Starbucks will pay $35 million to more than 15,000 New York City workers to settle claims it denied them stable schedules and arbitrarily cut their hours, according to city officials. This happened hours after NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders visited striking baristas on a picket line.
This development comes amid a continuing strike by Starbucks’ union that became last month in many locations in the U.S. The union said around 1,000 baristas are participating in a strike in more than 40 cities on “Red Cup Day,” one of the coffee chain’s biggest annual sales events. This is the third strike to hit the chain since the union launched four years ago. Last month, Mamdani joined the growing boycott of the chain, adding political weight to a national labor push that has increasingly targeted major corporations over workplace conditions and union recognition.
Read: Starbucks baristas strike, affecting stores in at least 25 cities (
The workers want better hours and increased staffing. They are reportedly upset with the fact the company has yet to agree on a contract nearly four years after workers voted to unionize at a Buffalo store. Union votes at other locations followed, and about 550 of Starbucks’ 10,000 company-owned stores are now unionized.
“These are not demands of greed — these are demands of decency,” Mamdani, who ran on pledges to help working class people, said. Some workers carried giant mock-ups of Starbucks takeout cups, bearing the union’s logo instead of the coffee chain’s insignia. Sanders added, “Starbucks has refused to sit down and negotiate a fair contract.”
Starbucks spokesperson Jaci Anderson said the company was “ready to talk when the union is ready to return to negotiations.” While the union picketed, Starbucks “focused on continuing to offer the best job in retail,” where more than one million applicants seek jobs annually, Anderson said in a statement. “The facts speak for themselves,” she said.
Striking workers said their workplace faced chronic short-staffing, online orders so complex that the ticket is sometimes longer than the cup, and last-minute calls to come in. “It is the company’s issue to give us the labor amount to schedule partners fairly, and they are not scheduling us fairly, no matter how much money we are making them,” said Gabriel Pierre, a shift supervisor at a store in suburban Bellmore.
Under the agreement announced Monday, with New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, Starbucks will pay $3.4 million in civil penalties, in addition to the $35 million it is paying workers. The company also agreed to comply with the city’s Fair Workweek law going forward.