Starbucks Workers Join Amazon Workers On Strike Against Union-Busting Megacorporations.
‘Twas the Strike before Christmas, when all through the land, the workers were stirring, on strike to take a stand…
The working class is making history.
In the middle of the holiday rush and massive profits for big business, Starbucks workers have just joined Amazon workers and gone on strike against one of the largest corporations in the country. Hundreds of workers are rising up against these union-busting companies who refuse to negotiate contracts that would guarantee real wage increases, job protections, and other much-need improvements to working conditions. Amazon and Starbucks workers, who have been at the forefront of a new wave of labor organizing amongst precarious sectors of workers in recent years, have had enough.
These are the largest Amazon and Starbucks strikes in U.S. history. While Amazon and Starbucks have spent millions of dollars to deter organizing, stalled negotiations, and retaliated against employees, these workers are rising up in one of the most important strikes in recent labor history.
On Friday December 20, Starbucks Workers United announced a series of escalating strikes that have begun at unionized locations in three cities: Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago. The union has announced that the strikes will last until December 24 and that with a strike authorization vote of 98 percent nationally, other unionized stores are ready to walk out as the week continues.
Since workers in Buffalo, New York voted to unionize in 2021, Starbucks workers have formed over 500 unions in shops across the country representing over 11,000 workers. They have been fighting for a first contract ever since, first struggling with Starbucks to recognize their union and then fighting to get the company to the bargaining table in good faith. Refusing to accept these attempts to hamstring their collective power, Starbucks workers have conducted several important workplace actions over the years, including staging a work stoppage at over 150 stores during Pride month to protest the company’s anti-LGTBTQ+ practices. They also put forward a strong statement against the genocide in Gaza that was met by a lawsuit by Starbucks and vicious attacks against the union; but this fight only strengthened the workers,in their effort bring Starbucks to the table.
Starbucks has now stated publicly that it will offer a serious contract proposal before the end of the year, but workers say the company is not making good on any of their demands. Further, the company is trying to go around the union by offering concessions on its own terms to head off future organizing efforts at its other stores. One of workers’ central demands is for wage increases, but the company refuses to include immediate raises in the contract — in a slap to the face, the company offered a measly 1.5 percent wage increase for future years.
Workers are calling out the blatant hypocrisy of the second-largest food conglomerate in the country that makes nearly $40 billion a year off the low-wage labor of its baristas. In September, Starbucks brought in a brand new CEO, Brian Niccols, to overhaul Starbucks’ operations, including the management of negotiations with the union. As workers demand living wages, the company doled out a compensation package of $113 million for the new executive. As Starbucks worker Michelle Eisen said, Niccols makes “approximately $57,000 an hour, which is about 10,000 times more than what the average barista makes an hour.” Workers are demanding improved healthcare and paid leave stipulations as well.
With this strike, Starbucks workers are joining the hundreds of Amazon workers who are going on strike at distribution centers across the country this weekend to demand that the company recognize the union and negotiate a first contract that will ensure better and safer working conditions at some of the most notorious warehouses in the United States. These workers are treated like machines, dehumanized by Amazon’s excruciating work conditions. Yet they are standing up against the second wealthiest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, and the second-largest employer in the United States. Worth $2 trillion and ranked #2 on the Fortune 500, Amazon has refused to recognize the union formed by nearly 10,000 workers across the country.
In a fight that would change the terrain for the working class in terms of using unions to combat the divisions and attacks of the bosses, these workers are demanding an end to forced overtime and the institution of a $30 minimum wage. This is the fight to keep the momentum of the tremendous effort to unionize both of these immense workforces going full steam ahead.
Together, Amazon and Starbucks workers are showing that, at one of the most crucial times of the year for the bosses’ profit-making, they are the ones who make it all run and can bring it all to a halt.
