The workplace organizing platform Coworker was just a year old in 2014 when a Starbucks worker launched its breakout campaign: a petition to let baristas have visible tattoos at work. Since then, Starbucks employees have grown into one of Coworker’s largest and most active networks. Now that many of those workers are channeling their energy into unionization, the nonprofit is reimagining its role in aiding their fight.
Long before the recent wave of unionizations sweeping the country, Starbucks workers have used Coworker to voice to their grievances and organize for better working conditions. Some have felt that the coffee company has not lived up to its professed progressive values, alienating employees in a single-minded quest for profits. One longtime former employee described Starbucks as “hustle culture” because baristas without guaranteed minimum hours often cobble together shifts from different stores to make ends meet. The Coworker campaigns have shown the power—and the limitations—of issue-based petitions.
Veteran SEIU union organizers Jess Kutch and Michelle Miller launched Coworker in 2013 when the labor movement was in the doldrums. Frustrated with the barriers to joining a union, they wanted to make workplace organizing more accessible. “We thought the only way to revitalize the labor movement was to bring as many people into it as possible, and to not be overly obsessed with whether or not they’re joining a formal trade union,” says Miller. “But more importantly, to have them have the experience of collective advocacy, to raise the sense of possibility that you could change something in your workplace.”
They started out focused on online petitions, a deceptively powerful tool. “Petitions often have to name decision makers,” says Kutch. “You’re writing out what it is you want to change, who has the power to change it, and why it’s important.” They also often include powerful stories that draw in other workers and the media. Kutch and Miller saw that online campaigns could close distances and unite far-flung compatriots in ways that offline initiatives could not. And because anyone could sign the petitions, they carried the force of public pressure.
At their most successful, Coworker campaigns seem to have sparked real change. On a scorching Atlanta day in August of 2014, the air conditioner in Kristie Williams’ Starbucks went kaput. As the heat grew more oppressive by the minute, Williams and her coworker longed to roll up their long sleeves. But Starbucks had a policy barring visible tattoos, and Williams’ and her colleague’s forearms were all inked up.
Williams started to worry when she glanced over by the hot espresso machine and saw her coworker looking faint. So she decided to take action. When she got home that night, she went to Coworker.
Her petition, titled “Let us have visible tattoos!!!,” racked up more than 25,000 signatures—including nearly 14,000 from Starbucks baristas—in more than 40 countries. In October of that year, Starbucks changed its dress code: Baristas could now flaunt their tattoos. Williams was shocked. “It was a crazy moment,” she says. “I really just did it on a whim, thinking, ‘This isn’t going to go anywhere.’”
The tattoo petition would go on to inspire similar successful efforts at Skechers, Publix, and Jimmy John’s. Since then, more Starbucks workers have launched almost a hundred campaigns. Nearly 80,000 baristas have taken some kind of action on Coworker, and 43,000 are currently active. While plenty of petitions haven’t succeeded, Starbucks workers have claimed victory for several notable changes, ranging from a six-week store closure with pay during the pandemic to expanded paid parental leave to needle-disposal boxes in the bathrooms.
Starbucks spokesperson Reggie Borges denies that Starbucks has based any of its policy changes on Coworker petitions. He says the company receives feedback from employees through a number of channels, including weekly meetings, surveys, a hotline, and a social media platform for managers. “Of course they said they were already considering it, and it had nothing to do with my petition,” Williams says. “But I’m like, ‘sure.’”
To Casey Moore, a barista in Buffalo, New York, who has been active both in the union efforts and on Coworker, it comes as little surprise that Starbucks employees have effected change. “They’re known for hiring LGBTQ folks and people who look at themselves as activists outside of the workplace,” she says. “We want to have a say in the places we work too.”
Even when they don’t result in tangible change, Coworker petitions can drive awareness. In 2016, Starbucks workers began noticing their hours being cut and their stores understaffed. The timing couldn’t have been worse; summer was arriving, and with it the unquenchable thirst for complicated Frappuccino drinks. A California barista named Jaime Prater penned a letter to CEO Howard Schultz about the issue and published a petition on Coworker titled “Starbucks, Lack of Labor Is Killing Morale.” Coworker ran a poll for baristas on its platform and found the labor shortage was a consistent experience.
