Starbucks Workers United members are hitting the road to convince coffee drinkers to help organize and join picket lines at their local stores.
The union is starting a bus tour this week that will take activists to several cities in an effort to pump blood back into the stalling labor movement. The union will be handing customers flyers with information on how to protest at local stores.
The union wants to organize a much larger protest on Aug. 7 to coincide with the national “Adopt-a-Store Day of Action.”
The tour began on Monday and will first make its way through the Midwest and the South before finishing in Seattle, the birthplace of Starbucks.
The campaign is part of a larger strategy to get tough with Starbucks as contract negotiations have stalled. Both factions accuse the other of acting in bad faith and further hurting the workers. Of the over 300 stores that have voted to recognize a union, none of them have a contract.
Starbucks has been hit with hundreds of unfair labor practice charges and is being sued by the National Labor Relations Board for failing to rehire 33 employees after closing several stores in an alleged case of retaliation.
The company, for its part, has not backed down and continues to claim the union is the one at fault for a lack of contract.
“Despite the fact that we have attempted to schedule bargaining for hundreds of stores, Workers United has only met Starbucks at the table to progress negotiations for 11 stores,” Starbucks said in a statement.
• Vaughn Cockayne can be reached at vcockayne@washingtontimes.com.
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