Hours before U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani visited striking baristas on a picket line, city officials announced on Monday that Starbucks will pay roughly $35 million to more than 15,000 New York City workers to settle claims it denied them stable schedules and arbitrarily cut their hours.
The development occurred amid a prolonged walkout by Starbucks' union that began last month at dozens of outlets around the country.
The workers want improved hours and greater staffing, and they are furious that Starbucks hasn't settled on a contract nearly four years after they voted to unionize at a Buffalo store.
Union elections at other sites followed, and around 550 of Starbucks' 10,000 company-owned outlets are now unionized. The coffee behemoth also has roughly 7,000 licensed shops at airports, grocery stores and other locales.
Workers and the firm dispute the scale and impact of the strike, but Mamdani, Sanders and several state and city officials sought to reinforce the baristas' message by mingling with scores of strikers and sympathizers outside a Starbucks shop in Brooklyn.
"These are not demands of greed - these are demands of decency," Mamdani, a democratic socialist who ran on vows to aid working-class people, said the gathering.
Some workers carried enormous mock-ups of Starbucks takeout cups, carrying the union's logo instead of the coffee chain's symbol.
Four years after the first shop's union vote, "Starbucks has refused to sit down and negotiate a fair contract," said Sanders, a Vermont independent who supported Mamdani's campaign. Starbucks received a note requesting reaction on the progressive politicians' visit to the picket line.
Striking baristas reported a frantic environment with chronic short-staffing, online orders so intricate 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, 26, a shift supervisor at a store in suburban Bellmore.
Starbucks has been striving to bounce back from a period of sluggish sales as inflation-conscious U.S. customers questioned if its coffee concoctions were worth the money.
The Seattle-based company recently announced the first growth in over two years in same-store sales - a term for sales at stores operating at least a year - but restructuring charges, shop redesigns and other adjustments took a bite out of profits in its July-September quarter.
In addition to the $35 million it is paying employees, Starbucks will pay $3.4 million in civil penalties as part of the agreement reached Monday with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection in New York City. Additionally, the business committed to future compliance with the city's Fair Workweek legislation.
Starbucks stated that it is dedicated to conducting business ethically and according to all relevant local rules and regulations wherever it conducts business, but it also acknowledged the intricacies of the city's legal system. According to spokesman Jaci Anderson, "this is notoriously challenging to manage."
According to the agency, the majority of impacted hourly workers will get $50 for each week worked between July 2021 and July 2024. Workers who suffered a violation after that may be eligible for compensation by submitting a complaint with the agency.
"I sure hope that it gives Starbucks an awakening," stated 21-year-old Kaari Harsila, a shift supervisor at a Brooklyn store who was picketing on Monday. The deal also guarantees that employees laid off during recent store closings in the city will get an opportunity for reinstatement at other Starbucks locations.
Following many employee complaints against multiple Starbucks outlets, the city started an investigation in 2022. The probe subsequently expanded to hundreds of retailers.
The city claimed the study discovered, among other things, that most Starbucks employees never got regular schedules, making it difficult for them to organize other commitments, such as child care, education or other jobs.
According to the city, the corporation also prevented employees from taking on more shifts, so they continued to work part-time even when they wanted to.
