Jenny Brown

Unionized Starbucks workers are electing strike captains and getting customers to pledge they won't cross picket lines. They’re amassing in front of stores with picket signs, borrowing a slogan that UPS Teamsters used during their 2023 contract campaign: “Just Practicing for a Just Contract.” Thirty-eight stores held practice pickets in early October, and starting October 25, 80 more stores plan to hold pickets and sign up customers to a “No Contract, No Coffee” pledge, promising not to patronize any Starbucks in case of a strike.

No Contract Means No Coffee as Starbucks Baristas Walk Out

No Contract Means No Coffee as Starbucks Baristas Walk Out

Red Cups Raised in Rebellion, Starbucks Strike Spreads

Red Cups Raised in Rebellion, Starbucks Strike Spreads

Already before Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, there were dire omens. Poultry workers reported that their supervisors were using Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric to divide workers up—allowing white workers bathroom breaks but denying them to Hispanic workers. “The more people are afraid to organize, the more the bosses will take advantage to create worse working conditions,” wrote Magaly Licolli of the worker center Venceremos in January.

Starbucks barista Christi Gomoljak has been on strike for 80 days. Managers at her Disney store in Anaheim, California had taken away the workers’ restroom without consultation. “There was a note on our break table that we were losing our employee restroom,” she said. Workers would have to go elsewhere in the busy theme park. Management also accused workers of not really being sick when they took their sick leave, said Gomoljak. On top of that, “We were told by our store managers not to talk to each other.

Update, February 20: After staying out for an additional week, the 4,200 nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospitals have reached a new tentative agreement, recommended by the hospital bargaining committee. They will vote on it starting today. —Editors The largest and longest nurses strike in the city’s history will continue at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospitals after nurses there decisively rejected the hospital chain’s contract offer 3,099 to 867. About 10,500 other nurses will start returning to work Saturday, ending the strike at three Manhattan hospitals run by Mt.

Union baristas are finally back to the negotiating table with Starbucks, but the workers charge that rather than progressing, the company is reopening already agreed-upon issues. “They're trying to move backwards on issues we've already settled instead of settling the few that we have left,” said Mina Leon, a barista in downtown Manhattan who struck for two months to get the company back to the table.

Silicosis is a lethal workplace illness that killed thousands each year up through the 1960s. In recent decades, thanks to union workplace safety fights, it became much rarer. Annual deaths dropped to the hundreds. The disease affected mostly older workers with longer exposures. So it was hard for stonecutter Gustavo Reyes Gonzalez, 35, to get a clear diagnosis in 2019 when he first developed a cough and shortness of breath. It wasn’t until two years later that he was told he had silicosis—and only had a year to live.