Category: The Service Worker

Since Brian Niccol became the Chairman and CEO ofStarbucks, bargaining between SBWU and the company hascome to a standstill, with the new leadership refusing tocontinue bargaining. Since that time, there has been all sortsof talk of the upcoming SBWU strike response to once andfor all obtain a contract with the company. Of course, strikesare the…

Recently, employees at the bank headquarters in RI have been told that, starting on December 23rd, the contract for Eurest will be dropped and replaced with another subsidiary of Compass Group- Flik. The General Manager has seemingly gone to everyone individually to tell us all the same thing: that everything will stay the same, except…

Our successes and failures of labor organizing in the service sector have revealed many hard-won truths about the industry’s conditions. As an example from New England, many useful lessons can be drawn from the work done at Maruichi, a small New England Japanese grocery/cafe chain that a labor activist with the Organization of Class-Conscious Service…

We lost 2 workers at coffee bar: one who had put in two-weeks notice and one who hadn’t, and the reasons were of course to do with the dysfunctional way this place is run. They gave us a replacement supervisor, but instead of a barista that also focuses on orders and running day-to-day stuff, she…

The ordering at Eurest has always been bad- we are almost always out of something, I think we’ve been out of at least one thing every week since I started. But the general manager got in a screaming match with the client, and while Eurest doesn’t fire managers (just demote them or move them to…

The five-day Starbucks Worker’s United strike leading up to Christmas ultimately closed down operations at 170 stores out of the 290 that went on strike. SBWU represents now 540+ stores out of Starbucks’ over 17,0001. Regarding the impact of the strike in this small fraction of 1% of stores, Sara Kelly, executive VP and CPO…