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WHY WALMART WANTS TO SEE THE STARBUCKS BARISTA STRIKE FAIL  
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Derek Seidman
December 8, 2025
Truthout
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_ Corporations far beyond Starbucks want to keep baristas out of
unions. The ongoing barista strike also represents something much
broader: a pitched battle against an executive and governance regime
interlocked with a wider network of corporate power _

Striking Starbucks workers walk the picket line in New York City, on
December 1, 2025., Photo: Angela Weiss / Agence France-Presse (AFP) //
Truthout

 

Thousands of Starbucks workers across a hundred cities
[[link removed]] are nearly
one month into an expanding, nationwide
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unfair labor practice strike in protest of the coffee giant’s
“historic union busting and failure to finalize a fair union
contract,” according to [[link removed]]
Starbucks Workers United, the barista union that has spread to over
650 stores [[link removed]] since its
birth in Buffalo four years ago
[[link removed]].

The strike comes after years of
[[link removed]]
illegal
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anti-union [[link removed]]
antics by Starbucks and follows a historic $39 million settlement
announced
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on December 1 for more than 500,000 labor violations committed by
Starbucks management in New York City since 2021.

The rise of Starbucks Workers United has energized the U.S. labor
movement, as the struggle to unionize the mega-chain represents far
more than baristas pitted against managers: Starbucks is a
trend-setting global powerhouse
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and one of the top U.S. employers
[[link removed]]. Current fights at
places like Starbucks and Amazon will shape the labor movement for
decades to come.

This is well understood by industry leaders, in no small part because
of Starbucks’s deep interlocks with major corporations across
numerous sectors. At its highest levels of governance and management,
Starbucks’s closest industry ally may be Walmart, the top U.S.
corporate employer and a long-time anti-union stalwart. Starbucks and
Walmart, along with other corporations represented on Starbucks’s
board of directors, also support major industry groups that carry out
the retail and service sectors’ wider agenda of weakening unions.

Moreover, while Starbucks positions itself as a leader on climate and
sustainability, it recently brought a longtime board director of oil
giant Chevron onto its board, a move that lends legitimacy to
accusations
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of hypocrisy
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leveled by baristas against the company.

All told, striking baristas are not merely up against the executives
of a coffee store behemoth, but a broader constellation of corporate
power fully networked into Starbucks’s top leadership.

THE NEW STARBUCKS REGIME

In September 2024, Starbucks hired Brian Niccol as its new CEO — its
fourth since 2022. Starbucks sales were stagnant
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and Niccol, who had been Chipotle’s CEO since 2018, had a reputation
as a successful food service executive. Starbucks’s stock shot up a
record 24 percent
[[link removed].]
with the news of Niccol’s hiring.

Under his watch at Chipotle, the company paid $240,000
[[link removed].]
to workers who sought to unionize a shop in Augusta, Maine, that the
company shuttered
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and Chipotle was accused
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of withholding raises from unionizing workers in Lansing, Michigan.

Nearly 500 Starbucks stores had unionized
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took over. The new Starbucks’s CEO emphasized boosting sales at
stores and promised
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“high-quality handcrafted beverage to our cafe customers in four
minutes or less” — experienced by baristas
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as speed-ups and surveillance.

Niccol’s total compensation package last year as Starbucks CEO was
an astounding $95.8 million
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The AFL-CIO ranked Niccol as the fifth-highest
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Starbucks’s 2024 CEO-to-worker pay ratio was an astronomical
6,666-to-1
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Niccol’s also garnered controversy — and the ire of baristas —
for accepting
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a company-paid remote office in Newport Beach, California, and
commuting 1,000 miles
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on Starbucks’s corporate jet to its Seattle headquarters.

The highest governing body over Starbucks — which hired Niccol and
can fire him — is the company’s board of directors. Mirroring the
CEO turnover, the majority of Starbucks’s board is today
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composed of new faces compared to just a few years ago
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For the prior 20 years
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the Starbucks board had been anchored by Mellody Hobson, who also sits
on the board of JPMorgan Chase, the U.S.’s top bank, and is married
to billionaire filmmaker George Lucas.

