Starbucks union calls for strike on busiest sales day

Syndicate STarbucks Workers United (SWU)which, with 9,000 members, constitutes the majority of the popular coffee chain, has called a national strike for Thursday, which coincides with “Red Cup Day”one of the brand’s sales highlights consisting of giving away red glasses with motifs alluding to Christmas.

The strike has been dubbed the ‘Red Cup Rebellion’ and has been called in protest because the company is refusing to sit down with the union to discuss issues related to scheduling, hiring, wages and work stoppages.

As part of the Day of Struggle, union members will lift the doors of the same coffee shops, visit those where a union section has not yet been formed – since each place needs at least half plus one employee – and turn off their phones. taking orders, an important detail in the chain on which more and more depend orders through the application.

The union is thus responding to offers from the company, which on November 6 publicly improved its “partners” – the adjective Starbucks uses for its employees -: an average wage of $17.50 an hour, the ability to ask for annual leave. three months after employment and curriculum fundingamong other things.

New union stage at Starbucks

Starbucks has refused unionization for decades, but in December 2021, employees will from a coffee shop in upstate New York they won the battle and created their first union; Soon the process spread throughout the country and now there are 360 ​​local union cells and 9,000 members, according to JZU data.

The seeds that SWU has planted are beginning to be noticed in other businesses in the non-chain sector, so a coffee shop called Hex&Co, which has the distinction of being an informal board game room and has three locations in New York, joined the movement on Tuesday, and the employees of one of them managed to create a union with a convincing majority (50-16).

Like Starbucks, Hex&Co presents itself as a company with “progressive” values, supposedly aware of issues of gender and race, or climate change, but they fiercely opposed union action, thus pointing to the paradoxes of the new corporate progressivism. 21. century.