Starbucks workers protesting in Seattle. Photo: Eric Stoller. CC BY-SA 2.0

Thousands of baristas at nearly 100 Starbucks locations are on strike this holiday season, picketing outside the iconic cafes for a contract. While the corporate coffee chain has claimed little to no disruption to its bottom line so far, the union chose one of the most lucrative sales days of the year to launch its strike—Red Cup Day—and boldly rebranded it as a “Red Cup Rebellion.”

How long the rebellion will last is unclear. But given the union’s strong stand and public appetite to punish misbehaving corporations, Starbucks is risking everything by ignoring its workers’ demands.

“This is not the first nationwide strike,” explained Diego Franco, a Chicago-based Starbucks worker who is active with Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) and an elected strike captain. “However,” he added, “this will be the largest strike in the company’s history.”

It all began in December 2021 when the New York Times hailed the first-ever successful union vote at an Elmwood Starbucks near Buffalo, New York, as a “big symbolic win for labor.”

In response, the company brought its founding CEO Howard Schultz out of retirement in 2022 to lead it on an interim basis. But Schultz’s return did little to stave off the union’s momentum, and by 2025, in spite of multiple changes in leadership, more than 640 Starbucks cafes were unionized under the banner of SBWU. This is despite a union-busting campaign that was so aggressive that the National Labor Relations Board denounced the company’s actions as a “virulent, widespread and well-orchestrated response to employees’ protected organizing efforts.” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) also lambasted it as “the most aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign in the modern history of our country.”

The company has long referred to its workers as “partners,” a term that holds the promise of fairness. But, according to Franco, “they........

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