Get TPR's best stories of the day and a jump start to the weekend with the 321 Newsletter — straight to your inbox every day. Sign up for it here.
Unionized workers at the Starbucks stores on Wurzbach and Blanco and East Houston and St. Mary’s participated in the Red Cup Rebellion, a national one-day strike that included thousands of union baristas around the country.
Seiya Wayment is the lead organizer at the East Houston and St. Mary’s store downtown. This is their store’s second Red Cup Rebellion after they participated in the first one last November.
Wayment said the strike’s purpose was to push two demands — a demand for better staffing levels, and a demand to bargain.
“Because of the way the staffing has been and the turnover, a lot of my coworkers, and me too, have been extremely overworked this past couple of weeks,” they said. “We’ve had days where we don’t have more than three people working at a time, and that’s incredibly draining and stressful.”
Wayment said promotional days like Starbucks’ Red Cup Day, where the company gives away free red holiday-themed cups to customers, make the situation even worse than usual.
“Today’s Red Cup Day, it’s kind of like a holiday that Starbucks invents to drive business,” Wayment said. “They don’t pay us extra for it, they don’t staff us extra for it, and they just give away free stuff to customers and we get slammed.”
Parker Davis is a union organizer at the store on Wurzbach and Blanco, which he picketed on Thursday. He said Starbucks still refuses to bargain with workers, nearly two years since the first store unionized.
“We still haven’t been at the table with Starbucks,” Davis said. “We’re still waiting to bargain with them. And another major new development is that Starbucks announced recently that they’re gonna have new benefits for partners starting in January, and they said that union stores will not get those, union partners will not get those benefits.”
The coffee company’s decision to offer new benefits only to non-union stores goes against a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge’s September ruling that a previous benefit increase to non-union workers violated labor law.
Starbucks has appealed that ruling, and the appeals process can take months or years.
Starbucks has said it can’t give new benefits to union workers without bargaining because that would be a violation of labor law.
The company has also said it is willing to meet with the unions, but that it will only do so in person. Starbucks Workers United, which represents the union baristas, has resisted that demand.
