The Complete History of Starbucks Organizing: From Failed 1985 Efforts to the 2026 Defeat
On Thursday, February 5, 2026, unionized Starbucks workers at ten New York City stores quietly returned to work, ending a nearly three-month strike with absolutely nothing to show for it. The workers failed to force management back to the bargaining table. They failed to win a first contract. They failed even to extract minor concessions. What began in November 2025 as the "Red Cup Rebellion"—a militant open-ended unfair labor practice strike involving over 1,000 baristas at 150 stores across 100 cities—collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. By February, only roughly 50 stores remained on strike, down from the initial surge.
A Reddit post from a striking Richmond barista captured the brutal truth: "We had to end our strike because we simply couldn't sustain it any longer. Right now, we aren't paying union dues since we don't have a contract, so our strike pay was supported by Workers United, but their resources are limited".
This is a lie. Workers United's resources are not limited.
Workers United controls a $178 million treasury, primarily accumulated from stock holdings in Amalgamated Bank, which the union sold to Wall Street investors in 2018. According to ProPublica filings, Workers United's main entity alone held $232.6 million in total assets and $223.6 million in net assets as of 2023. This doesn't even include the additional millions held by Workers United's various regional affiliates.
More importantly, Workers United is the majority owner of Amalgamated Bank itself. Despite going public in 2018, Workers United still owns approximately 40 percent of the bank's equity, and Lynne Fox, the president of Workers United chairs the bank's board of directors. Amalgamated Bank oversees more than $45 billion in investment advisory and custody assets. The bank generates millions of dollars annually in fees from over 500 political clients, including the Democratic National Committee, major liberal PACs, Senate campaigns, and progressive nonprofits. In 2018 alone, Amalgamated brought in over $4 million in fees from Democratic Party infrastructure.
Workers United also has access to additional financial instruments. The 1199 SEIU Federal Credit Union, one of several SEIU-affiliated credit unions, holds $91.2 million in total assets, including $49.8 million in investment securities. The broader SEIU apparatus controls the SEIU National Industry Pension Fund, which manages $1.7 billion in assets. Collectively, the top 20 union headquarters in the United States—of which SEIU and Workers United are major players—hold $8.5 billion in net assets as of 2023. The entire U.S. labor movement sits on $32.7 billion in net assets.
When striking Starbucks workers were told that Workers United's "resources are limited," they were being lied to by a union bureaucracy that chose not to deploy the hundreds of millions of dollars at its disposal. Compare this to the United Auto Workers under Shawn Fain: the UAW spent $152 million on strike benefits in 2023 alone during the Stand Up Strike against the Big Three automakers—more than the entire U.S. labor movement spent on strikes in 2022 ($116 million). The UAW ran a budget deficit to support that strike, spending 13 percent of its $1.1 billion strike fund, and then allocated an additional $40 million for organizing campaigns in 2024.
Workers United increased its annual spending from $3.8 million in 2019 to $11.5 million in 2023 to support the Starbucks campaign—a total of $10.8 million in new spending between 2020 and 2023 to organize 10,500 workers at 425 stores. But when workers needed sustained strike pay to hold the line against Starbucks in the winter of 2025-2026, Workers United refused to tap its $178 million treasury. Instead, the union forced workers to drain their personal savings, rely on limited discretionary strike pay, and depend on donations from the general public. This wasn't a resource problem. It was a political choice.
Labor researcher Chris Bohner calls this practice "finance unionism"—a model in which "union leaders focus on accumulating Wall Street financial assets rather than investing those resources in mass organizing and strike activity". Since 2010, union membership in the United States has declined by 2 percent, yet union net assets have increased by 127 percent, from $14.4 billion to $32.7 billion. Unions achieve this by running budget surpluses: they spend less on organizing and strikes than they receive in dues revenue and investment income. In fact, the top ten union headquarters—representing roughly 70 percent of all union members—spent nearly $500 million less in 2023 than they did in 2010 when adjusted for inflation.
Between 2010 and 2023, U.S. unions collectively spent less than $1 billion on strike benefits for workers, compared to $31 billion on salaries and benefits for union staff and officers, and $9 billion on political activity such as lobbying and campaign donations. SEIU alone poured $155 million into Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and got nothing in return—no Employee Free Choice Act, no single-payer health care, no meaningful labor law reform. Meanwhile, Obama deported more immigrants than any president in history at that time, setting the stage for the ICE infrastructure that SEIU now claims to oppose.
This is the material structure of business unionism: a parasitic bureaucracy that extracts dues from workers, invests those dues in Wall Street, uses union pension funds to generate returns for the financial elite, funnels millions into the Democratic Party apparatus, and then tells striking workers that "resources are limited" when they need strike pay to survive.
The hypocrisy reaches its apex with Amalgamated Bank's investments in the ICE deportation machine. In the first quarter of 2025—at the exact moment SEIU and Workers United were issuing statements calling for "ICE out of our communities"—Amalgamated Bank held nearly $10 million in stock in companies that operate ICE detention centers and supply equipment for immigration enforcement.
The bank's Q1 2025 holdings included: