On March 11, Starbucks locations in Pittsburgh, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Saint Louis, and Eaton were struck. Many other locations saw a “sip-in”, essentially union members or supporters order coffee with a pro-union nickname or otherwise be present in the Starbucks with some kind of show of support for the union. Naturally, the cops showed up at some locations and arrested people. These facts have been reported in the bourgeois press.

What was not reported in the bourgeois press was the struggle over the strike action beforehand. The NLOC affiliate Barista’s Voice criticized the SEIU’s obvious conflict of interest regarding labor action at Starbucks in its very first edition. The strike was initially conceived by the SBWU organizers as a way to bring negative media attention to Starbucks before their shareholder meeting. The arrests were planned ahead of time by the SEIU as a part of this backward strategy. Initially, an SBWU organizer wanted to give the police everyone’s personal information as well as the time and place of the strike, but the NLOC supporter successfully fought against this. However, an SEIU lawyer alerted the police district commander beforehand that there would be labor action in the area. While the NLOC supporters correctly did not scab, the underdevelopment of Barista’s Voice and the hegemony of the SEIU over the struggle held back the Starbucks workers from the start. The SEIU sold out the strike through their extensive organizing failure and by collaborating directly with law enforcement.

Because of the extremely limited economic impact of the work stoppage, the March 11 action was objectively a defeat for Starbucks workers, but it was nonetheless an important landmark for the trade union struggle at Starbucks. The work stoppage and associated “sip-ins” completely obliterated the dogma that has held the labor movement back for decades

Dogma 1: a militant group within a state union can lead an advance in the trade union struggle by utilizing the state union’s machinery. The fact that the state unions are literal police informants make this a doomed task. Even though hundreds of stores are “organized” and 98% voted for a strike, the strike was organized so badly and essentially set up to fail by the SEIU calling the cops, because the police immediately removed militants before the disruption could last a significant amount of time. Instead, all that resulted was that a number of militant union organizers were swiftly arrested. The “militant minority” theory is in fact the “theory” of isolating trade union militants by subordinating them to the scab state unions, who will always try to prevent or limit a strike by keeping as many workers as possible on the job and in this case alerting police ahead of time.

Dogma 2: the vast financial resources of the state unions are a strong basis for organizing a strike. The SEIU recently affiliated to the AFL-CIO supposedly to pool their resources—where were these vast resources on March 11? The fact is the only thing capable of winning workers’ demands is their own organization and discipline which the state unions actively undermine.

Dogma 3: restricting economic action to the limits of the NLRB system will protect the workers from legal retaliation. The police have proven, for the nth time, that they are the hired thugs of the capitalists who will use armed force to strip the workers of their basic right to strike. The fact that the strike was an Unfair Labor Practice strike in no way changed the police protocol of breaking up the picket and arresting organizers for criminal trespassing. The reality is the SEIU, supposedly the representative of the Starbucks workers in the NLRB process, compromised their own members instead of organizing a more successful strike.

Dogma 4: the path to unity with the bourgeois trade union militants is within the framework of the state unions. This dogma has been fully obliterated by the fact that the New Laborists and the SBWU supporters struck together, and that it was an SBWU organizer (and by extension SEIU-AFL-CIO supporter) who cut the strike short by informing the police ahead of time. This was justified with the backwards logic that by getting their own members arrested for striking, Starbucks would get negative press and be forced to agree to a contract to improve their public relations. This is literally scab logic, as the goal was to lose the strike to the police on purpose, and informing the state ahead of a labor action is exactly what Starbucks management would have done if the SEIU didn’t beat them to it.

Dogma 5: the “sectarianism” of the tactics of New Labor weaken the labor movement. In actual fact it was not the “sectarianism” of the New Laborists that isolated the strike, but the treachery of the SEIU and the underdevelopment of Barista’s Voice in nearby stores that should have struck with the Chicago and Pittsburgh locations. If anything, it was the revisionist organizations such as Labor Notes who helped isolate the strike by promoting the “sip-in” as an alternative in place of a work stoppage, and not the NLOC, whose supporters were arrested for holding the line. In fact, the critique of the SEIU by Barista’s Voice was confirmed by the SEIU’s conduct on March 11, once again proving that the NLOC is not the “sectarian” wing of the labor movement but the scientific, class-conscious wing.

The SEIU is stuck. They cannot openly oppose a strike without losing the support of the Starbucks workers, but they can’t get a contract without striking. The Starbucks workers are stuck too. The SEIU is not willing to organize a work stoppage large enough to win the baristas’ demands, instead it promotes pleading with the investors to put pressure on Starbucks and staging stunts of the March 11 type. The lesson the baristas should take away from this is that their power comes from their role in production, and that without the capacity to organize genuinely militant strikes that completely shut down production for a significant amount of time, they have no objective basis for winning the pay and working conditions they thought the SEIU would provide. In spite of the SEIU’s actions, the baristas fought as hard as they could. The joint strike-sit-in plan was sound, clearly the militant workers were prepared to strike against the company and law enforcement (a very positive sign for the labor movement)—the decisive factor that resulted in their defeat was the state of the movement at Starbucks broadly, which is largely subordinated to the class-collaborationist strategy and structure of SEIU.

Contrast the Starbucks strike with the Nexperia strike in Laguna in the Phillipines, lead by the independent, combative and class-conscious Filipino union center Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), which ended the same week. As part of the work stoppage workers physically locked the company and their scabs out of the factory which caused a loss of P1 billion for the company and resulted in the company agreeing to a collective bargaining agreement within 72 hours and reinstating multiple employees the union claimed were wrongly terminated, while in the process openly defying the no-strike order of the Labor Secretary Laguesma.

The March 11 strike proves that Starbucks workers are prepared to advance in the trade union struggle and that the SEIU is an active obstacle to organizing the type of work stoppage necessary to win their demands. The point of a strike is to withhold labor in order to harm profits. The Starbucks workers should organize a strike committee composed of the Barista’s Voice organizers, the pro-strike (non-snitch/scab) Starbucks Workers United organizers, and any militant workers from unorganized stores, with the goal of organizing sit down strikes. The Starbucks workers must develop the strike weapon as the basis for expanding their trade union rights.