member of the Boston Teachers Union.
Photo Credit: Henry De Groot