Generation U Raises Its Head
The names of their CEOs may be different, but Amazon and Starbucks workers know that their fights are intimately connected. They are united by historic unionization efforts and the struggle for new workers organizations to be a fighting force against the exploitation of the bosses. Though they work different jobs in different sectors, they are fighting against two companies that have built their massive wealth off of finding new ways to exploit, divide, and make their workers more precarious. Against these efforts, Amazon and Starbucks workers are fighting for higher wages and protections, and raising the aspirations of the entire working class.
The workers themselves see these connections — on an organizing call to announce their strike, Starbucks workers celebrated the Amazon strike in front of a Palestinian flag, calling their members to the Amazon picket lines. These workers present themselves as part of a unified movement of workers, standing shoulder to shoulder with the thousands of other workers who have mobilized for better working conditions in recent years — alongside UPS workers, autoworkers, healthcare workers, teachers, academic workers, students, and hundreds of thousands more. They bring to the picket lines their energy to fight oppression alongside exploitation, from homophobia to bloody imperialist genocide. And these workers see these as efforts that strengthen their struggles — bringing more of the diverse and multi-faceted working class into the fray — rather than a distraction.
The Amazon and Starbucks unions have become the figureheads of “Generation U,” for union — which has sparked the flame of a resurgent labor movement that the United States has not seen in decades. They were part of the worker upsurge of 2021 and 2022, where they won key victories to form unions against massive anti-union campaigns by the corporations. This “Strikemas” — building off of the lessons these workers have learned in struggle over the last several years — is the next phase of the battle.
That their struggles have run parallel for years is no coincidence. It’s a product of a political moment racked by crisis and marked by decades of attacks on workers living conditions and their rights to organize and fight for their rights. These workers were radicalized by the Pandemic, which showed them that they are essential and that nothing runs without the working class.
But these shifts go deeper, showing that workers’ issues go way beyond the shop floor and to the heart of how capitalist society operates. Starbucks and Amazon workers — alongside hundreds of thousands of others — have seen with brutal clarity over the past decades how the ruling class makes the rich richer and the poor poorer by sowing divisions among the working class and attacking the most marginalized sectors of society. These workers have seen how the bosses work hand-in-hand with politicians to attack immigrants, give the police impunity to kill Black and Brown people, roll back our rights to reproductive care and bodily autonomy, to support genocide, and to divide the working class into second and third classes of workers, ever more precarious and unable to make ends meet.
Many of these workers protested during Black Lives Matter, making connections between the struggle for Black lives and the conditions in their workplaces: the low wages, the lack of PPE, and the racist harassment of Black and immigrant workers by managers. At early Amazon Labor Union rallies, workers and supporters alike raised anti-police chants, infusing the spirit of Black Lives Matter (BLM) in these labor struggles.
With the Pandemic and BLM, Amazon and Starbucks workers alike entered the scene having had a glimpse of their true power — seeing the workplace as a site of struggle to fight for their economic interests, but also to make their voices heard against the din of the two capitalist parties and the capitalist despair they oversee. This is the spirit of “Generation U,” a new political generation that sees their interests as distinct from those of the bosses.
Importantly, these workers are willing to bring the strike to the table as their sharpest weapon with which to fight the bosses, ready to withhold their labor to win their demands and hit the bosses where it hurts the most. The struggles of the last few years have shown a willingness to fight and gives the bosses a good reason not to underestimate the power of an enraged and awakened working class. The more we see the connections between the struggles, the more we see how the entire working class can be united to fight for our demands — from ending tiered labor to winning universal healthcare and a society not run for billionaires’ profits but for the needs of the many.
It’s clear who our enemies are — it’s not just the bosses, but the capitalist politicians who help them exploit workers, from breaking railway strikes to giving them massive subsidies and upholding laws that divide workers among tiers. As Amazon and Starbucks workers take on the CEOs of some of the richest companies in the country this holiday season, their struggle is an important first step to prepare for the battles to come. As we saw with Jeff Bezos’ generous $1 million donation to the Trump inauguration fund, the bosses side with the politicians that ease the way for their profit-making — key to which is finding new ways to exploit workers and devalue their labor.
The workers now on strike for their rights is an important reminder that when we organize according to our class interests, we can win.