Starbucks Union Demands Reinstatement of Fired Baristas - Coffee-sippers at 17th & Broadway Baffled by Drum-Pounding Protesters
Submitted on Fri, 07/11/2008 - 2:37am
By Inni Chowdhury - NYC Indymedia
A
dozen protesters gathered in front of the Starbucks on 17th and
Broadway on Saturday July 5 to protest the termination of two union
organizing baristas. Liberte Locke, ( a current barista who works in
Manhattan, wrote a letter to Chairman Howard Schultz, asking to
re-instate two terminated employees: Monica (who has declined to reveal
her last name for fear of being blacklisted by other potential
empolyers) and Cole Dorsey, of Grand Rapids Michigan.
According
to the official Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) website, “Monica
was fired on the 24th of April without notice. She had resisted
management when they made people work public holidays without extra
pay. The store manager had told her on several occasions that she must
have nothing to do with unions.”
Cole Dorsey was fired on June 6. He had been an active member of IWW Starbucks Workers Union.
The
event was just one of dozens around the world, as part of an
IWW-organized Global Day of Action. There were protests in Belfast
Brighton, London, Serbia, and major US cities including Phoenix,
Boston, and Grand Rapids. The IWW Starbucks campaign began in 2004,
when the group decided to take on the company in the court of public
opinion. Daniel Gross, New York City organizer for IWW, calls their
methods “direct action,” one that pressures by attacking their “public
image, picketing stores, and organizing Internet campaigns.”
Marching
in a line and pounding a drum, they were greeted with bewildered
glances by the coffee-sipping patrons. The group of nearly a dozen
people gathered around Liberte as she talked about the fired employees,
and their efforts to gain more workers benefits for all Starbucks
employees. Halfway through her speech, a shift supervisor asked the
protesters to leave and warned that law enforcement was on the way.
Before leaving, Liberte gave her the letter to the shift supervisor,
and asked that it be passed on.
As Daniel Gross, a former
Starbucks barista and an organizer with Industrial Workers of the
World, or IWW, said before the event, “This is a strategic protest.
They are as anti-union as Wal-Mart.” For Starbucks, this latest
controversy is just another headache. The Fortune 500 Company announced
on July 1 that it would close 600 underperforming stores around the
country. As one protestor, Eugene from Brooklyn College put it, “Not
only do they have bad labor practices, but the have bad business
practices too.”