How Starbucks baristas spurred a new US labor movement

On the day last winter when Starbucks workers at two coffeehouses in Buffalo, N.Y., voted to unionize, the moribund labor movement stirred to life. 

Petitions for union elections rose by 53 percent in the fiscal year that ended in September, a surge largely inspired by Starbucks baristas in Buffalo. The caseload of the National Labor Relations Board swelled by 23 percent, the largest year-to-year increase since the Eisenhower administration. 

Union membership stands at a historic low. Yet, more Americans approve of unions now than at any time since 1965, according to Gallup polls. Union support stands at 89 percent for Democrats and 56 percent for Republicans, marking the first time Gallup has found a majority of Republicans willing to rally around organized labor.  

“Unions are cool again, is what it comes down to,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. 

Over the past year, workers have organized unions at blue-chip corporations with hipster credentials and progressive images: Starbucks. Trader Joe’s. Chipotle. Amazon. REI. Apple.  

Protests have also gone viral. A TikTok video of a walkout by Starbucks workers in Buffalo drew 30 million views. 

All of these events have encouraged talk of a new labor movement.  

“For sure, the needle is being moved by the number of union elections taking place,” said Will Brucher, an assistant teaching professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University.  

“I think a lot of these workers understand their own value, that they’re the ones making it a fun place to shop,” Brucher said. “Sure, they want more money. It’s the highest inflation in 40 years. They’re working for companies that have made a ton of money.” 

But even labor supporters concede they will need more than a few viral videos to reverse the decades-long decline of organized labor.  

Since 1983, the share of U.S. workers represented by unions has fallen from 23 percent to 12 percent. One encouraging sign, amid the decline, is that women and men are now more or less equally represented in union ranks. Three decades ago, union men outnumbered union women almost 2 to 1. 

If the new labor movement has a public face, it is Starbucks, or, more specifically, the Starbucks logo, the smiling siren replaced by a defiant fist clutching what appears to be a venti iced latte. More than 250 Starbucks shops have unionized. The movement started last December in Buffalo.  

“I had a coworker who had been at the company for 13 years, and she was only making 25 cents more an hour than me when I started,” said Will Westlake, one of the Buffalo organizers.  

“When I’m standing there making seven-dollar drinks, and I make 45 of them every half hour, and I’m only getting paid $15.26, when this campaign started,” Westlake said. “I know that it only takes maybe a month of sales, two months of sales, to pay the entire salaries of everybody in my shop.” 

Half a century ago, the typical union man was a middle-aged, white Democrat with a high-school education and a blue-collar job. But today, the group of labor movement supporters appears to be more politically diverse.

“We do have Trump supporters on our organizing committees,” Westlake said. “We have moderate Republicans. We have centrist Democrats. We have progressives.” 

Westlake is 25. At his own Buffalo union shop, he said, organizers are “mostly under 35, mostly women, and mostly queer.” 

New York is a historically strong union state. But a recent union victory at an Apple store in Oklahoma City, and labor wins at Starbucks stores in Kansas, Florida and South Carolina, defy conventional wisdom that unions cannot prevail in labor-resistant enclaves.  

“This isn’t a big union coming in and saying, ‘We’re going to organize Starbucks workers,” said U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, a pro-union Democrat from Madison, Wis. “This is young, young people who are not part of the labor movement, organizing peers.” 

Starbucks unions accuse the coffee chain of firing more than 100 union leaders in retaliation for their efforts. Westlake lost his own barista job this month after showing up to work wearing a suicide awareness button. 

A Starbucks spokesperson countered that Westlake and his employer parted ways over “repeated attendance and dress-code policy violations.”  

The Seattle-based roastery prides itself on a benevolent and forward-thinking corporate culture. From the 1990s, Starbucks offered health insurance and stock options even to part-time employees, calling them “partners” to suggest a flattened chain of command. 

“No Starbucks partner has been or will be disciplined or separated for supporting, organizing, or otherwise engaging in lawful union activity,” the company spokesperson said in an email interview. 

Apart from the millennial trappings, the labor battle at Starbucks has played out like many labor disputes of yore. Workers leveraged their collective voice to push improvements in pay, benefits and working conditions. The employer pledged support to the workers and their grievances, but not to the union, which it portrayed as a meddlesome intermediary.  

“From the beginning,” the Starbucks spokesperson said, “we’ve been clear in our belief that we are better together as partners, without a union between us.” 

Although union membership has dwindled in recent years, union support has rebounded.  

Public empathy for unions ran strong from the New Deal 1930s through the Great Society 1960s. Confidence flagged through the 1970s and 1980s, an era of perennial scandals. The decline of the American auto industry, and President Reagan’s unblinking crackdown on striking air traffic controllers in 1981, encouraged the view of labor organizing as archaic and counterproductive.  

In years since, many Americans came to view unions as socialist and anti-American. Yet, overall public support for the labor movement dipped below 50 percent only once, in 2009, the year former President George W. Bush floated a controversial $80 billion bailout to automakers.  

The Great Recession of 2008 inspired that bailout. The same downturn may have seeded the new movement. 

“Millennials, Generation Z, generations that are more educated than any previous generation, were led to expect that going to college would lead to useful and remunerative careers,” said Milkman, of CUNY. “And then they faced this labor market where what’s available are very inferior jobs to what was available before.” 

Millennial outrage over low wages and meager working conditions energized former President Obama’s campaign in 2008, Occupy Wall Street in 2011, Black Lives Matter in 2013 and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) presidential run in 2016.  

Then came the pandemic. 

Ava Alsens was working at a Trader Joe’s when COVID-19 hit. Like many in the retail industry, Alsens watched a relatively idyllic workplace fall to dystopian shambles.   

“I’ve been through three or four major outbreaks of COVID involving 20 to 30 crew members at multiple stores,” Alsens said, using Trader Joe’s nautical lingo for its own employees.  

“I started out at a store that had a lot of veteran crew members. And then half the people left. And on just an emotional level, it felt like a totally different place.” 

Talk of unionization at Trader Joe’s began in 2020. The employer “sent out a letter to everybody in the company saying we didn’t need a union, that we were in a good position on our own,” Alsens said. “That ended up sparking a lot of conversations in the store.” 

The Trader Joe’s in downtown Minneapolis, where Alsens now works, voted to unionize in August. Organizers followed the lead of the Trader Joe’s crew in Hadley, Mass., who formed a union in July. The Hadley crew followed the lead of Starbucks. 

“When someone else does it,” Alsens said, “it makes you feel like you can, too.”