By Baristas’ Voice Editorial Board
“Back to Starbucks” is the name of the latest speed-up and set of policy changes under the guise of “enhancing the in-store experience” by “focusing on what has always set us apart.” What does this mean in practice? A new dress code requiring “partners” to spend out of pocket on new clothing and which renders the clothing they currently own useless for work, a requirement to write customer names on to-go cups, a cut to our promised yearly raises, stricter time limits on producing orders, among other various new rules and changes. What do partners get out of this new deal? Supposedly more hours. But, as we all know too well, the promise of more hours often means keeping existing partner hours the same and hiring more to maintain barriers to benefits and save Starbucks money by reneging on its promises to veteran workers. For Starbucks, the important changes happen instantly. What about changes for the workers? Starbucks can only “aim” to begin promoting internally, and that aiming can only take place over the next three years. They have urgency to make their changes but we’re expected to be patient and wait for deferred benefits all while working harder, faster, and with more needless complications.
Those of us working in the shops know that all these changes miss the point. If Starbucks wanted a better customer experience, they would fully staff shifts with workers who are getting the full-time hours they need to survive. We know that the positive experience of our customers isn’t just fancy mugs or a name written in sharpie; it’s fundamentally an experience with no stress for either party, where the customer gets what they wanted from a worker who has the capacity and support to provide it. A demoralized barista rushing through orders and jumping through unnecessary hoops is far less likely to engage positively with a customer than a barista who has adequate resources and conditions to do their job. So, we know that this speed-up isn’t ultimately about the customer experience; it’s about the shareholder experience, and secondarily it’s about putting you in a position to do more for less. Starbucks’ profits are on the same steady incline they have been for years.
Even though company has been performing poorly, sales are still undoubtedly going up, but not enough to hit market expectations. It should not be us baristas who are forced to clean up the mess that management made.
So how do you beat a speed-up? You slow down! You slow-roll or go on strike. You resist and refuse collectively until the bosses get the message: we aren’t going to take it. This is easy to say but much harder to do. To resist collectively, you have to be organized; you have to take all your diffuse power, all your fellow union members, unorganized coworkers, and community supporters and weld them into one force to stop or slow production. For a long time, we counted on SBWU and SEIU to do this organizing for us, which resulted in on-the-ground organizers becoming inactive by passing the buck up the ladder to “their betters” — professional organizers often without experience on or actively removed from the shop floor and therefore without the ability to understand and represent us fully. SBWU/SEIU know that the path forward is resistance; that’s why they attempted to organize a mass rejection of the new policies. This attempt amounted to nothing when SBWU couldn’t secure the 5,000 participants they deemed necessary and went back to their tried and true method of (ineffective and ignorable) localized one-day ULP strikes. These fragmented and low-impact actions have limited (if any) impact on Starbucks’ broader operations and do more to dissipate our energies with futile activity than to build toward our demands and goals. Why couldn’t this larger resistance action be organized? Because SBWU is using seriously inefficient methods. Most shops do not have an active union life; most SBWU affiliates sign cards and join up without having participated in any strike or other action and do not have meaningful connections to the higher levels of organization or even to other shops in the area. Most count on SBWU to make the calls and to come down to the shop level to ask for their participation. This could only ever result in relatively weak, piecemeal organizing that at best can give baristas the ineffective one-day ULP strikes that have proliferated under SBWU’s guidance. We need to work toward large-scale, nationwide, coordinated, and sustained strikes outside of the broken ULP framework if we want to utilize all of our power.
In order to develop toward this, we need local, shop-level, strike committees that can develop on their own initiative. These committees would be responsible for identifying grievances, recruiting new members (and crucially giving everyone something to do), communicating directly with other shops and higher levels, as well as planning local actions. This work will lay foundation for ever wider and more powerful actions. We need to activate all of our membership, all of our coworkers, and to end the reliance on far-off lawyers and judges that could care less about our day-to-day and have no stake in how soon we get a contract. If we can develop a network of strike-ready shops which could quickly and efficiently communicate and coordinate to build strike campaigns on the fly and by ourselves, we will have a much better shot at successfully resisting openly illegal and anti partner policy changes like the new dress code than we will in Trump’s courts.
Talk to your coworkers about Back to Starbucks, form your strike committee and begin to resist in whatever ways you can, coordinate with other strike committees and develop broader and stronger actions. Utilize but don’t limit yourselves to what SBWU has provided.
