Starbucks Workers Organize to Stay Home, Stay Safe and for Continuing Pay

The CVDSA Covid-19 Response Working Group interviewed Scarlett Moore, a barista at Starbucks in downtown Burlington, about how the store is responding to the pandemic and what workers are doing.

In a recent letter to “partners”, Starbucks says it is committed to “ensuring your safety and well-being, supporting our public health and government officials and being in service to our communities.”  How has Starbucks lived up it commitments?

When the pandemic broke out in China, Starbucks closed stores and they didn’t have an option not to.  When the pandemic came to the United States I think that Starbucks response was so delayed that workers had to take action on their own to demand the types of environments we think are safe to work in. So when Starbucks originally promised store closures and catastrophe pay for 30 days, that was the result of workers organizing, mostly online across many stores, thousands of workers demanding that stores shut down.  Starbucks had to respond to that. We certainly benefited from that in Burlington. Starbucks did provide pay (called “catastrophe pay”) when stores closed. There were problems with the way it was calculated, but it has been really helpful to a lot of people. 

What about working conditions in your store?

Because of its location in a mall, my store in Burlington closed right away. Other stores like the one in Essex Junction, Vermont with drive-throughs stayed open longer. They did not however provide PPE to workers who were working at the windows within 6 feet of customers, where you still could contract the virus. So, what I heard is that when the rest of the Starbucks closed down, the customer load increased so much that it was impossible to complete recommended measures like washing hands and sanitizing between each transaction because of the level of production workers were being asked to maintain by managers. Eventually, that came to a head, and there weren’t enough people willing to work in those conditions.  People won’t work when our lives are lives are on the line for $11/hour.

Workers at your store wrote a letter to management. What were they asking for?

On April 16, when we read the letter from Rossan Williams, the Exec. Vice President of Starbucks U.S., it was like getting whiplash. The letter to us read that we were being pushed back to work in unsafe conditions on threat of losing our jobs, whether or not it was cloaked in compassionate language. So we read that and were immediately concerned that the company was prioritizing its profits over our lives. We knew we had the ability to do something about that, and so we should. We wrote a letter to our manager and to our district manager, which essentially said that we would not be returning to work until the Vermont stay at home order had been lifted. We asked them to extend our catastrophe pay until that point. One of our main concerns is that baristas are not essential workers. Serving coffee is not essential work. There is no socially useful reason we should be asked to return to work. It’s all about restoring the profitability of the store, and that’s just not acceptable. Our lives are worth more than that.

So we wrote a short and sweet letter to management saying that we had made the decision on our own that our store was staying closed, regardless of the priorities of the company.

How did Starbucks respond?

We gave the letter to our manager during a Zoom meeting with our store’s staff. We discussed our concerns about our safety in being asked to return to work.  Another concern on the call was that our location was on Church Street, an area of non-essential services largely for upper middle class people, and that by opening the store we were actually encouraging people to step out of their homes during a stay at home order and come to a shopping district. We felt that was not only unsafe for us, but also creating unsafe conditions for the rest of our community as well.

Although the manager said he was proud of us, the letter and our concerns were to the best of our knowledge passed up to the district manager and to upper management. This was something that we were ready for.  We did not hear back for another 48 hours. And then a @StarbucksHelp account responded to one of my tweets saying that the store had never intended to open before the stay at home order was lifted. This message was given in individual calls to all the baristas at our location by the district manager and store manager the following morning. A few days after that we had a meeting where management didn’t mention our letter at all, but reiterated that the store was never going to open until the 16th.  They told us that because Starbucks serves food, it is an essential service, and that it was their choice to have been closed this whole time.

I would say this type of response is an attempt to gaslight workers and distract us from what we won. Getting an extra 12 paid days off is a real victory that comes out of solidarity and comes out of community.  And I think the response we’ve gotten is to convince us that we didn’t win anything by our coming together, and that our action was superfluous and didn’t have a concrete benefit for all of our lives. We know that’s not true.  But it is true that my store is staying closed until the stay at home order is lifted, while every other store in the district to the best of my knowledge will be opening up May 6.

What are lessons that you learned?

Everything that happened took place in a very short period of time, about 24 to 36 hours.

It is inspiring to see how store workers could come together in such a short time. We’ve seen an enormous political shift in the last few years, and many of the people I work with are looking at a job market that is really terrifying. The economy seems to be crashing down all around us, and we are having to respond in the best ways that we can. That is always going to be through solidarity in our workplace. This is a feeling that has been building for a long time. Problems always exist in our workplaces. We are asked to work for wages that are lower than what we deserve. Never mind the pandemic, we are put in situations that are unsafe at work. We face sexism, and LGBTQ+ discrimination and racism in the workplace all the time, and we don’t have a company that stands up for us. We learn over time that we have to stand up for each other.