Today, the major corporate ties represented on Starbucks’s board
through current or recent past executive or director positions cut
across industries, from telecoms (T-Mobile
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and AT&T
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to tech (YouTube
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and Yahoo
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agriculture (Land O’ Lakes
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to apparel (Nike
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hotels (Hilton
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to finance (BlackRock
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and much more. The board also reflects Starbuck’s global scope, with
representatives
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from prominent companies in China (Alibaba), Latin America (Grupo
Bimbo), and Europe (LEGO).

THE STARBUCKS-WALMART NEXUS

Starbucks’s leadership has a close alliance with another anti-union
retail powerhouse: Walmart.

Most notably, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol is simultaneously a board
director of Walmart. Niccol joined Walmart’s board in June 2024,
replacing
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Rob Walton, the son of Walmart founder Sam Walton who had served on
the company’s board for over three decades, mostly as its chairman.

But that’s not the only Walmart connection: Starbucks board director
Marissa A. Mayer, who became a Starbucks board director in June 2025
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has sat on the retail giant’s board since 2012
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Niccol was compensated
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with $274,973 by Walmart in 2025, and Mayer made $299,973. Mayer
currently owns 129,642 shares
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of Starbucks stock, worth around $11 million.

As Walmart directors, Niccol and Mayer are swimming among the heights
of billionaire power. The Walton family — who effectively owns
Walmart with a 45 percent company stake — is worth $267 billion
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members sit on Walmart’s board, including its chairman Greg Penner
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who is married to Carrie Walton Penner, the daughter of Rob Walton.

Additionally, Mellody Hobson — again, who left the Starbucks board
just a few months ago after a 20 year stint — is also part of
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the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group that purchased
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the National Football League’s Denver Broncos in 2022.

Like Starbucks, Walmart is notorious for its union busting
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and ability to hold down
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the wage floor, though its wages have risen in recent years as it was
“in the crosshairs of labor activists” and trying to reduce
employee turnover, according
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to the _Wall Street Journal_.

Just recently, in 2024, the National Labor Relations Board alleged
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that the retail giant interrogated and threatened pro-union workers at
a store in Eureka, California.

As the biggest employers in their respective industries, corporations
like Walmart and Starbucks, as well as other top non-union employers
like Amazon and Home Depot, understand unions as existential threats,
and they’ve historically aimed to crush emerging beachheads through
illegal firings, store closures, and endless bargaining delays.

INDUSTRY GROUPS AGAINST UNIONIZATION

Starbucks and Walmart’s united front against workers is also
reflected in their joint dedication to lobbying and policy groups that
carry out the industry’s wider anti-union agenda.

A compelling example of this is the Retail Industry Leaders
Association (RILA), one of the leading industry groups for major
corporate retailers. While companies carry out their own individual
lobbying efforts, they pool their resources into groups like RILA to
advance their general interests as an industry.

RILA is dedicated to weakening labor unions and supporting anti-labor
campaigns. It spends millions
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on federal lobbying annually to defend corporate interests around
taxation and regulation and to fight
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pro-labor measures like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO)
Act.

RILA’s 2025 policy agenda advocates
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“redesign and purs workforce policies and practices to reimagine
outdated labor laws.” In 2024, it warned
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of workers at Amazon and Starbucks winning their first contracts,
which “are the holy grail because unions, once embedded, rarely
relinquish their hold.”

Both Walmart and Starbucks are RILA members
[[link removed]],
and Starbucks current and historic ties to RILA run deep. Former
Starbucks board director Mary Dillon is the former chair
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of RILA. Additional companies represented through Starbucks board,
like Nike and Williams-Sonoma, are also RILA members.

Starbucks, Walmart, and other corporations represented on
Starbucks’s board are also tied to other major anti-union industry
groups, such as the National Retail Federation (NRF) and National
Restaurant Association (NRA).

While the membership rolls of these groups are not disclosed,
corporations like Walmart and Starbucks feature prominently in their
leadership and activity. For example, Walmart sits on the anti-union
[[link removed]] NRF’s board
[[link removed]], and the group has
supported
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litigation
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aimed at combating Starbucks Workers United. 

