Thousands of Starbucks union members walked off the job on the coffee retailer’s biggest promotional day of the year. Timing is everything.
tarbucks's "Red Cup Day" is one of the biggest revenue-and-PR days for the global coffee retailer. Each year, its iconic white cups get their festive makeover, and Starbucks offers customers a free, reusable red cup with certain purchases of holiday drinks. Coffee lovers - especially fans of flavours such as gingerbread, pumpkin spice and apple crisp - turn up in droves, often posting their beverages on social media.
But this year, on 16 Nov, thousands of unionised workers participated in a multi-state strike across about 150 locations, timed to coincide with Starbucks' biggest promotional event of the year. The Starbucks Workers United Union (SBWU) dubbed it the "Red Cup Rebellion", to fight for better workplace conditions regarding staffing, scheduling and contract negotiations.
It's the second consecutive year workers have walked off the job on Red Cup Day, but the 2023 strike represents the largest in SBWU's active history, and included some stores that had never stopped labour before. In several locations, workers were joined on the picket line by union supporters. This year's Red Cup Rebellion also saw the SBWU coordinate with staff at on-campus Starbucks locations at colleges and universities across the country.
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Red Cup Day marks the kick-off to Starbucks's lucrative holiday season, and attracts millions of customers for a free, reusable festive cup (Credit: Alamy)
For Mari Cosgrove, an SBWU barista who has worked at Starbucks's Seattle Roastery since 2014, timing is everything. "You can't look up information about this promotional day without also seeing news about the strike, and that's why we're striking," says Cosgrove, who helped organise and lead the strike. Among SBWU's complaints included understaffing during promotional events, such as Red Cup Day, which was another factor in the strike's timing.
"The union's decision to strike on Red Cup Day was strategic, and probably increased the impact of the strike," says Benjamin I Sachs, the Kestnbaum Professor of Labor and Industry at Harvard Law School.
This year's Red Cup Rebellion comes in a year that has seen an uptick in strike actions by unions including the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), says Sachs. "Large existing unions have sort of reinvigorated themselves, revitalized themselves, changed leadership, become more militant and are winning." They are succeeding in their efforts at time when public sentiment towards unions is very positive, especially among younger generations.
There's also been more union activity in sectors that were previously thought to be "impossible to unionise", says Sachs, referring to organising efforts at companies such as Amazon, Apple and grocery-store chain Trader Joe's. And while these efforts have seen increasing success, Sachs says Starbucks is more of a "mixed story", because the company's employees had enormous victories winning union elections, but no progress in concluding even a first collective bargaining agreement with Starbucks.
This has led to a stalemate that the SBWU hopes to tip: workers at Starbucks locations continue to unionise, but the corporation has yet to commit to negotiations, despite numerous National Labor Relations Board rulings Starbucks is violating federal labour law by not doing so.
