Starbucks

As members of the Starbucks Workers Union, we believe that the need for workplace organizing is greater than ever before ; behind each shiny logo lies a potential struggle. Since the mid-1970s bosses have been on the offensive : battering workers with inflation, union busting, outsourcing, industrial restructuring, and the destruction of the last shreds of the social safety net. The result of these shifts can be summed up as the rise of "precarity" as the defining fact of life for an ever-growing section of the working class.

The Precariat : An Impossible Class

More than anything, precarity describes the everyday life experience of workers in the corporate chains. It is simply impossible to make a life for yourself working one of these jobs. Because of the lack of union organization in these industries, we are almost all legally classified as "At Will" employees. This means that under U.S. labor law, we can be fired for no reason. The threat of firing, however, is only the least subtle of many mechanisms used by management to control us.

At Starbucks, many workers have difficulty budgeting or planning ahead because our work hours fluctuate wildly from week to week. The company uses a computer system to determine staffing levels for the stores based on past sales. Starbucks’ "Automated Labor Scheduling" software displaces almost all of the risk of the vagaries of the market onto individual workers. Bosses order "labor" exactly like they order coffee beans or other inputs. When workers challenge the arbitrary authority of their boss they often face punitive measures, such as cuts in hours. But we are not coffee beans, we are human beings ! By organizing, we assert our humanity in a system founded on our commodification.