Shortly after posting his screed, Prater received a call from Schultz himself. “It was thrilling,” says Prater. He thought, “If the CEO of this company is calling me, Mr. Nobody, action’s going to happen. But it didn’t.” Prater says Schultz kindly listened to his concerns, then transferred him to Cliff Burrows, president of Starbucks’ Americas operations. The company gave Prater back pay for a promotion he was supposed to have received but never addressed the staffing shortage, he says. “It was like, quiet down the messenger and forgo the message.”
The petition remains live on Coworker, where it has garnered 25,000 signatures, 17,000 of which come from Starbucks employees. It continues to collect signatures to this day. Some workers have cited staffing shortages as a motivation for unionizing.
Borges disputes that Starbucks understaffed stores and attributes the perceived shortage to seasonal fluctuations, although Prater published his petition well before Starbucks typically pares down staffing in late summer. Borges says store managers can shut off various ordering channels, such as mobile orders, in the event of a staffing crunch.
Although Prater’s campaign hasn’t succeeded, it has helped draw further attention to Coworker and expand its network of baristas—more than 10,000 self-identified Starbucks employees signed the petition in just under six weeks. Prater appeared on news outlets like CNN and gained recognition amongst Starbucks employees. Through the connections he built up, he crowdsourced a document outlining employees’ top concerns and the impacts of these issues on shareholders, workers, and customers, and delivered it to corporate. Despite having left the company in 2018, he says he still receives almost weekly emails about Starbucks.
After that initial series of calls, Prater says, “I never heard from anybody in corporate again.” He found the experience clarifying. “The people who had my back were the people at Coworker.”
Prater had found that single-issue petitions only get you so far—if they get you anywhere at all. It’s a lesson that Moore, the Buffalo barista, took to heart when she helped organize one of the first three Starbucks stores to unionize in December. “Instead of fighting individual battles, we want to fight for our union,” she says.
Like most of the 150-plus Starbucks stores that have unionized since December, Moore’s location didn’t use Coworker to come together. But they still found it played a role in the face of what she and other workers describe as a relentless anti-union campaign. Starbucks has fired union organizers, closed a unionized store, allegedly threatened workers with the loss of benefits, and doled out pay raises—but only to non-unionized stores. Starbucks North America vice president Rossann Williams became a constant presence at the Buffalo stores for several months, Moore says. “It seemed like they gave up on running an international coffee company and just focused on busting our union.”
Borges denies that the company’s actions were retaliatory and says Starbucks does not union-bust. He says Williams visited to address employee concerns related to the pandemic.
This month, Moore and two of her Starbucks colleagues launched their first petition on Coworker. It calls on Schultz to stop union-busting and sign a set of fair elections principles drafted by Workers United, the union representing Starbucks stores. The principles include non-retaliation, freedom from bribes or threats, and equal time for management and union-side messaging. They’re intended as a corrective, Moore says, “because [US] labor law is so awful.” Current law, for instance, permits employers to hold mandatory anti-union meetings while barring organizers from company premises, and bribery, threats, and retaliation often carry penalties too light to act as a deterrent.
The goals of the petition, Moore says, are twofold: Pressure the company to end its union-busting, and reach other Starbucks workers across the country “because some folks might not realize why there are flyers in the back of their stores now with anti-union propaganda.”
It’s an example of the role Coworker might play in supporting a unionized workforce. Petitions and polls can serve as barometers for unions, says Miller. “Coworker remains a place for workers to test out things that might not currently be in the [union] contract to see what kind of support there is among their coworkers.”
And even if some Starbucks employees outgrow the platform, workers in other sectors rely on it more than ever. In response to tech workers beginning to organize in 2018, Coworker expanded its offerings to suit their needs. That includes Know Your Rights and media trainings, as well as the Solidarity Fund, a mutual aid fund for workers in the tech industry and its supply chain. It also launched a “bossware” database last year, tracking the rise of surveillance tech at work.
Of course, plenty of Starbucks locations have yet to unionize, and those that have remain far from a first collective bargaining agreement. Workers will need all the tools at their disposal for the battles ahead. Dozens of petitions remain live on Coworker, several of which have been added in the past year. Shortly before the Fair Elections petition went up, another barista posted his own union-themed broadside. He titled it, “Starbucks Board Needs to Get Their Heads Out of the Sand and Treat Union Organizers with Respect.”
