Providence Starbucks Workers to Join Thousands in Nationwide Strike Thursday
GoLocalProv Business Team
Providence Starbucks Workers to Join Thousands in Nationwide Strike Thursday
The strike comes on Red Cup Day, when the company hands out tens of thousands of free reusable cups, one of its busiest customer traffic days of the year.
This week, Starbucks workers at the One Financial store in Providence filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to unionize with Starbucks Workers United.
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About Strike
As part of the strike, workers will "demand Starbucks turn off mobile ordering on future promotion days, which company executives are scheduling with increasing frequency."
According to the group's release:
Workers earlier this fall filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board over Starbucks’ refusal to bargain around promotion days. Promotion days like Red Cup Day, half-off ThursYays and Buy One Get One Free offers cause a flood of customers to stores, without any additional staffing to cover the influx in orders. On Red Cup Day, drink orders pile up and are abandoned, lines are out the door, and Starbucks workers are left to handle angry customers who have had to wait as much longer than usual for their beverages and food all while trying to make complicated holiday specialty beverages as fast as possible. When the supply of red cups runs out, customers get disappointed and often take their anger out on workers.
The strike will take place at 11 AM at One Financial Plaza.
The group maintains the following:
"STARBUCKS REFUSES TO BARGAIN
The historic union wins by 9,000 Starbucks workers over the last two years at more than 360 stores nationwide have sparked a movement across the country of workers seeking to join unions.
But Starbucks has conducted a coordinated, scorched-earth campaign, centrally directed from its corporate labor relations office, to illegally frustrate and stall bargaining. The National Labor Relations Board is prosecuting Starbucks at an ongoing trial in Seattle over this refusal to bargain.
Instead of bargaining with workers, Starbucks has illegally offered workers at only nonunion stores benefits like credit card tipping that unionized workers have called for since the beginning of the campaign. Last week, they offered 3% raises to nonunion workers, a move union workers called “tone deaf” given the company’s record fourth quarter revenue and the recent 25% increases won by auto workers.
STUDENT, CUSTOMER SOLIDARITY
The November 16 Red Cup Rebellion is expected to draw in students and customers, who are increasingly calling on the company to live up to its progressive values and listen to workers who are demanding the company respect their right to a union and bargain a fair contract.
Earlier this week, students at the University of California-Los Angeles introduced a resolution at the student council calling on the administration to kick Starbucks off of campus as a consequence for its illegal union busting, which has resulted in administrative law judges finding the company has broken the law more than 270 times.
The Red Cup Rebellion comes as workers across the economy–from auto workers, to Hollywood writers and actors to fast-food cooks and cashiers, are increasingly taking bold action to demand more from employers who are raking in profits, but failing to share that prosperity with their workers."