After years of scorched-earth union-busting and stonewalling tactics by their bosses, Starbucks workers are trying to get their union drive and contract negotiations unstuck through a nationwide strike.
When Benjamin Estrello started working at Starbucks four years ago, he knew he wanted to unionize his store. The then-nineteen-year-old had grown up in what he describes as a “very conservative” household in North Texas. When a friend of his came out as transgender in high school, “that experience made me think very deeply about my worldview, what matters and what separates us from one another,” Estrello said. “It caused me to question authority, leading me to the way I am now.”
By the time he got the Starbucks job in the Dallas, Texas, area, he was ready to organize.
As locations across the country followed the lead of the Buffalo, New York, store that in December 2021 became the first corporate-owned store in the United States to unionize, Estrello kept his head down, building rapport with his coworkers. That didn’t change until earlier this year, when he and a coworker were discussing Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), a division of Workers United/Service Employees International Union that now represents more than 12,000 workers at some 640 unionized stores. The two began finding other supporters at their location, and despite what Estrello describes as a formidable union-busting campaign, on September 9, 2025, the store voted 7-6 in favor of unionizing.
They are now on strike. Estrello’s store, along with sixty-four other unionized locations, walked off the job on November 14, Starbucks’ lucrative “Red Cup Day.” It’s an unfair labor practice (ULP) strike over what the workers say are the company’s violations of workers’ rights and stonewalling at the bargaining table, meaning strikers cannot be replaced once the strike concludes. The union says that additional stores will join the work stoppage in waves, reminiscent of the strategy the United Auto Workers employed during their 2023 auto strike.
Starbucks workers hoped it wouldn’t turn out this way. In February 2024, SBWU announced that it had achieved a breakthrough: Starbucks was committed to reaching a first master contract by the end of the year. The two sides started bargaining in April, and there was reason to believe that the workers might at last lock in gains for which they had spent years organizing.
Theirs was the highest-profile union drive in the country with widespread support, an odds-defying achievement in an otherwise largely stagnant labor movement. Their worker-to-worker organizing model, in which baristas train one another to organize, with newly unionized employees transferring their skills horizontally, created the momentum to scale the union drive nationally while remaining flexible enough to respond quickly to store-level problems.
Laxman Narasimhan, the then-CEO, had previously helmed a British company and displayed less resistance to collective bargaining than had Starbucks founder Howard Schultz. By the end of the summer, the two sides had reached thirty-three tentative agreements on noneconomic issues ranging from grievance procedures to dress code to handling harassment.
Then came Brian Niccol. In August 2024, the Starbucks board dismissed Narasimhan, whom they had hired in 2022 with a $28 million compensation package, blaming him for the company’s stagnant growth. Niccol took over as CEO on September 9, the same day Estrello’s store unionized.
Niccol’s previous job was as Chipotle’s CEO. Under his leadership, the burrito chain had aggressively quashed union-organizing drives and violated labor law so wantonly — from keeping a store operating where rats bit employees (they only closed it when a manager was bitten) to violating child-labor laws. They paid $300,000 for the latter in 2023, shortly after coughing up $20 million to New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protections for violations of the city’s Fair Workweek Law.
Niccol negotiated a $97.8 million compensation package for himself as Starbucks CEO — more than twice what he made at Chipotle, itself an astronomical sum — and became chair of the board, ensuring he’d be harder to fire. His compensation last year was 6,666 times that of the typical Starbucks barista, one of the highest such ratios in any US company. Niccol also convinced the company to install a satellite office in Newport Beach, California, the chichi Orange County community where he lives, and shell out $360,000 a year for a private jet pilot to handle his commute to its Seattle headquarters.
It isn’t the first time Niccol has had his employer foot the bill for his preferred address. When he came to Chipotle from Taco Bell in 2018, the company broke its leases in Denver, Colorado, and New York City to relocate to Orange County, California, where Niccol lives. Niccol billed the relocation as ideal for attracting “top talent,” but the company laid off much of its existing white-collar workforce in the process and asked others to relocate to Orange County; the change in location can only be understood as having been one of his conditions for taking the job.
Immediately upon taking over at Starbucks, Niccol rolled out a restructuring plan called “Back to Starbucks.” The company touts it as a program for improving customers’ experiences, but workers say it fixes none of the problems they had identified and has added a few more.
“It leads to an increase in surveillance from managers trying to make sure that you’re doing this laundry list of practices,” said Lisette Harris, who has worked at the company for six years and whose Eugene, Oregon, store unionized in 2022. “They’re trying to make you move as fast as you possibly can, make as many drinks as you can, and then adding additional practices on top of that.”
