Starbucks is in hot water with its employees once again, with more than two dozen baristas across New York City saying that the coffee giant is in violation of local labor laws.
Workers, aided by the newly-formed union Starbucks Workers United, filed dozens of complaints Tuesday morning with the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs alleging that the company is in breach of the city’s Fair Workweek Law. The law deals with scheduling and mandates fast-food operators to provide their employees with work schedules at least two weeks in advance.
The Starbucks workers then gathered Tuesday afternoon in lower Manhattan with the City Council’s Consumer and Worker Protection Committee Chair Marjorie Velazquez to draw attention to their complaints.
“I cannot emphasize how necessary it is to uphold and protect their work week,” said Maria Flores, a barista at a recently unionized Astoria store. She added that workers should not be at the mercy of their employers to get predictable scheduling and income.
“It would be like begging the wolf to not eat the sheep,” Flores said.
Workers United coordinated the action with 32BJ-SEIU, a heavy-weight local of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 175,000 workers and is a key player in the enforcement of local labor laws for service workers.
A 32BJ spokesperson said that the complaints come from 27 baristas at 23 Starbucks across four of the five boroughs.
The complaints primarily accuse the coffee company of breaching scheduling requirements.
“You deserve an ability to know how much you’re gonna get paid every single week. And I’m here to support you every step of the way,” Velázquez told the workers.
Crys Mathieu, a barista at the Park Row Starbucks, says he got in touch with Starbucks after getting his hours cut, which he said was not in accordance with the law.
Mathieu’s store has not unionized, unlike some other locations in the city, but he joined the union’s effort to enforce the Fair Workweek law when he first believed that store management had been violating it.
The coffee giant, however, said that it has measures in place to comply with the law and defended its employment practices.
“We make every effort and have invested significant resources to ensure partner scheduling practices are in alignment with New York City’s Fair Workweek Law,” said Starbucks spokesperson Andrew Tull in response to the complaints.
The baristas compared their cause to a landmark case at Chipotle, the fast-food chain that agreed to pay a sum of $20 million to around 13,000 New York workers to settle violations of the workweek and sick leave laws this past August.
That settlement agreement came after 160 Chipotle employees organizing with the 32BJ Service Employees International Union filed complaints to the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.
It’s not yet clear whether additional Starbucks complaints over the workweek law will be filed and thereby expand the case to scale of that lodged against Chiptole. The Chipotle case snowballed into a citywide investigation.
Starbucks workers say they will continue to document the alleged violations as they occur.
“I asked the folks to share their stories and if [they] know of other stores, because if this is more expansive than just several stores, if it’s a full blown citywide problem, then we got to address that as such,” Velázquez told amNY.
