Starbucks Faces New Headaches as College Students Push to Kick It Off Campus

Labor organizers have had Starbucks in their crosshairs for the past two years, unionizing more than 300 stores in North America and demanding higher wages and better working conditions.

Now college students are more aggressively joining the effort.

Students at Georgetown University plan to rally against the world’s largest coffeehouse chain on Friday. They've gathered more than 500 signatures on a petition they plan to deliver to the school’s administration asking the university to demand that Aramark, its food service provider, end its relationship with Starbucks.

An Aramark representative did not immediately respond to a Messenger request for comment.

Georgetown Students Against Starbucks wants the school “to live up to its Jesuit values by supporting workers,” it said in a statement.

Students across the U.S. — Boston University, Northern Arizona University, UCLA, University of California Riverside, University of Chicago, University of Washington Seattle — are also pressing administrators to expel Starbucks unless the coffee chain agrees to pay better wages and improve conditions for its workers.

Students on dozens of additional campuses are forming groups to oppose the presence of Starbucks.

Starbucks spokesperson Andrew Trull said it's hard to say definitively how many college across the country have the coffee chain outlets on campus because some are operated by the company, others are operated by third-party food service vendors and some schools have shops entitled to sell Starbucks products.

It remains to be seen if the campaign will make any progress, but students have high-profile backers like Starbucks Workers United and Maxwell Frost. The Florida Democrat — and the youngest member of the U.S. House of Representatives — addressed students on several campuses in a Nov. 9 strategy session.

For its part, Starbucks says it has improved wages and working conditions in recent months, and is negotiating with unionized stores in good faith.

In August, students at Cornell persuaded the university to end its partnership with Starbucks, a move that groups at other universities want to replicate.

“We want to show Georgetown that we won't stand for a union buster on campus,” said Elinor Clark, an 18-year-old first year Georgetown student who signed the petition and was involved in an effort to unionize a Starbucks in her home state of California.

Clark said petitioners want Georgetown to replace the Starbucks on campus with a different coffee shop so workers remain employed.

She noted Starbucks has a history of labor law violations. The National Labor Relations Board has ruled against the company dozens of times since stores began unionizing in 2021.

The petitions also asks Georgetown to sell the $5 million worth of Starbucks stock it owns and “take that money and invest in other organizations that are not violating labor laws,” Clark said.

David Ramirez, a member of a UCLA student group opposing Starbucks, said he has first-hand experience with the coffeehouse chain.

“I worked at Starbucks for two and a half years through the pandemic,” he said in a Nov. 9 conference call. “I worked the closing shift, and then I would sleep for four hours and wake up for the morning shift because we were always so understaffed.”

Ramirez said he had to work twice as hard when his co-workers took time off due to COVID exposure, which took a toll on his physical and mental well-being.

“We were told it was expected and it’s normal, but it’s not normal and I definitely wasn’t getting paid enough for my body to be in that much physical pain,” he said.

UCLA’s student government voted earlier this year to ask the university to sever ties with Starbucks. 

A representative of UCLA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Starbucks pushed back against accusations that it doesn’t pay enough or won’t negotiate with unionized stores.

Starbucks spokesperson Trull told The Messenger that pay for workers in the U.S. now averages more than $17 per hour after a recent across-the-board raise. He listed benefits now available to workers, including tuition reimbursement, medical, dental and vision coverage, paid parental leave, a 401K match and free therapy sessions.

“We respect our partners’ right to organize, freely associate, engage in lawful union activities and bargain collectively without fear of reprisal or retaliation," Trull said in an email.