She’s Still Fighting Starbucks Four Years Later
Honey’s Bistro, a fast-casual café just steps away from the LIRR in Glen Head, features many of the telltale signifiers of 2010s design and menu planning. A letter-board menu lines the wall, plastic cups are printed with GOOD VIBES SERVED DAILY, millennial pink is used liberally, and white-chocolate–pistachio matcha lattes are on offer. On a quiet Sunday afternoon, Michelle Eisen, a 42-year-old Starbucks barista turned union leader, settles on a wooden banquette, an empty coffee cup in front of her. “This coffee-shop atmosphere was brought to the States by Howard,” she tells me, referencing Starbucks’ mogul-like chairman emeritus and former CEO Howard Schultz. “He nurtured that, and he built that.”
Eisen, who was instrumental in the Starbucks unionization fight that has spread across the country and intensified since November into an open-ended strike at about 150 stores, will often reiterate that the company was once a good place to work. In 2010, when she started at a location in Buffalo, where she grew up, employees were trained well, had decent benefits, and could trust that their shifts would be appropriately staffed. Eisen had a flexible but reliable schedule, which allowed her to juggle hours with another job as a stage manager for local theater companies.
She pinpoints the 2017 introduction of the “Unicorn frappucino” as the moment she realized Starbucks was going downhill. “They sent enough product to last two hours,” Eisen recalls. The “ridiculous” multi-ingredient drink was evidence that standards had shifted away from quality control to “anything goes.” By 2018, she says, the only insurance she could afford was the high-deductible plan.
Like many in the service industries, she was exhausted by working through the pandemic. “We all worked through it for a company that was recording record-breaking profits,” she later wrote. “We weren’t seeing any of that.” She was ready to quit. Then she learned other Buffalo-area baristas were organizing over demands for better staffing, training, and pay, including for longtime employees who earned little more than new hires.
As Eisen remembers it, she was the last person her colleagues approached to join the effort. She asked, “What do you need from me that’s kind of the easiest lift right now?” She planned just to vote “yes” and wear a button. But the corporate office’s full-court press to snuff out the union, which according to workers included shipping in out-of-state managers and executives to convince baristas to drop their efforts, motivated her to do more. “I was called into my first captive-audience meeting” — what the National Labor Relations Board chairman describes as a meeting in which employers have “near-unfettered freedom” to push an anti-union agenda — “and that was a game changer for me,” Eisen says. At one point, she recalls, employees were told that executives were there “to give us the facts” and that if baristas wanted to hear from the union, it had to be through a union organizer. “I raised my hand and said, ‘I’m one of the organizers’ — which I didn’t even know if I was — ‘and I would be happy to answer any questions that you have.’”
Thus began an ongoing four-year effort. Though the Starbucks location Eisen worked for successfully voted to unionize — and more than 600 other locations across the U.S. followed — the workers still don’t have a contract. Federal labor laws can’t force companies to reach a deal with unionized employees; they only require that employers bargain in “good faith.” And Schultz so adamantly opposes the union’s efforts that he came out of retirement to fight it. The company has balked in particular on guaranteed hours, which the union says are imperative for baristas who can’t get enough shifts to qualify for benefits or plan their schedules in order to take second jobs. Starbucks has a policy of 150 percent availability. If an employee wants to work 30 hours, that person must be available for 45. In the end, they may only end up working 17. “There’s no consistency, there’s no way to know what your schedule is going to be,” Eisen says. “You’re just being told, ‘Well, sorry, you found yourself working at a Starbucks, so this is the reality of your life now.’”
Eisen now works full time as a spokesperson for Starbucks Workers United, which has filed hundreds of unfair labor practice charges against the company as it has grown. She met her husband, Ian Hayes, a lawyer, after he became the first attorney to work with SWU in its infancy. Over the years, prepping for hearings and trials, Eisen and Hayes became good friends, she says. “A couple of years in, everything kind of shifted and we were married last October.”
In January 2025, after at least seven people were arrested protesting the closing of an unionized Park Slope store, Starbucks and the union agreed to enter mediation. Negotiations have since stalled; on November 13, SWU launched a strike and series of protests without an end date. A Starbucks representative said, in an email, that despite coming to “meaningful agreements on hundreds of topics Workers United delegates told us were important to them” through bargaining and mediation sessions, the union “decided to walk away from the table.” The representative wrote: “We’ve invested more than $500M to improve our coffeehouse staffing, training, and support on top of offering the best job in retail, with pay and benefits averaging over $30 per hour for hourly partners.”
In New York, protests have drawn baristas from Albany and Pennsylvania, members of sympathetic unions, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. On December 4, at a rally outside the Empire State Building, where Starbucks has executive offices and a flagship store, Eisen spoke to the crowd as picketing baristas led call-and-response chants, including “Who pulls the shots? “We pull the shots.” (“They’re quite catchy songs aren’t they?” said a British tourist who stopped to take a video.) A boomer handed out flyers for RefuseFascism.org, several people wore BE GAY AND ORGANIZE shirts, and a cop told another cop he can identify brands of weed by the smell.
That same week, the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection had announced a $38.9 million fine against Starbucks for violations of the city’s Fair Workweek Law, including failing to provide employees with enough notice for scheduling, arbitrarily cutting schedules, and denying them the ability to pick up more shifts. More than 15,000 employees will receive restitution, the amount of which will be determined based on when and how long employees worked at city locations. At the midtown protest, the DCWP commissioner Vilda Vera Mayuga told the crowd, “This is the largest workers-rights settlement in New York City history.” In a press release, Starbucks argued that “even minor schedule changes can trigger a violation under the law.”
Earlier this year, Eisen and her husband relocated to Long Island, where Hayes grew up. “It was not an easy transition at all. Obviously, all my family’s in Buffalo,” Eisen says. But the change isn’t all bad. “It’s been really nice being this close to the ocean.” She’s been thinking a lot about a mentality in the service industry that many people share. They feel they didn’t get the right degree or make the right choices and that they should just be grateful anyone will hire them, a mind-set she didn’t realize she had internalized until she started fighting for her colleagues. “What I had to sort of come to terms with — and I still am not a hundred percent there — is that it took a really long time for me to even understand that I deserved more,” she says.
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