Students Rally at 40 Campuses as Starbucks Baristas Push Nationwide Boycott

Students, union members and community supporters were set to rally at more than 40 U.S. college campuses on Thursday, November 12, backing 12,000 unionized Starbucks baristas and a national boycott aimed at breaking a nearly five-year contract impasse.

Starbucks Workers United billed the coordinated actions as a day of pressure across 25 states. At the University of Washington, the union’s event notice called on administrators to end the school’s Starbucks contract and asked students to stop buying from the chain until workers win a first agreement and the company ends conduct the union describes as unlawful union busting. A Texas AFL-CIO notice announced the same demands for a rally at the University of Texas at Austin.

The campaign turns campuses from passive retail sites into contested centers of economic power. Universities buy coffee, grant branding access and concentrate thousands of potential customers. Students can therefore support baristas not only through symbolic solidarity, but by challenging institutional contracts and reducing sales. That is a material form of leverage in a dispute where workers say ordinary bargaining has produced no first contract.

Starbucks Workers United represents workers at more than 700 stores, according to independent reporting by the Guardian, which also placed total union membership above 12,000. The first Starbucks union victory came in Buffalo, New York, in December 2021. The union is seeking a $17-an-hour wage floor, staffing of at least three workers per store and job protections that would replace at-will discipline with enforceable standards.

Those demands connect pay to power on the shop floor. A higher hourly rate matters little when schedules are cut so severely that workers cannot obtain enough hours. Staffing rules affect workloads, safety and service. Just-cause protections would make organizing less vulnerable to arbitrary punishment. Together, the provisions seek to move baristas from company promises to rights they can enforce collectively.

FILE — Starbucks workers and labor allies march in Seattle on April 23, 2022. Photograph: Elliot Stoller / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The campus strategy has already produced precedents. Cornell University and Pomona College allowed Starbucks agreements to expire, while UCLA stopped selling Starbucks products in its cafes, according to the Guardian. Local campus reporting at the University of California, Riverside, documented students organizing to push Starbucks off campus ahead of Thursday’s action. These examples show how a national call can be translated into decisions by individual institutions.

Starbucks disputes the union’s framing. A company spokesperson told the Guardian that Workers United represents about 5 percent of its U.S. workforce and argued that protests divert attention from bargaining. The company said it expected no meaningful disruption and highlighted compensation and benefits it values at more than $30 an hour on average, including health care, tuition coverage, stock and parental leave for eligible workers.

The benefits claim does not resolve the central question: whether organized workers can secure binding terms through collective bargaining. Corporate benefit programs can be changed by management; a ratified contract gives workers a direct voice, a grievance process and enforceable obligations. The long delay after hundreds of union victories also explains why the campaign is looking beyond the bargaining table for pressure.

Thursday’s rallies arrive as labor action is increasingly linking workplaces to wider communities. The same principle was visible when MIT graduate workers reached a tentative agreement and postponed a planned November 12 strike: organizing works by raising the cost of delay and building durable support beyond a single negotiating room.

For Starbucks baristas, the campus boycott is a test of whether that wider coalition can convert public sympathy into institutional consequences. Forty-plus demonstrations in one day will not settle a national contract by themselves. But they can make a prolonged impasse harder to treat as background noise—and make clear that students and workers have leverage when they act together.