Starbucks baristas fuel the working world. But will anyone help them?

Felix Santiago has been working as a barista at a Starbucks near Times Square for more than a year, and for about half of that time he’s loved it. It was easy to trade shifts, easy to pick up new ones, easy to deal with supervisors who were largely accommodating. “The first six months were absolutely wonderful,” Mr. Santiago told me recently. His opinion changed when his hours were cut again in October and then again in January.

Overall, they had fallen from around 31 hours a week to just under 24 hours, a drop of almost 25 percent, and the pay cut was being felt hard. His rent, $1,000 a month, for a room in a Bronx apartment, was no longer affordable, he said, so he started bouncing from couch to couch, from a friend’s house to a friend’s house. This is how homelessness so often begins.

In early December, about three weeks after Mr. Santiago, who still works at Starbucks, filed an official complaint with the city that was helped Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, several other Starbucks employees with similar grievances about the company’s inconsistent approach to scheduling were invited to sit with Mayor Eric Adams at City Hall. A few days later the mayor photos posted from the rally on social media in which he showed his support. “I don’t need to tell you that Starbucks employees get our city moving every morning,” he wrote. “Their city supports them in their pursuit of fair conditions and workers’ rights.”

But what did that mean in practice? Since last February, the Department of Consumer and Employee Protectionthe city agency charged with preserving these rights has received 76 complaints from employees at 56 Starbucks locations, alleging that the company has violated city laws. Fair Workweek Act again and again. Taken together, the complaints allege that Starbucks failed to provide them with regular schedules, that hours were cut without reasonable explanation, and that the company failed to post open shifts for employees who wanted them, opting instead to hire new employees to take.

Another barista, Jordan Roseman, who has worked at a Starbucks in the Financial District for three years, has seen his hours drop from 20 to 15 and sometimes even to 10, he told me, making it harder to pay rent and utilities . and other expenses for the apartment he shares with his father.

When Mr. Roseman signed up for the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, an online education program offered by Arizona State University and a signature benefit of his employment, he discovered he was not working enough hours to qualify. “It was a punch,” he said. “If my hours had not been cut, I would be 100 percent qualified.” He filed an initial complaint in August and is considering filing a second complaint.

Andrew Trull, a Starbucks spokesman, claimed the company took compliance very seriously. “We are committed and have invested significant resources to ensure that partners’ scheduling practices are aligned with New York City’s Fair Workweek and Just Cause ordinances,” he wrote in an email.

Julie Menin, who headed the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection during the early years of the de Blasio administration and now chairs the city council committee that deals with these issues, believes Starbucks hasn’t worked hard enough to to adhere to these mandates. . But no less worrying to her is the city’s slow pace of response, with complaints including Mr. Santiago’s languishing at the labor protection agency for months.

“What concerns me is the number and nature of complaints and the number of stores involved,” she said. “You have a corporate actor with widespread violations. If ever there was an issue that warranted aggressive citywide action, it’s Starbucks.”

In a statement, Michael Lanza, a spokesman for the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, said the agency “is committed to protecting workers and holding employers accountable for ignoring our city’s laws,” but that it ongoing investigations, which vary in “size and complexity.”

While inequality has remained a feature of New York life, the city has led the way in progressive workplace legislation, filling the gaps left by federal law and delivering what many other cities cannot offer. The Fair Workweek law, which was implemented in 2017 and expanded four years later, aims to protect fast food workers from various forms of corporate exploitation by insisting they be given predictable schedules and the opportunity to work longer hours if they want that, and by banning more hours. then a reduction in the number of hours by 15 percent without a valid reason or legitimate economic reason. Starbucks’ net revenues exceeded $4 billion in 2023, up 26 percent from the previous year.

Once simply the Department of Consumer Affairs, the agency saw its mission expanded in 2016 to include worker protections, with the goal of “improving the daily economic lives of New Yorkers to create thriving communities.” Major successes have been achieved, the most recent of which was announced last month: a settlement with six companies, including Taco Bell, White Castle and Domino’s Pizza, for violations affecting more than 3,500 employees. The companies were forced to pay a combined $2.7 million in restitution and $343,000 in fines.

Perhaps because Starbucks emerged from Seattle in the 1970s as an early avatar of a new corporate counterculture, it has been a lightning rod in the way that, say, Taco Bell has not: a symbol of runaway gentrification, of liberal consumer glut. , of bougie hypocrisy.

It may not matter what a city agency – even a very lofty and meaningful one – will or will not do in the face of massive union mobilization efforts and boycotts to come. This week, students at New York University petitioned the president demanding that the school terminate its licensing agreement with Starbucks. Similar petitions circulated on 25 other college campuses across the country over the course of a week, as Workers United, Starbucks’ union, organized a record 21 stores in one day. At that point, it had already scored victories in 386 locations.