New York City, United States – A passionate crowd of a few hundred people lined the heavily trafficked Fifth Avenue in New York City, cascading with picket signs calling on coffee giant Starbucks to negotiate a contract with its union.

Picketers held signs saying “No Contract, No Coffee” and “Baristas on Strike” as they lined the sidewalk, blocking the front doors of the Empire State Building, the single most iconic landmark in the United States and which houses an office for the company alongside one of its more high-end signature stores called Starbucks Reserve.

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Several demonstrators were arrested. Two of the men who identified themselves as “T-bone” and “Elon” spoke to Al Jazeera about why they’re picketing.

“Stop stalling contracts, negotiate with the workers and sign a contract for fair wages,” Elon, one of the detained baristas, told Al Jazeera as he was loaded into an NYPD bus.

Starbucks Workers United told Al Jazeera that a total of 12 people were arrested, but the NYPD did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request to confirm the figures.

Representatives for Starbucks said as per their “rough estimate”, only 25 people in the crowd were actually team members.

Representatives for Starbucks Workers United disputed that and told Al Jazeera that more than 100 baristas were in attendance.

This is the third straight week of open-ended strikes, which began on November 13 as the union calls for Starbucks to offer them a contract.

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War of words

These tensions are not new for the company, which operates 18,300 stores in the US and Canada. They come amid a longstanding history of the coffeeshop chain being at odds with its workers. In December 2024, workers hit the picket line when negotiations for a contract that had started in April, stalled.

At the time, the union rejected a proposal that guaranteed raises of 2 percent, but did not include any improvements in healthcare packages, which workers said were inadequate. Starbucks has not budged.

“We’re focused on continuing to offer the best job in retail, including more than $30 an hour on average in pay and benefits for hourly partners. The facts speak for themselves: partner engagement is up, turnover is nearly half the industry average, and we get more than 1 million job applications a year,” Starbucks spokesperson Jaci Anderson told Al Jazeera.

Starbucks Workers United points out that starting wages, which do not include tips, in 33 states are $15.25 per hour. That’s what Al Jazeera found on Starbucks’ jobs board: a barista position in Elko, Nevada starts at  $15.25, a supervisor role in Kansas starts at $19.37 per hour, a barista role in Brooklyn, New York, is open for a starting wage of $17.25 and a shift supervisor role that starts at $22.25 per hour.

The union said that many baristas get less than 20 hours per week, which is below the cut-off for benefits; Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify those claims.

Starbucks said that the union is demanding a 65 percent pay increase in the immediate future and 77 percent over the next three years, and higher pay for other elements of their jobs, including weekend hours, early or late hours, sorting inventory, and working on days of promotions, like the store’s Red Cup Day, which typically brings in heavier traffic.

Starbucks Workers United has pushed back and has said that it is a misrepresentation of their requests and combines several proposals into one.

“That allegation is not true. We presented a set of economic proposals as options to negotiate over and ultimately get to more pay and benefits. Starbucks simply said ‘no’ to all of them, and then disingenuously added up all the options as if they were one cohesive demand,”  Michelle Eisen, Starbucks Workers United spokesperson, told Al Jazeera.

“That would be like walking into Starbucks, adding up the entire menu, and saying it costs $1,000 to order a drink at Starbucks.”

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Political pressure

Starbucks is also facing increased pressure in New York City, where the chain has 300 stores. Both the outgoing mayor, Eric Adams, and the incoming one, Zohran Mamdani, are putting pressure on the company to meet union demands.

This week, the current Adams administration solidified a $38.9m settlement with the coffeeshop chain for violations of the city’s Fair Workweek law, which requires employers to provide predictable schedules, advance notice, and to give existing workers the opportunity for more hours before hiring new employees. The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) said the company committed more than half a million violations of the law since 2021.

The settlement covers those who worked at one of the 300 locations across New York City between July 4, 2021, and July 7, 2024.

Also this week, Mamdani and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders joined striking workers outside a Starbucks location in Brooklyn, New York.

While Mamdani answered Al Jazeera’s questions on Tuesday in a news conference, his press team did not respond to requests for comment following the arrests of members of the union he marched with only two days before.

