Thursday morning in November, the sidewalk in front of a Starbucks on Lafayette Avenue in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn didn’t look like it does most of the time. It wasn’t the usual line of people holding their phones and waiting for their orders. Instead, there were picket signs, chanting, and the air was about 40 degrees and very cold. Baristas in aprons stood with union supporters and told people who came in for coffee to keep walking. A lot of them did.
The strike didn’t just happen at one Brooklyn location. It was planned to happen on Red Cup Day, which is one of Starbucks’ busiest marketing days of the year. There were more than 1,000 workers in over 40 cities across the United States who took part in the walkout. No contract, no coffee, that’s how Starbucks Workers United, the union that has been organizing inside the company since 2021, put it. The demands weren’t hard to understand: fair wages, better staffing, and the end of hundreds of unfair labor practice charges that have been building up for years without being resolved.
It wasn’t just the number of people that made the Brooklyn scene stand out. It was the little thing. A 21-year-old shift supervisor named Kaari Harsila was one of the main organizers of the rally. She said that Starbucks had brought in regional and district managers to keep the store running. She said, “They don’t want to shut it down.” Along with Rami Saied, who had worked there for two years, Rami Saied talked about shifts with only one other worker and 30-minute wait times for drinks. “You’re just really working back-breaking work,” she replied. “It just leaves you without any dignity.” These aren’t just general complaints. They’re the texture of a job that’s getting harder and harder to keep up.
What the union really wants to say about the economy is hard to argue with. According to reports, Starbucks didn’t offer any wage increases in the first year of any contract. After that, they offered 2% increases every year, which the union said didn’t keep up with inflation or rising healthcare costs. Baristas turned down the company’s offer of a contract by a large majority in April. Starbucks says that its total pay package, which includes benefits, is about $30 an hour on average, and that it has a low staff turnover rate. That difference between those two realities is where the real argument is, and it hasn’t shrunk much.
It seems like this moment is about more than just Starbucks. A promise has always been hidden in third-wave coffee culture, which is based on single-origin beans, careful extraction methods, and the idea that a café is a community space. It promises quality, care, and a connection between the person who makes the drink and the person who drinks it. What it hasn’t always given us is a way to run a business that can pay the people who do the work. Premium prices are charged for specialty coffee. Margin, on the other hand, stays low most of the time, and when money is tight, owners and operators look first to labor costs.
Of course, Starbucks is not a small town coffee shop. There are thousands of locations around the world, and the company has a new CEO, Brian Niccol, who was hired from Chipotle to fix problems like falling sales, angry customers over prices, and a damaged brand. Niccol’s “Back to Starbucks” strategy has brought about changes, such as stricter dress codes and more comfortable seating. Baristas say that some of these changes have made their jobs harder without giving them more help. It seems silly to write names on cups. It’s not during a rush when there are two people working.
When people in Clinton Hill chose not to cross the picket line, they were making a choice that had deeper meaning than their morning coffee. A union member named Jacob Muldoon, who used to work at Starbucks and now has a job at UPS, came to support the strike. He said that his pay had gone up by $8 an hour since he joined the union. It came with free health care. He believed that baristas should also get the same. It’s still not clear if Starbucks will agree in the end. Once, talks about a contract had broken down. A mediator was brought in, but there was still no solution, and both sides were still blaming the other for not moving forward.
What the Brooklyn strike made clear, in a quiet way that didn’t need to be dramatic, is that drinking a well-made cup of coffee and making it have become very different experiences. For a while now, that gap has been getting bigger. It became hard to ignore in the morning after the Red Cup Rebellion.
