Strike over wages and staffing issues comes at one of the coffee chain’s busiest times of the year.
A strike at Starbucks has expanded to more than 300 of the coffee chain’s stores in the United States, with more than 5,000 workers expected to walk off the job, the workers’ union said.
The five-day strike will end later on Tuesday, and has come amid the Christmas holidays, one of the busiest times of the year for Starbucks.
Starbucks Workers United, representing employees at 525 stores nationwide, said more than 60 US stores across 12 major cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle, were shut on Monday.
Talks between Starbucks and the union had hit an impasse with unresolved issues over wages, staffing and schedules, leading to the strike that began on Friday.
With a union contract, improved benefits, wages, and working conditions could be in writing and cannot be reduced without bargaining, according to the Workers United website.
The Christmas Eve strike on Tuesday was projected to be the largest ever at the coffee chain, the union added. “These strikes are an initial show of strength, and we’re just getting started,” an Oregon barista said in a union statement.
The union claimed that more than 290 stores had been “fully shut down” as a result of the strike.
Starbucks, which operates more than 10,000 company-operated stores across the US, said 98 percent of its stores remained open, and said that only around 170 stores closed on Tuesday.
The company had said on Monday that it expected a “very limited impact” to overall operations.
“We are ready to continue negotiations when the union comes back to the bargaining table,” the company said.
The Seattle-headquartered firm had previously claimed that the union delegates prematurely ended the bargaining session.
Earlier this month, the workers’ group rejected an offer of no immediate wage raises and a guarantee of a 1.5 percent pay increase in future years.
The union also said that Starbucks has yet to present its workers with “a serious economic proposal”.