Thousands of Starbucks workers held a one-day strike Thursday on “Red Cup Day,” one of Starbucks’s busiest days of the year. Workers say frequent promotional events and giveaways like yesterday’s create extra stress and unmanageable workloads.
Organizers say Thursday’s walkout was the largest in the coffee chain’s history. A historic union drive has swept over Starbucks stores nationwide in the past two years; over 360 locations are now unionized.
This is Edwin Palma Solis, a Starbucks worker and union organizer in New York, spoke with reporters: “We want to make sure that we have better pay, staffing, scheduling, and we have the right amount of hours to work, because they’ve been improperly staffing us. And sometimes it just makes it harder for us to work. You know, sometimes we feel like we work for two people instead of one, and we’re just tired. We’re just really tired of overworking ourselves.”
