Starbucks Workers in Chile Show that Winning a Union Contract Is Possible

Over the past four years, workers at hundreds of Starbucks stores across the United States have organised. Their success has not come easily. As is by now well-reported, the company—contrary to its self-styled progressive image—has responded to the nationwide unionisation drive with aggressive retaliation.

In a report for the Economic Policy Institute, John Logan, a professor of U.S. labor history at the University of California, Davis, calls Starbucks’ tactics “an enormous unlawful union-busting campaign”. The company has spent at least $240 million fighting the union drive, and Logan notes that the number of complaints and cases referred to the National Labor Relations Board “is almost certainly the largest in the 90-year history of the NLRB”.

While Starbucks Workers United has been effective at unionising stores across the U.S., it has yet to win a first collective bargaining agreement. The struggle for a contract is often the hardest part of organising, and although the company has repeatedly said it wishes to confirm an agreement with SBWU, negotiations have dragged on for more than a year.

After witnessing Starbucks’ bruising, years-long campaign against its own employees, it can be hard to feel hopeful about the union’s prospects. But workers in other countries show that it can be done. Canadian workers at a handful of stores have unionised—and some have even won contracts—over the past few years, in spite of similar union-busting tactics. And back in 2005, organisers won a contract with raises and better conditions for hundreds of Starbucks workers in New Zealand.

But it is in Chile that the union push at Starbucks has been the most successful. Since the first union victory in 2009, organisers have managed to secure a hard-fought series of contracts with the country’s Starbucks operator, Alsea. It hasn't been easy: Workers have repeatedly used strike action, including a hunger strike, to force the company to bargain.

Now, as the latest contract comes to an end, Chilean Starbucks workers are on strike again. After negotiations broke down on 6 March, more than 1,200 workers from 170 locations walked out the next day and have since staged a series of strikes to demand better pay, benefits, and more opportunities for trans workers. 

As Starbucks Workers United continues to fight for its first contract, the organisers in Chile offer inspiration—and hope.

From Student Leaders to Union Organisers

The roots of the Chilean Starbucks union go deep into the country’s modern history. Many of the union’s original leaders took part in a long series of student protests throughout the 2000s and 2010s that were a reaction to the country’s poorly funded education system. That system was a remnant of dictator Augusto Pinochet—who took power in a CIA-backed coup in 1973—and his brutal economic regime.

Pinochet, advised by the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, instigated what Naomi Klein in her book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” calls “the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere”. This included, Klein writes, “tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending and deregulation”. Privatising the country’s education system was part of that makeover, creating a stratification that benefited the wealthy and left the poor behind.

Even after Pinochet stepped down in 1990, the country’s highly privatised education system was left mostly untouched and underfunded. As Cristián Bellei and Cristóbal Villalobos wrote for International Higher Education in 2024, “these structural characteristics have strongly reconfigured Chilean higher education, which is experienced by students as an inequitable system that does not promote public education and turns social mobility into an illusion”.

In response, over the past 30 years students across the country have staged a succession of uprisings. Bellei and Villalobos detail more than 900 demonstrations between 1990 and 2019, but two of the largest and most famous were the 2006 high school and the 2011–2013 university protests. Both saw hundreds of thousands take to the streets to demand education reform.

In a study for the German foundation Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Felipe Labra wrote that “the history of the Starbucks Chile union must be understood in terms of the socio-political context facing the country during the first decade of this century, marked by protests by high school and university students against the education model inherited from the military regime”.

Starbucks’ historically progressive reputation means that it has long attracted young, idealistic workers, and that’s been just as true in Chile. It was during the student protests that many of the Starbucks union leaders received their first taste of organising.

“A lot of the high school students in 2006 were college students in 2011; there was a tonne of student mobilising and labour organising in this moment”, says Carolina Bank Muñoz, professor of sociology and labor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Starbucks hires a lot of young workers, a lot of them are university students or former university students. So in a place like Starbucks, the student-to-organiser connection is especially visible”.

‘They Wanted to Destroy Us’

The current Starbucks Chile union president, Antonio Páez, was also a student activist when he began working at the company in 2010. “My union activism and my student activism have gone hand in hand”, Páez wrote in an article for The Forge in 2022.

Páez had participated in student organising for several years before starting at Starbucks, and immediately became involved in the union push. Workers had unionised the year before, but contract negotiations proved difficult, and they went on strike in 2011. The experience was tough, Páez tells me, with three leaders even going on hunger strike. “Starbucks didn’t want to negotiate. But not only did they not want to negotiate, they wanted to destroy us”.

While the union has since staged a number of strikes, the 2011 work stoppage was the largest: Only a little more than half of the country’s Starbucks stores had unionised, yet every single unionised worker walked out. However, Chilean labour law stipulates that after striking for 30 days, organisers either have to accept the company’s last offer or postpone bargaining for 18 months. In this case, they chose to postpone, and in the intervening time Starbucks expanded, diluting the pool of unionised workers and their influence in the process.