Sanders — who in March 2023 grilled then-CEO Howard Schultz on union-busting allegations — told Al Jazeera that momentum is now on the side of workers.

“I’ll tell you what is also different is that for years, four years have come and gone, and hundreds of shops have voted to join unions, 12,000 workers have voted to join unions. And yet Starbucks has refused to sit down and negotiate a fair contract,” Sanders told Al Jazeera.

It’s not clear what the next steps are. On the federal level, under the administration of US President Donald Trump, the National Labor Relations Board — the federal agency where workers bring labour rights complaints to— has been scaled back.

Since Trump took office, the agency has lacked quorum, meaning there are not enough members to make key decisions related to allegations of unfair labour practices. Earlier this year, the Trump administration fired board member Gwynne Wilcox, and fired the general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, two Biden-era appointees who took pro-labour stances.

Long-term tensions

The nationwide movement — a wave of unionisation that has called for better pay has been years in the making, beginning after a store in Buffalo, New York, voted to unionise in 2021.

Among allegations of union-busting practices under then CEO Schultz, is surveillance amongst workers and what are called “captive audience” meetings in which workers had to listen to anti-union messaging from the company.

In 2024, the NLRB ruled that Schultz made a threat to employees in a 2022 town hall in which he said, “If you’re not happy at Starbucks, you can go work for another company.”

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“There is an exhaustion amongst New Yorkers at the sheer contrast between these workers, who cannot afford to live in this city, and CEOs who are making $96m a year on the backs of those same workers’ labour,” Mamdani said.

Mamdani was referring to Brian Niccol, who took over as CEO from Schultz in September 2024, with a compensation package  of nearly $96m — or 6,666 times the median employee salary. That represents the largest CEO-to-worker pay gap among the S&P 500, according to the AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch tracker.

With sales slumping, Niccol was brought in with the hopes that he would turn the company around after a short stint by Laxman Narasimhan, who was ousted by the board amid looming pressure from activist investors and slowing sales.

Starbucks Workers United said that the former CEO was at the negotiating table.

“Bargaining commenced in a real way under his [Narasimhan] leadership,” Eisen added.

A new CEO

Niccol’s appointment was a step back, according to Eisen.

“We had a solid 9 months of really good bargaining in 2024, which came to a screeching halt when this current CEO stepped into that role,” said Eisen, whose Buffalo location became the first store to vote to unionise.

Niccol has struggled to address slumping sales. Global same-store sales rose by 1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared to the previous quarter, lifted by international markets. North America same-store sales remained flat.

In September, the Seattle-based coffee shop chain announced the closure of 1 percent of its US stores. While it does not impact store workers, 900 corporate employees lost their jobs as part of a $1bn restructuring plan.

Niccol came from Chipotle, which faced a slew of union-busting allegations and settlements under him during the more than six years he led the company. In 2023, the company closed its first unionised store in Augusta, Maine, and later agreed to pay employees of the store $240,000 as part of a settlement.

Chipotle also faced similar penalties from the City of New York, much like this week’s settlement with Starbucks. In 2022, the company agreed to pay $20m to settle allegations it violated city labour laws, including failing to provide predictable schedules and paid sick leave. That settlement covered 13,000 workers.

Under Niccol, the chain was also accused of violating child labour laws and paid out settlements across the country. In 2022, the company settled with the state of New Jersey for $7.75m after a state agency found more than 30,000 allegations of child labour violations. In Massachusetts, the company paid almost $2m to settle 13,000 allegations of child labour law violations.

Workers hope that amid the settlement this week, renewed pressure from lawmakers, and bigger turnout of picketers will be enough to move contract negotiations forward.

“I think this company recognises that there are some serious systemic issues within it. I think they do recognise that the people with the solutions are the ones in the cafes every single day and we are just waiting for them to pick that conversation up so we can finalise that contract,” Eisen said.

And the company spokesperson suggested it is as well amid a jab at strikers on the picket line.

“We’ve been very clear that we’re ready to talk when the union is ready to return to negotiations. Instead, they are focused on staging and promoting a protest in New York City, where they represent only 200 of the 4,500 partners in NYC,”  Anderson said.

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