Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Thousands of Starbucks workers are once again conducting a strike nationwide to call upon the coffee giant to reach a fair contract and labor deal with the unionized stores.
This Thursday, Starbucks is holding their annual "Red Cup Day," a promotional day where customers can get a reusable red cup when ordering a holiday beverage. Workers are saying the stores continue to serve understaffed and overworked as Starbucks continues to push extra promotional days.
"The company has continually refused to come to the bargaining table and bargain a contract in good faith with us," says Michelle Eisen, a lead organizer of Starbucks Workers United and longtime barista of the Elmwood Avenue Starbucks. "As of late, they've been throwing additional promotional days at workers in these stores that they have not bargained over and have really not staffed appropriately for and this is the biggest promotional day of the year. The company calls it Red Cup Day', and we are not working for them today."
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Eisen mentions that many stores walked off on Wednesday to protest in addition to this Thursday. Eisen estimates over 5,000 Starbucks workers will be organizing across the country in solidarity as the frustration continues to mount between Starbucks Workers United and the coffee company.
"This has really shown us that a corporation is going to do what a corporation does, but what we have on our side is 1000s of workers who are standing up and saying no," said Eisen. "You make billions of dollars, you need to treat your workers fairly. You need to pay us fair wages, you need to at least give us adequate staffing if you want us to continue to work the frontlines and bring in this money. The movement just gets stronger and stronger every day."
As it stands now, over 361 stores have unionized. Eisen mentions that numbers of stores on strike have doubled compared to this time last year. She hopes that eventually that Starbucks heads realize they are "on the wrong side of history" and finally work with the union to negotiate.
"They are traditionally a company that does the right thing, even if they don't do it initially. They right that course, they admit they made a mistake and there is room for that here. We would welcome someone to call up and say, 'Look, the last two years have been bad. We're sorry. We want to come to the table. We want to negotiate a fair contract. We want to embrace the union. We want to be on the right side of this of history in the labor movement.' We've seen huge wins and labor just over the last few months. And I'm proud to be a part of that."