“One of the biggest problems facing workers in Chile today is that to unionise is hard, but not as hard as, for example, in the United States”, Bank Muñoz says. In both countries unions can be organised on a store-by-store basis, she explains, but in Chile just 10% of workers need to sign authorisation cards. That being said, “it’s very hard to secure a contract [in Chile]. You can be unionised and never secure a contract. I think that’s one of the big challenges for these Starbucks workers and other workers in retail”.

According to the International Trade Union Confederation, Starbucks Chile argued during those first negotiations that providing its workers with basic benefits like sick pay would “damage … its competitiveness”. In 2015, Labra reports, a new strike, as well as the intervention of Chilean government regulators, forced Starbucks to finally agree to a contract. While watered down—Labra describes it as “decaffeinated in the extreme”—it nonetheless provided an increased monthly food allowance, a bonus for barista trainers, and laid foundations for future negotiations.

“During that time, our union went from having more than 200 members to just 60”, Páez says. “From 2011 onwards, until 2019, our union remained a small resistance organization. We managed to avoid the annihilation that Starbucks intended but we did not manage to exceed 200 [members]”.

According to Páez, it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that the union began to increase its membership. “Because of our policy of protecting the lives of workers, we managed to increase our prestige and confidence on the part of workers”, he says.

‘An Hour of Work Costs Less Than the Cheapest Coffee’

Camilo Gallardo has worked at Starbucks for three years. He joined the union one year in, after being verbally harassed by his store manager. “That made me join the union and fight for those who can’t raise their voices”, he tells me. He says such treatment happens “more than one would believe”, but that the union offers workers protection. Gallardo is now a union leader himself, and assists other workers who have issues at their stores.

For this new contract, the union’s demands include increased wages and benefits. “We have improved our working conditions but we still need to improve wages permanently”, Páez says. “Starbucks insists on offering us temporary benefits, bread for today, hunger for tomorrow, that’s just what we don’t want”.

Gallardo notes that “an hour of our work costs less than the cheapest coffee that Starbucks sells in Chile”. Baristas earn 2,800 Chilean pesos (about $2.99 or £2.31) an hour, Gallardo says, while the average Starbucks coffee costs 6,000 pesos.

Workers also have non-monetary demands, such as air-conditioned stores—Gallardo says that some locations can reach 32°C (90°F) inside during the summer—and a trans labour quota. “We all know that trans people have a hard time finding work worldwide”, Gallardo says. “That is why as a union we want to ensure a labour quota so that we all have the opportunity to work with dignity and without discrimination”.

Negotiations on the latest contract have thus far reached a stalemate, which prompted the most recent strikes. Alsea, which operates Starbucks stores in much of Latin America, made $4.4 billion in revenue in 2023, with sales in Chile rising 12% year-on-year.

Although it is considered one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America, Chile still experiences persistent inequality. Large-scale protests erupted in 2019, and made plain the public’s anger at high living costs, low wages, and lack of investment in public education and healthcare. Starbucks union workers also took part in those demonstrations.

In a speech given with fellow union leader Deborath Jofre at the 2022 Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, Páez described how, during the protests, Starbucks organisers helped workers from other large companies like Burger King and McDonald’s to unionise. “This showed that even in these highly precarious workplaces with high turnover, the youth can and should organize themselves to fight against these large imperialist multinationals”, they said.

Cracks in the Facade

Starbucks has built a hundred-billion-dollar multinational brand on the back of a carefully curated progressive image. It pitched itself as the ultimate third place, a community meeting spot that welcomes all, and attracted investors because of its environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives. “We are leading [Starbucks] to try to redefine the role and responsibility of a public company”, former CEO Howard Schultz once said.

The company also actively promoted its inviting workplace and progressive benefits, such as free college tuition and gender-affirming care for U.S. trans workers, something Them described as “the most comprehensive trans health policy in the world” in 2018.

But in response to its workers organising, the company no longer looks or acts so forward-thinking. From threatening to abolish trans healthcare coverage at unionised stores to removing Pride decorations and firing union leaders (something it has also done in Chile; Páez was fired in 2012 and rehired a year later), Starbucks has repeatedly shown that progressive image to be little more than a facade.

The unions in Chile and the United States have much in common: They are grassroots, worker-led movements driven in large part by idealistic and youthful organisers. In Chile, the union has made more progress on contracts, but faces similar obstructionism from the company as it looks to renegotiate.

Starbucks Workers United has also tried to pressure the company through strikes and demonstrations—including one just this week—but so far the two sides remain at a stalemate. 

If there is a lesson to take from the Chilean union drive, it is that persistence pays off. It took organisers years to force Starbucks to agree a first contract, but in the end they succeeded. Now, they’re doing it all over again—and giving hope to international Starbucks workers in the process.