More than 1,000 unionized Starbucks baristas began an open-ended strike on Nov. 13, 2025, walking out of roughly 65 stores in more than 40 cities on the company's promotional Red Cup Day (Reuters, Nov. 13, 2025). Starbucks Workers United, the union, called it an unfair labor practice strike over stalled contract bargaining. The company's stores stayed open with remaining staff.
Why the union timed the walkout to Red Cup Day
Red Cup Day is one of the chain's busiest single-day promotions, and the union picked it to maximize disruption and publicity. The union had used the same timing in its first Red Cup Day walkout in November 2022, when workers at about 100 stores struck for one day (Reuters, 2025). This time the union framed the stoppage as open-ended rather than symbolic.
What preceded the strike
Days earlier, unionized baristas voted to authorize an open-ended walkout and set Nov. 13 as the deadline for a contract deal (Reuters, Nov. 5, 2025). When bargaining produced no agreement by that date, the strike began. The union's stated demands centered on wages, staffing and what it called unresolved bargaining disputes; those are the union's characterizations of the dispute.
How far the strike spread
By Black Friday, Nov. 28, 2025, the union had expanded the walkout to about 120 stores, according to Reuters (Nov. 28, 2025). Reuters reported strikers demanding higher wages, more predictable hours and movement in negotiations that began after the first store organizing victories in 2021. Whether individual locations were fully or partially struck varied by city.
What an unfair labor practice strike means legally
The union's framing matters under the National Labor Relations Act. A strike over unfair labor practices generally cannot be met with permanent replacement hiring, unlike an economic strike, though that protection applies only if the board ultimately finds the employer committed the alleged violations. No such findings had been made when the strike began; the allegations remain the union's.
What it changes
The walkout put holiday-season pressure on a bargaining relationship that has produced store-level wins but few signed first contracts since December 2021, as Reuters' coverage of the strike noted. It also tested whether an indefinite strike at a small share of roughly 10,000 US company-operated locations can shift a national negotiation. As of the dates reported here, the parties had announced no agreement, and the strike's end date was not known.
What an unfair labor practice strike is
Labor law distinguishes strikes by their cause. An economic strike pressures an employer over wages and terms; an unfair labor practice strike protests the employer's alleged lawbreaking, and strikers in the second category hold stronger rights to reinstatement when the strike ends. Workers United called the November 13, 2025 walkout an unfair labor practice strike over stalled bargaining, as the article reports.
The label is not self-executing. It matters where the board's regional offices rule on the disputes the strike generates — replacements, discipline, reinstatement — and those rulings are contested case by case.
How the dispute built to the deadline
The sequence the article traces is contractual and public: unionized baristas voted to authorize an open-ended walkout, set November 13 as the deadline for a contract deal, and struck when the date passed without agreement. The union's demands centered on wages, staffing and what it called unresolved bargaining disputes — its characterizations of the dispute.
First contracts are the slow stage of any organizing campaign. A union certified after an election bargains toward an initial agreement, and the board's unfair labor practice machinery is the union's principal lever when bargaining stalls, which is the strike's legal backdrop.
What the timing was engineered to do
Red Cup Day is one of the chain's busiest single-day promotions, and the union picked it to maximize disruption and publicity, as with the one-day 2022 walkout the article cites. An open-ended strike differs from a day of action precisely in duration: the employer cannot wait it out on the same calendar.
The company's stores stayed open with remaining staff, and the walkout expanded to roughly 120 stores by Black Friday, per Reuters. Both facts describe scale, not resolution.
What to watch
The strike's end, when it comes, will be a dated event: a return-to-work agreement, a contract settlement, or a board ruling on one of the underlying disputes. The National Labor Relations Board's docket in the company's cases is the parallel track that outlasts any picket line.
For the sector, the pattern of promotion-day strikes is now established practice, and the next such date on any retailer's calendar is the natural next test.
What happens when the strike ends
Strikes end by agreement, exhaustion or ruling, and the ending sets the aftermath. Unfair labor practice strikers, on the law's traditional terms, hold a stronger claim to reinstatement than economic strikers, and disputes over replacements and discipline travel to the board's regional offices as unfair labor practice charges.
An open-ended strike also presses the union's own resources: strike funds, member endurance, and the contract campaign's public narrative all run against the calendar. The union set November 13 as a bargaining deadline and struck when it passed, as the article recounts; the open-ended frame made the strike's duration itself part of the dispute.
The company's calculus mirrors it: stores stayed open with remaining staff, and each day of the strike tested which side's operations held. None of this describes an outcome; it describes the machinery both sides were operating when the article went to press.
Related: Can public employees be required to pay union fees? · Can workers strike over safety? The two statutes that answer.
For more context, read Can workers strike over safety? The two statutes that answer.
For more context, read A union win is not a contract: why first deals stall.
For more context, read How to read a union's LM-2 financial filing.