Starbucks Workers in Buffalo and the Long Road to a First Contract

The count took place on Zoom. On December 9, 2021, a few dozen baristas and supporters in Buffalo, New York, watched a National Labor Relations Board agent open ballots on a screen and read them out one at a time. The store at issue was a Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue, a busy corner cafe in a neighborhood of old houses and small shops. When the tally finished, the result was 19 votes for the union and 8 against. It was the first union win in decades at any of the company's own stores in the United States, and there are roughly ten thousand of those. A single cafe's worth of baristas had just opened a door the company had kept shut for a generation, and over the next two years workers at hundreds of other stores walked through it.

In short: The December 2021 union vote at the Elmwood Avenue Starbucks in Buffalo set off a campaign that spread to hundreds of stores under Workers United. Starbucks fought it hard, labor judges found many violations, and the Supreme Court in 2024 tightened the rules for emergency court orders. The two sides began talking in 2024, but turning hundreds of election wins into a first contract has been the hardest part.

Why Buffalo, and why baristas

People who imagine union drives often picture factories or warehouses. A coffee shop seems like an odd place to start. Buffalo was not.

The city has a long union history, from steel and grain elevators to auto plants, and the organizers who helped the baristas came out of that tradition. Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union with roots in the old garment and textile unions, had a strong presence in western New York. Some of the young organizers involved had studied labor history and chosen to work at Starbucks partly to organize.

The baristas themselves were a mix: college students, career service workers, people in their twenties and thirties who had expected their jobs to be temporary and found that they were not. Starbucks sold itself as a progressive employer that called its workers "partners," offered health insurance to part-timers and paid for college through an online program. That reputation made the campaign more interesting, not less. The workers were not saying Starbucks was the worst employer in America. They were saying that a company that talked so much about partnership ought to let them have a voice in staffing, scheduling, training and pay.

Staffing was the issue that came up most. Workers described stores that were too thin on staff for the volume of orders, especially as mobile ordering grew, and a scheduling system that cut hours in ways that could cost workers their benefits eligibility. Those are the kinds of problems a contract can address, and the kinds of problems a corporate office far away tends to see as numbers.

The company's campaign

Starbucks fought the Buffalo drive with an intensity that surprised many observers. Senior executives traveled to Buffalo. The company sent managers from out of town into stores, held meetings with workers and temporarily closed some stores for what it described as renovations or training. Union supporters said the company was flooding stores with new hires to dilute the vote and making life hard for organizers.

The results in Buffalo that December were mixed, which is often forgotten. The Elmwood store voted yes. A second store voted no. A third store's result came down to challenged ballots that took longer to resolve. The narrow, uneven outcome made the Elmwood win look less like the start of a wave and more like a fluke.

It was not a fluke. Within weeks, workers at other stores, in Arizona and then across the country, began filing for elections. The union's template was simple: a store's workers file a petition with a letter to the chief executive, hold an election run by the labor board and, if they win, join a growing list. Because each store was its own bargaining unit, a dozen workers could organize without waiting for thousands. By 2023, hundreds of stores had voted to unionize, and the union kept winning a large majority of the elections it entered.

What the labor board found

As the campaign spread, so did charges of illegal conduct. Workers accused Starbucks of firing union leaders, cutting hours at union stores, closing stores where workers had organized and withholding raises and benefits from union stores. In 2022 the company announced new pay and benefits for stores that had not unionized, saying it could not change terms unilaterally at stores in the middle of bargaining; the union called that retaliation, and labor board prosecutors brought complaints over it.

Federal administrative law judges, who hear the board's cases in the first instance, ruled against Starbucks many times, ordering reinstatements, back pay and other remedies. In a major Buffalo case, a judge found widespread violations and ordered sweeping remedies, including that the company's founder record a video for workers about their rights. Starbucks appealed decisions and denied that it had broken the law, arguing that individual workers were disciplined for ordinary reasons like lateness or policy violations and that store closures were business decisions.

In 2022, Howard Schultz, the founder who had led the company for decades, returned as interim chief executive. He spoke openly against unions at the company. In March 2023, after Senator Bernie Sanders, who chaired the Senate's labor committee, pushed for his testimony, Schultz appeared before the committee and denied that the company had broken labor law. Sanders and other senators pressed him with the judges' findings. The hearing produced no change in law, but it made the dispute a national political question.

The Memphis firings and the Supreme Court

One case from the campaign changed federal law. In Memphis, Tennessee, Starbucks fired seven workers who had been organizing, citing their decision to let a television crew into the store after hours. The labor board's regional director went to federal court under Section 10(j) of the National Labor Relations Act, which allows the board to ask a judge for a temporary injunction while a case is being decided. A district court ordered the workers reinstated.

Starbucks took the question of how judges should decide such requests to the Supreme Court. In Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney, decided in June 2024, the Court held that courts must apply the same traditional four-part test for preliminary injunctions that they use in other cases, rather than a more lenient standard some courts had used for the labor board. The practical effect was to make it harder for the board to win quick reinstatement orders for fired workers. For a union campaign, that matters. A firing that is reversed in a few weeks shows workers the law protects them. A firing that is reversed years later shows them the opposite.

