'Red Cup Rebellion': The worker strike on Starbucks's most iconic day
Thousands of Starbucks union members walked off the job on the coffee retailer's biggest promotional day of the year. Timing is everything.
Starbucks'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.
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.
In email statement provided to the BBC, Starbucks senior manager of corporate communications Andrew W Trull writes: "Despite escalating rhetoric and recurring rallies demanding a contract, Workers United hasn't agreed to meet to progress contract bargaining in more than five months … we again call on Workers United to fulfill their obligations and engage in the work of negotiating first contracts on behalf of the partners they represent."
Trull also disputes the understaffing claim, telling the BBC employee schedules are set three weeks in advance and that "stores are often provided additional labor hours to augment staffing in support of planned promotional days, including for Red Cup Day".
Sachs believes the question for Starbucks is whether they can convert organising election victories into real gains for their workers. The way current US labour laws are structured can make that difficult: federal law requires companies to bargain in good faith with unionised workers, but doesn't require them to agree to a contract. The biggest benefit of high-profile movements like the Red Cup Rebellion might the morale boost it provides union workers, who are "forming a union and facing these legally imposed hurdles to concluding an agreement and striking just to get Starbucks to the table", says Sachs.
In the long-term, he adds, success for the striking workers "would look like Starbucks sitting down and negotiating a reasonable contract with the workers who have expressed their democratic desire to be represented by a union". For now, Cosgrove feels confident about the day's events, and believes it achieved its short-term goal of disruption and profit elimination at the hundreds of affected US stores.
"The majority of customers were incredibly supportive and completely understanding," says Cosgrove, "and that's what gives us a lot of confidence.