After 25 days, Chilean Starbucks workers (organized through Sindicato Starbucks) have ended their national strike against the US corporate giant, which has spread its tentacles into Latin America through the corporate shareholder, Alsea, that secures the interests of American fast-food industries from Mexico where its one of the largest foodservice providers.

It is approximated that 60 percent of Starbucks workers, across 170 different locations, participated in this historic strike. At its high point, workers were able to shut down 100 stores a day. The workers demanded higher wages, better conditions, and further protections against gender and LGBTQ+ biases and discriminations.

Sindicato Starbucks, founded in 2009, is the first unionized Starbucks in South America and one of the first in the world, seeing a huge boom in membership during the COVID 19 crisis and now represents over half of all Starbucks employees in Chile.

Facing relentless union-busting from Starbucks, they have fought for 16 years for better conditions and increases on their pitiful wages, winning some gains, but not enough to meet their basic needs as made evident by the demands of the recent strike.

The workers note that even a single cup of the cheapest coffee sold at their store among the countless that they produce on any average day cost more than what a worker makes for an hour in wages, reflecting the most obvious exploitation of their labor-power for the company’s massive profits.

The recent 25 day strike comes 14 years after Sindicato Starbucks held the first ever strike against Starbucks in 2011 that lasted 30 days. Workers were demanding the very same things then: higher wages, better conditions. However, the union decided to abide by Chilean labor law that tells workers that after 30 days they either “must” accept the last offer from the company, or postpone their strike for 18 months. Resolving to continue the strike in the form of a “hunger strike”, they relinquished their actual strike power. Of course, the company did not offer a contract that was remotely close to the demands of the workers and the fight was lost.

Similarly, the recent strike comes just shy of the hard 30 day line in the sand made by the Chilean bourgeoisie and the union voted to pass a contract that fell quite short of a major win for the workers.

Compared to the poor leadership of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), who can only muster up short, disconnected strikes that last a single day like the strikes of last December, a 30 day national strike that shut down over half of the stores in the country is certainly a more powerful action from the Chilean baristas.

However, the same issue remains for the two unions: playing the unfavorable game of the purely “legal” union struggle. In the case of SBWU, who have yet to win a contract, and are not even utilizing the full limits of the bourgeois NLRB; reducing their strikes to meaningless symbolic protests that appeal to strictly legal means to win the needed wage increases for the workers.

In the case of Sindicato Starbucks, the boss – knowing they ultimately have the last say on the contract as long as they take a dip in sales for a month of strike – has far more of an advantage over the poor workers who barely survive during a normal working week; forced to accept contracts that win minor wage increases that are greatly surpassed by inflation and are therefore actual decreases.

The only way forward for Starbucks workers to win economic concessions from the capitalists, is to join in building towards the class union and to mobilize towards national and international general strikes. The legal labor apparatuses, while offering supposed “rights” to workers, more realistically outline the boundaries of bourgeois subordination and are not designed to improve the lives of workers as much as they are to encourage peaceful wage-slavery.

Corporate giants like Starbucks only understand economic coercion, they are indifferent to the moral objections of a hunger strike as they regularly starve their employees worldwide through miserable wages. The Sindicato Starbucks has made great successes in organizing the Starbucks and fast-food workers of Chile, but their struggle for better conditions are lost without the militancy and support of the class union. If all baristas, organized nationally and internationally, were to strike for their common demands, both Sindicato Starbucks and SBWU could really put pressure on the company.