Starbucks's side, stated fairly

The company's position deserves a fair statement. Starbucks has argued that it offers pay and benefits above much of the restaurant industry, that its direct relationship with workers lets it respond faster than a union contract would and that a patchwork of store-by-store bargaining would be unworkable for a company of its size. Many baristas agreed and voted against unions; a large majority of Starbucks stores have not unionized. The company has also said that disciplinary decisions involved real policy violations, and it was entitled to contest the labor board's cases in court.

Here is the argument on the other side, and it is the argument this blog makes. Good benefits are not a reason to deny workers the right to bargain; they were in part a result of workers' leverage in a tight labor market. The labor board's findings were not a matter of union opinion. They came from judges who heard evidence. And the store-by-store structure the company complains about was not the union's preference. It was the result of labor law that lets workers organize where they can. A company that wants a simpler structure can agree to bargain a national framework, which is exactly what the union proposed.

From war to talks, and the stalls since

In February 2024, Starbucks and Workers United announced, to general surprise, that they would work together on a framework for organizing and first contracts, and that they would try to resolve the litigation between them. Bargaining sessions followed through much of 2024. A new chief executive, Brian Niccol, took over in September 2024.

The talks did not reach a deal that year. In December 2024, union baristas held strikes at stores across the country in the days before Christmas, accusing the company of failing to make an economic offer that matched its promises. Talks and pressure continued in 2025, and in November 2025 union baristas launched another strike timed to the company's holiday cup promotion, again demanding a contract. As of the end of 2025, no first contract had been ratified. If you are reading this later, check the latest news; this is a fight where a single announcement can change the picture.

The lesson so far is the one that runs through every modern organizing story. Federal law gives workers the right to vote for a union and requires the employer to bargain in good faith. It does not set a deadline. It does not provide arbitration when a first contract stalls. It relies on a labor board whose remedies arrive slowly. Into that gap, workers at Starbucks have poured years of strikes, petitions and patience.

The people behind the cups

It is easy to forget, amid litigation and CEO testimony, who actually carried this. They were baristas closing stores at night and opening them before dawn, many working second jobs or going to school. They learned the National Labor Relations Act on the fly. Some lost their jobs; some had them restored years later. Many of the original Buffalo organizers have moved on to other work, which is ordinary in an industry with high turnover and is itself part of why delay works against workers: the people who voted are often gone before the contract arrives.

Some customers changed their habits, choosing union stores or leaving notes of support. Some co-workers disagreed and said so, and they were not enemies; they were people weighing risk differently. A campaign that respects them is more likely to win them over later.

Why one store at a time worked, and where it hits limits

The Starbucks campaign rested on a quiet rule of labor law. When workers file for an election, the labor board decides what group of workers, the bargaining unit, gets to vote. For retail chains, the board has long presumed that a single store is an appropriate unit. Starbucks argued in Buffalo that the vote should include all the stores in a market, which would have forced the union to win a majority across many locations at once. The board's regional office rejected that argument and allowed the store-by-store elections to go forward.

That decision shaped everything that followed. A single cafe might have fifteen or twenty-five workers. They know one another, often socialize together and can hold an organizing meeting at someone's apartment. A union drive that needs only that group's majority can move quickly and quietly. Once a few stores won, workers elsewhere could see that it was possible, and copy the method within weeks.

But the same structure creates problems later. Hundreds of separate units mean hundreds of separate contracts, in theory. A company can close a store and the unit disappears. Workers transfer and quit at high rates in food service, so a store's union supporters can be largely replaced by new hires within a year or two. The union's answer has been to seek a single national framework covering all union stores, with local issues handled store by store. That is a sensible design, and it is also one the company has to agree to, which is why the talks matter so much.

There is a broader lesson in this for organizers in other low-wage service jobs, from fast-food chains to retail stores. The small-unit model lowers the barrier to winning an election, but it raises the barrier to winning a contract, because the company holds the power to decide whether there will be one table or hundreds. Unions in these industries have increasingly paired store elections with campaigns aimed at the whole company, and with state and city policies, such as fair-scheduling laws, that improve conditions for every worker whether or not a store has a union.

What you can do

If this story speaks to you, here is how to stay useful:

• Watch the union elections. The labor page shows the newest union votes counted by the National Labor Relations Board, including retail and food-service stores, and long-run membership trends.
• Ask Congress for a first-contract fix. Use find your representatives to look up your House member and senators by address, with phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes. Ask whether they support mediation and arbitration when first-contract talks stall.
• Learn the Court's role. The Court Watch page follows the Supreme Court's opinions with the Court's own summaries, the emergency docket and Senate votes on judges, which shape how labor law is enforced.
• Follow the bigger fight. Our topic page on workers and unions collects current reporting on contracts, strikes and labor policy.

The next time you order a coffee, look at who is making it. The people behind that counter have shown that even in the most unlikely workplace, a vote of 19 to 8 can move a company that thought it would never have to listen.