Niccol’s initiative does not address the understaffing that many baristas cite as a consistent stressor. Instead, it adds onerous expectations that have only made the problem worse — perhaps none more grating than the directive that baristas write a personalized message on every drink order.
“If there’s one cup that you don’t write on and a district manager catches you, you can get written up for it,” Harris explained, adding that they have seen baristas reprimanded for simply drawing smiley faces on cups during busy moments of their shift.
Just “No”
SBWU had given the company their economic demands in September 2024, and Starbucks’ bargaining delegation told them to be patient as Niccol got used to the collective-bargaining process. In December 2024, the company finally had a response: no counterproposals, just “no” to the union’s economic proposals.
In response, SWBU charged the company with bargaining in bad faith, and some 5,000 baristas walked off the job for a holiday ULP strike. Following the action, the company offered a meager economic counterproposal: guaranteed 2 percent annual raises (starting pay for baristas is currently between $15 and $19 an hour) and no changes to benefits or immediate pay hike. The union’s 490 elected bargaining delegates voted on the proposal in April, with 82 percent rejecting it. According to SBWU, “The remaining dispute is over less than a single average day’s sales, less than 4 months of CEO Niccol’s 2024 compensation, less than one quarter of one percent of the company’s annual revenue.”
“The company is not failing by any means,” said Estrello. “It’s very successful, but . . . many of us must rely on government programs. That creates a situation that isn’t necessarily unique to Starbucks, in which taxpayers are subsidizing corporate greed.”
“I am ready for them to stop telling the public that everything we’re asking for is unreasonable while they’re paying their CEO one of the highest salaries in the country right now,” Harris said.
During the pre-Niccol productive bargaining period, Starbucks seemingly paused its union-busting campaign, which by then had led to what SBWU estimates as roughly $140 million in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) penalties. The union had filed hundreds of ULP charges since 2021; during the pre-Niccol bargaining period, they filed zero. Niccol’s tenure has meant a return to law-breaking: the union has filed hundreds of ULP charges this year. According to SBWU, Starbucks has now committed more labor violations than any US company in recent history.
But those who consider such violations are now under very different direction than when Joe Biden’s labor-friendly NLRB general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, was in charge. Donald Trump appointed William B. Cowen as the board’s general counsel, who has urged his subordinates to reopen every Starbucks case, reconsidering judgements that had been made in workers’ favor. Overnight, the millions in economic leverage disappeared, as did the company’s fear that violating labor law might cost them.
A strike that does not financially hurt a company can be a gift to the employer. A boss sees an ineffective strike and realizes workers don’t have the power to hurt the company; an intensification of anti-union tactics follows. SWBU is vulnerable to that outcome: workers’ unionization of the roughly 640 stores is remarkable, but that constitutes around 6 percent of Starbucks’ ten thousand US corporate-owned stores. Should every one of the unionized stores go on strike, it will still be a minority work stoppage, one in which most employees do not join.
The company is already using nonunion workers and management as scabs at struck stores. When I recently visited a unionized location in Brooklyn, it was entirely staffed by managers. No doubt the company wants to permanently replace the strikers, ULP strike protections be damned. These are major risks for SBWU members, but they didn’t stop the workers from voting 92 percent in favor of authorizing a strike.
“We will do whatever it takes to get a fair contract,” Harris said. “We want them to listen to baristas. We want to increase our take-home pay — the average barista makes around $15 an hour — and we aren’t getting enough hours per week to receive the benefits Starbucks brags about.”
SBWU is relying on community support and solidarity from allies across the labor movement to multiply their leverage (workers are asking customers not to go to Starbucks until the strike is resolved). Many strikers see their actions as a wake-up call for the public, a spark for everyone to act before the Trump administration and the superrich it represents plunge the country further into an authoritarian, anti-worker nightmare.
“Worker solidarity is more important than ever right now in this country,” Harris said. “No matter what industry you’re in, unions are important and can make jobs and lives better for everyone, including for people not in unions. I want people to think about the amount of money that corporations in America are making and the money that they’re taking from workers all across the country.”
“I hope that people see what we are doing and are inspired to take action themselves and are maybe even inspired to use our blueprint to do so,” Estrello said. “Things are only going to keep moving in the wrong direction unless we do something about it.”
Following the unionization at Estrello’s store in Texas, the location received four new hires, an unusual number of additions for a company that continues to understaff. If it was an attempt to dilute support for the union, it hasn’t worked.
“Those of us heavily involved in the union welcomed them with open arms,” said Estrello. “It backfired on corporate.”
This post was originally published on Jacobin.