Starbucks employees in Brighton organized a walkout on Monday, joining an escalating surge of strikes, rallies and protests at stores across the country. Baristas in Massachusetts and a dozen other locations organized actions this week to draw attention to unaddressed labor complaints and a contract negotiation process they say has been stalled unfairly by company leaders.
Hannah Rafferty, a barista and organizer with the local chapter of the Starbucks United union, said the coffee giant has not been responding in good faith to negotiating efforts since baristas began organizing three years ago.
“We’re here for an unfair labor practice strike, because Starbucks has not been coming to the bargaining table with viable proposals,” Rafferty said Monday, standing in front of a small crowd of employees holding signs reading “no contract, no coffee” and wearing red union hats. “We want to be able to pay for groceries. A living wage would be really nice.”
Rafferty said a recent offer from the company included no new wage increases for union baristas and a promise of a 1.5% increase in future years. She called the offer an insult, especially from a company with one of the highest-paid CEOs in the country.
Since she started working as a barista in October, Ambi Dutton says she has been picking up shifts at multiple stores around Boston to try to meet her minimum quota of 20 hours per week in order to be eligible for health insurance.
“They offer it to all Starbucks members, but then they shorten your hours so you can’t have it,” Dutton said. “People’s hours and livelihoods are being affected, we might have to go from 35 hours to six hours just because we are union members.”
Starbucks has made working conditions difficult for union members, Dutton said, by reducing or increasing hours sporadically, lowering pay and forcing baristas to work in understaffed stores.
Starbucks United, a chapter of the labor organization Worker’s United, filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the company “refused to bargain and engaged in bad faith bargaining” over economic issues. Since 2021, hundreds of unfair labor practice charges have been filed against Starbucks, and many — including several dozen across New England — are still pending.
In October, Starbucks was given its first bargaining order from an administrative judge who found that store managers made “threatening or coercive statements” to Starbucks workers in New York. The following month, a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled that Starbucks violated federal labor law by excluding union stores in California, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Maine from switching to a weekly pay cycle.
“They’ve broken promises, and that’s why we have all these unresolved unfair labor practice claims with the NLRB,” said Andy Gonzalez-Piloto, a barista at a Starbucks location on Washington Street in Brighton.
“Part of the reason why a lot of our union partners are very frustrated is because we’ve been promised so many things,” she said. “They’ll tell us that once the contract is ratified things will happen, but then they don’t actually take steps to move towards the contract.”
Starbucks spokesperson Kristen Daudelin said Starbucks United’s proposal for an immediate 64% wage increase for hourly workers that would increase to 77% over the span of a three-year contract is “not sustainable,” and said the union “prematurely ended” a bargaining session this week.
“It is disappointing they didn’t return to the table given the progress we’ve made to date,” Daudelin wrote in a statement Monday. “Since April we’ve held more than nine bargaining sessions over 20 days. We’ve reached over thirty meaningful agreements on hundreds of topics Workers United delegates told us were important to them, including many economic issues.”
Despite the lack of a finalized contract agreement, Gonzalez-Piloto said the union has continued to fight for worker’s rights, most notably a change in the company’s parental leave policy. Starting in March, baristas will be offered 18 weeks of paid leave for birth parents and 12 weeks for non-birth parents, providing those employees are scheduled for a minimum of 20 hours per week.
In an announcement earlier this month, the company attributed the parental leave change to its new CEO, Brian Nichols, who took the helm in September.
“After hearing from some partners who shared the leave as new parents wasn’t adequate, we reviewed the program and have decided we’re making a change,” Nichols wrote in an announcement earlier this month. The company’s current policy offers up to six weeks of parental leave.
“That happened not even two weeks after [Cheyanne, Wyoming] bargaining delegate Madi Oates stood up in front of their delegation and said, ‘Why are your children worth more than ours?’” Gonzalez-Piloto said. “That was a union win because we were the reason why they even started thinking about it. We brought it to the table.”
After Boston stores began unionizing in 2022, contract negotiations hit a wall “about halfway through,” Gonzalez-Piloto said.
“We could see very quickly that the second we started getting into economics, they started to stall and be less willing to budge,” she said. “That’s why we’re here to ask them to actually consider our proposals and give us meaningful counterproposals, not just lip service.”
Daudelin, who said Starbucks gives employees a “best in class” competitive benefits package and salary not offered by any other retailer, said the company is willing to continue contract negotiations.
“We are ready to continue negotiations to reach agreements,” she said. “We need the union to return to the table.”
