12 Philly workers file Fair Workweek complaints against Starbucks
The Philadelphia complaints were filed the same day as 10 workers filed similar complaints in Chicago.
For four years, Philadelphia’s Fair Workweek law has given retail and hospitality workers a mechanism to hold large employers to account. The city law mandates that companies with either 250 or more employees or 30-plus locations worldwide give workers predictable schedules, pay, and other rights. Since the law took effect in April 2020, complaints have been brought against companies like Target, Walmart, and Ruth’s Chris — with some being forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars in damages for violations.
Another major employer will now face scrutiny as 12 Philadelphia workers recently filed Fair Workweek complaints against Starbucks. The workers, spread out across five different Starbucks locations in the city, are all represented by Starbucks Workers United, which assisted them in the filings.
The complaints variously allege that Starbucks did not provide good faith estimates of employees’ schedules, provided schedules with significant changes from good faith estimates, failed to offer new work hours to existing employees before hiring new employees, failed to deliver predictability pay for schedule changes, and retaliated against employees for exercising their rights, among other violations.
In response to the complaints, Starbucks said that it knows the value of consistent scheduling and predictable hours and that it has worked to build regular schedules that reflect employees’ preferred hours as well as customer demand. It also allows workers to view and pick up additional shifts at their home store and within their district.
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“We make every effort and have invested significant resources to ensure partner scheduling practices are in alignment with local Fair Workweek ordinances,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
“How can it be that a company doing business in our city can blatantly disregard our laws and keep delaying and avoiding justice?” said Workers United president and Philadelphia Joint Board manager Lynne Fox in a statement. “Workers should not be retaliated against for enforcing their rights.”
The Philadelphia complaints are part of a concerted strategy by Starbucks Workers United, which represents nearly 400 union stores around the country. Ten fair workweek complaints against Starbucks were filed in Chicago on Wednesday, and in New York City the union has filed a total of 76 complaints against the company on behalf of employees at 56 stores.
“Starbucks workers have made it very clear that they’re not going to back down and will use every tool they have to try to make Starbucks a better place to work, from fighting for a fair contract to holding the coffee giant accountable to our city’s Fair Workweek laws,” a Workers United spokesperson said.
Two of the workers who filed complaints, Lucas Reyes and Valerie Molina, expressed frustration at respective circumstances in which their work hours were drastically cut.
Reyes worked at the 3400 Civic Center Blvd. Starbucks, better known as Penn Medicine Starbucks, one of the busiest in the region, from June 2023 until last month. He said he saw his hours drop from 30 to 40 per week earlier in his tenure there to between 10 and 20 hours in December and January — a change he suspects was due to enthusiastic union involvement.
“One week I had 13 hours,” Reyes said. “It was unrealistic for me to keep up my visitations to my son in Virginia, and I just couldn’t take anymore also mentally, because I was struggling to pay rent.”
Faced with those hurdles, as well as the stress that comes with working in a high-volume store, Reyes quit Starbucks a month ago, though he remains involved in the union. That’s how he first learned about the city’s policies around predictability in scheduling and pay.
“At Penn Medicine [Starbucks], it is very common for people, including myself, to get demoralized, to feel helpless,” Reyes said. “But I found that, ‘No, I can actually do something about this, and I can’t continue to be afraid like this. This is not what I want for myself,’ so I decided to file that complaint.”
Five other Penn Medicine Starbucks employees joined Reyes in doing so.
Molina, who works at the Starbucks at 22nd and South, said she was taken off the schedule in February after she called out sick — using banked sick time — over a period of days in January. She said a leave of absence request was also filed by her manager without her knowledge or consent; when she confronted her manager about the request, she was told it was filed for her own benefit.
“I‘m losing nearly a month’s worth of work,” Molina said. “This didn’t benefit me in any way.”
Molina also learned of her rights under Philly’s Fair Workweek law through the union. Following the filing, she and other coworkers are planning to air their grievances to their store manager in person.
“What I hope happens from this is that, together, we make Starbucks a good place to work again,” she said.
Since the first Starbucks unionized in Buffalo in 2021, it has been joined by 390 others. There are nine unionized Starbucks in Philadelphia, including the five stores represented in the Fair Workweek complaints. The company has racked up hundreds of cases with the National Labor Relations Board in the past three years, with NLRB judges finding it broke federal labor laws 130 instances.
Starbucks has yet to sign a first contract with any of the store unions.