Starbucks Workers Push for Fair Contract, Eisen Says

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Transcript

00:00Michelle, I know this is day one here, but a lot of people want to know how far you're

00:03willing to take this. What exactly do you want from Starbucks that could bring the strike to an

00:08end? Well, workers are committed and ready to take this as far as they need to in order to

00:15secure a fair contract and an end to Starbucks egregious union busting. It's a thousand plus

00:22workers today in over 40 cities and workers have authorized an open ended strike, the first in our

00:28campaign's history. And that means they are willing to escalate accordingly. Starbucks needs to return

00:34to the bargaining table with newer proposals that are going to solve the remaining demands. Those are

00:40more take home pay, better hours to fix the severely understaffed stores and to resolve the outstanding

00:47unfair labor practices of which there are hundreds hanging over their heads. Well, Michelle, talk to

00:53us about what Starbucks's response has been so far and what is the current state of play when it

00:58comes to negotiations. Starbucks has not responded to the union directly at all, to the best of my

01:04knowledge. We made repeated attempts to get them back to the table over the last six months. The last

01:11face to face was in April of this year where Starbucks responded to the union's economic demands

01:19with an offer of nothing. And I'm not exaggerating. And we've made repeated attempts, including asking

01:27Brian Nichols himself to join the negotiations in order to hope that things could get moving along.

01:33Finally, workers were fed up. Yeah. Well, I'm curious on that point. I had a chance to catch up with Brian

01:38Nichols a couple of weeks ago about this issue. And, you know, he obviously talked a lot about some of

01:42the new things that he's trying to implement in the stores. And a big part of that is on service. And that,

01:47of course, means retraining employees, getting them on board with some of these changes. I do wonder

01:52how much of some of those changes that he's brought to the table in the year that he's been on the job

01:58have fed into the strike that we're seeing today, which I know some of the issues predate him,

02:04just to be fair. I mean, all of the policy changes that have rolled out under Brian Nichols have only

02:10made baristas jobs more difficult. And they have yet to actually improve the customer experience or the

02:15environments in these cafes. You can't heap additional responsibilities onto these already

02:22understaffed stores without increasing the staffing. And we have not seen any substantial increase in

02:27staffing in these locations.