THERE’S A LINE OUT THE DOOR every morning at the Starbucks at 430 Massachusetts Ave., and even more people queue up every day at its to-go window. These customers, whether they know it or not, are part of the latest chapter in Indiana’s rich history of organized labor, a movement spanning three centuries that seeks to protect workers from exploitation (or worse). The employees of the coffee shop on the ground floor of the Davlan are the first in Indianapolis to join Starbucks Workers United, a three-year-old effort to organize staffers of the company around the globe. They’re hoping that the region’s 50-plus locations will follow.
Starbucks launched in 1971 in Seattle, the project of three friends who met at the University of San Francisco. Since then, it’s grown to a $9.1 billion company, and last August, it hired a new CEO, Brian Niccol, with a first year pay package of $113 million.
By comparison, Starbucks says that the average pay of its employees is $18.50 an hour. In Indianapolis, workers make less, says barista Saturn Adair. “Most of us were hired at a rate at least $3 behind that,” says the 28-year-old, one of the leading voices of the local unionization effort.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average hourly pay in the greater Indianapolis area is $29.11, placing Starbucks workers at just above half of that. The pay rate, combined with a policy of scheduling workers for fewer than 32 hours per week, means that Starbucks is a side hustle, at best.
“I love being a barista,” Adair says. “If that could be my only job, that would be ideal. But I can’t afford to only work at Starbucks, which means I have to have a whole other job outside of this job to just be able to make ends meet.”
Morgan Wilson (age 24), a shift supervisor at the shop, says most staffers aren’t offered enough hours to be eligible for benefits such as health care or sick days. When most workers fall ill, they either skip work and lose that day of pay, or they work while unwell.
“I know I definitely have had to work while sick,” Adair says, “because I gotta make ends meet.”
“And potentially put others in harm’s way,” Wilson adds.
That the folks who prevent our caffeine headaches must struggle for such basic protections might surprise Hoosiers of the early 1900s, when Indianapolis was known as the “labor capital of America.” Back then, unions for professions as varied as laundry workers, hairdressers, and food service chose Indy for their headquarters.
“The heartland of America was highly industrialized and highly unionized,” says Hamilton Nolan, a journalist and author of The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Then in 1981, President Reagan “started the undermining of union power by firing the air traffic controllers,” a reaction to a strike of 11,000 airport employees. NAFTA, a bipartisan agreement to ease trade between Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., was signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton in 1992, further weakening Indiana’s industrial strongholds and decreasing the local unions’ numbers by the thousands.
Nolan notes that while many Hoosiers’ “grandparents or parents can remember when unions were a big thing around town, now they have a really, really low presence.”
In 2020 the combination of the pandemic and social justice movement fomented by the police slaying of George Floyd reignited interest in organized labor. By 2021, workers at multiple Starbucks stores in Buffalo, New York, banded together to form Starbucks Workers United. It’s now the fastest-growing labor movement in the U.S., with 535 stores across 45 states and Washington, D.C., joining the effort, including eight in Indiana.
Wilson and Adair say that their colleagues needed some convincing at first. “People were afraid of retaliation,” Wilson says, “because there was a lot of union busting when the union first started.” (Representatives for Starbucks did not respond to requests for comment on this story but have previously denied those allegations. As recently as November 2024, the National Labor Relations Board asserts that the company engaged in anti-union activities.)
“But earlier this year, corporate and the union made a neutrality agreement, where they can’t retaliate against us. That made it a lot safer for us to organize when we did,” says Wilson.
As you read this, Starbucks and Workers United continue to negotiate for a contract to cover workers at all the company’s unionized shops. Both Wilson and Adair have high hopes that by the time an agreement is reached, many more Indy Starbucks will join them in the union tent.
Speaking with baristas at other local shops, Adair says interest is growing. “[I] can see the gears start turning, like, ‘Oh, is that an option for us?’”
“Right now, we’re just trying to show Starbucks our power,” Wilson says of the ongoing effort. “We’re telling them that they can’t ignore us. We know they have the money. It’s time to pay up.”
The post Labor Pains appeared first on Indianapolis Monthly.