 
Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol is also a board director of Walmart, among
several close connections between the two huge anti-union corporations
and their industry groups.
CLIMATE HYPOCRISY

Unionizing baristas have long criticized
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Starbucks for describing its employees as “partners” and adopting
a “progressive” veneer while overseeing a fierce anti-union
campaign. But the company’s hypocrisy arguably stretches to another
area where it claims
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moral high ground: climate and sustainability.

In June 2025, Starbucks brought in
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Dambisa Moyo, a longtime board director of Chevron, the second-largest
U.S. oil company, as a board member. Moyo has served
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Chevron’s board since 2016. In 2024 alone, she took in $457,604 in
compensation from Chevron for her board role. According to her most
recent disclosure, she owns more than $2.1 million
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in Chevron stock.

In a 2020 interview
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Moyo said it was “very shortsighted” and “naive” for “people
to be campaigning for defunding” fossil fuel companies like Chevron
that she said “can potentially find solutions to the climate change
crisis.”

Since then, Chevron and other Big Oil majors have doubled
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down
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on fossil fuel extraction
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and slashed
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their low carbon investments, while their climate pledges have
garnered
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criticism. Chevron ranks at the 21st top U.S. greenhouse gas polluter,
according to the UMass Political Economy Research Institute’s most
recent “Polluters Index
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A 2019 investigation
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found that Chevron was the world’s second-biggest emitter of carbon
dioxide equivalent since 1965.

Moyo has also held board roles at corporations like 3M, which has paid
out [[link removed]] hundreds of millions
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of dollars in settlements tied to its production of cancer-causing
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PFAS “forever chemicals
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and Barrick Gold Corporation, which engages in gold and copper
extraction and has faced accusations of human rights violations
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While Starbucks has won industry praise for its sustainability
gestures, the decision to bring on Moyo, a clear defender of fossil
fuel companies who has millions personally invested in Big Oil stock,
raises alarm about the coffee giant’s climate commitments.

COMMON FOES

Other ongoing labor struggles share common opponents with Starbucks
Workers United.

For example, labor unions and community groups in Los Angeles are
organizing against [[link removed]] displacement and
heightened policing, and for [[link removed]] living
wages, housing protections, and immigrant rights. Their organizing
efforts are framed around the 2028 Summer Olympics, which will be held
in LA.

Some of the same corporate actors driving Starbucks are overseeing the
LA 2028 games. Longtime Starbuck director and former top Nike
executive Andy Campion
[[link removed]]
is a board director [[link removed]] of the
committee organizing LA’s hosting of the 2028 Olympics, while former
Starbucks director Hobson is also a LA2028 board member. Starbucks is
a “Founding Partner [[link removed]]” of
the LA2028 games.

Starbucks also historically has strong interlocks with Big Tech, and
some Starbucks directors — such as Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube,
which is owned by Google and its parent company Alphabet — are
powerful figures in Silicon Valley. Recent former Starbucks directors
also include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
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and Clara Shih
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head of
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Meta’s business AI division.

In recent years, tech workers have been facing off against some of
these Starbucks-linked tech CEOs by organizing through unions like
Alphabet Workers Union [[link removed]] and
campaigns like No Tech for Apartheid
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All told, while the ongoing barista strike is part of the larger
struggle to unionize Starbucks, it also represents something much
broader: a pitched battle against an executive and governance regime
interlocked with a wider network of corporate power whose tentacles
stretch far behind a chain of coffee shops. 

_[DEREK SEIDMAn is a writer, researcher and historian living in
Buffalo, New York. He is a regular contributor for Truthout and a
contributing writer for LittleSis.]_

_This article is licensed under __Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)_
[[link removed]]_, and you are
free to share and republish under the terms of the license._

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* Starbucks
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* Starbucks Strike
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* Starbucks workers
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* Starbucks Workers United
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* Walmart
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* Chevron
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* T-Mobile
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* AT&T
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* You Tube
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* Yahoo
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* Land O'Lakes
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* Nike
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* Hilton
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* BlackRock
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* Retail Industry Leaders Association
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* RILA
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