Has Starbucks Surpassed Amazon as the Villain of Big Labor?

NEW YORK — For more than a year, Felix Santiago has worked as a barista at a Starbucks near Times Square, and for about half that time, he loved it. It was easy to swap shifts, easy to pick up new ones, easy to get along with supervisors who were largely accommodating. “The first six months were absolutely great,” Santiago said recently.

His opinion changed when his hours were cut in October and then again in January.

Overall, they had fallen from roughly 31 hours a week to just under 24, a drop of nearly 25%, and the reduction in pay was harshly felt. His rent, $1,000 a month, for a room in a Bronx apartment, was no longer manageable, he said, so he began bouncing around from sofa to sofa, from friend’s place to friend’s place. This is how homelessness so often begins.

In early December, about three weeks after Santiago, who still works at Starbucks, filed an official complaint with the city helped by Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, several other Starbucks workers with similar grievances about the company’s inconsistent approach to scheduling were invited to sit down with Mayor Eric Adams at City Hall. A few days later, the mayor posted pictures from the meeting on social media demonstrating his support. “I don’t have to tell you that Starbucks workers get our city moving every morning,” he wrote. “Their city stands with them in their push for fair conditions and workers’ rights.”

But what did that mean in practice? Since last February, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the city agency entrusted with maintaining those rights, has received 76 complaints filed from employees at 56 Starbucks branches claiming that the company has violated the city’s Fair Workweek Law over and over again. Taken together, the complaints argue that Starbucks did not provide them with regular schedules, that hours were cut without reasonable explanation and that the company failed to post open shifts for employees who wanted them, choosing to hire new workers instead.

Another barista, Jordan Roseman, who has been working at a Starbucks in the financial district for three years, has watched his hours drop from 20 to 15 and sometimes even 10, he said, which has made it harder to help pay rent, utilities and other expenses for the apartment he shares with his father.

When Roseman applied to the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, an online degree program offered through Arizona State University and a signature benefit of his employment, he found that he did not work enough hours to be eligible. “It was a gut punch,” he said. “If my hours hadn’t been cut, I would have 100% qualified.” He filed an initial complaint in August and is considering filing a second.

Andrew Trull, a spokesperson for Starbucks, maintained that the company took compliance very seriously. “We make every effort and have invested significant resources to ensure partner scheduling practices are in alignment with New York City’s Fair Workweek and Just Cause ordinances,” he wrote in an email.

Julie Menin, who ran the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection during the early years of the de Blasio administration and is now the chair of the City Council committee related to these issues, believes that Starbucks has not worked hard enough to align itself with these mandates. But no less worrisome to her is the city’s slow pace of response, with complaints like Santiago’s languishing with the worker protection agency for months.

“The concern I have is the sheer number and nature of complaints and the number of stores involved,” she said. “You have a corporate actor with pervasive violations. If ever there was a case that warranted citywide and aggressive action, it is Starbucks.”

In a statement, Michael Lanza, a spokesperson for the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, said that the office was “committed to protecting workers and holding employers accountable for flouting our city’s laws” but that it could not discuss ongoing investigations, which vary in “scope and complexity.”

Even as inequality has remained a hallmark of life in New York, the city has stood at the vanguard of progressive workplace legislation, filling in the gaps left by federal lawmaking and delivering what many other cities do not. Implemented in 2017 and expanded four years later, the Fair Workweek Law is meant to safeguard fast-food workers from various forms of corporate exploitation by insisting that they receive predictable schedules and the opportunity to work more hours if they would like them and by prohibiting more than a 15% reduction in hours without just cause or a legitimate economic reason. Starbucks’ net income totaled more than $4 billion in 2023, a 26% increase over the previous year.

Once simply the Department of Consumer Affairs, the agency saw its mission broadened to include worker protections in 2016 for the purpose of enhancing “the daily economic lives of New Yorkers to create thriving communities.” There have been major successes, the most recent of which was announced last month: a settlement with six companies, including Taco Bell, White Castle and Domino’s Pizza, for violations that affected more than 3,500 workers. The companies were forced to pay a combined $2.7 million in restitution and $343,000 in penalties.

Perhaps because Starbucks emerged out of Seattle in the 1970s as an early avatar of a new corporate counterculture, it has been a lightning rod in the way that Taco Bell, for instance, has not — a symbol of gentrification run amok, of liberal consumer excess, of bougie hypocrisy.

It may not matter what a city agency — even a very august and meaningful one — will or won’t do in the face of a sweeping unionization effort and prospective boycotts. This week, students at New York University brought a petition to the president demanding that the school end its licensing agreement with Starbucks. Similar petitions were getting passed around at 25 other college campuses around the country during a week when Workers United, the Starbucks union, organized a record 21 stores in a single day. By that point, it had already won victories in 386 locations.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .