NEW YORK, NY –On this the 25th anniversary of Dr. King’s holiday, baristas at the Astor Place Starbucks in Manhattan declared their membership in the 105 year old union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a staunch and outspoken defender of workers’ rights including the right to a living wage and the right to join a labor union.
The baristas represent the latest group of workers at the coffee giant to join the ongoing struggle for a living wage, more consistent scheduling, more affordable health insurance, and to be treated with basic respect and dignity by management. “I am proud to join the growing ranks of retail workers organizing together in the largest and least organized sector of our economy and at a company that has created thousands of low-wage jobs,” expressed Astor Place barista Zelig Stern. In the last year, baristas in Omaha, Nebraska and Ft. Worth, Texas have also joined the IWW Starbucks Workers Union (SWU), showing that workers’ concerns with the company are far-reaching.
“We would just like to be treated like human beings and not machines,” said union barista and Astor Place employee Cason Bolton, Jr. in reference to Starbucks’ latest initiative toward mimicking the factory assembly-line, the “Beverage Repeatable Routine.”
Today the workers delivered a collectively written demand letter to the management of the Astor Place Starbucks. Their demands included a one dollar per an hour raise across the board for all store employees. While the company’s total net revenue for FY 2010 increased by 9.5% to $10.7 billion, according to the company’s Financial Report for Nov. 4, 2010, many of the retail location employees aren’t able to make ends meet with their low Starbucks wages and are forced to live below the poverty line, many requiring public assistance.

Monday was Martin Luther King Day. This year, for the first time, the pedlar of inferior coffee paid its 'baristas' at overtime rate for working on the public holiday. This long delayed concession was forced out of the anti-union monster by the Starbucks Union, IWW. No doubt the backlash is coming, and some of these Astor Place workers will be getting the boot, ostensibly for reasons other than union membership. Later they will be reinstated and compensation paid. This game has been going on for some years now. Presumably the compensation payouts amount to less than payment of fair wages an organised workforce would obtain.