by Second day on strike: Interview in front of the Starbucks at 5th & Pike in Seattle. Sarah Pappin and Katie McCoy, two Starbucks workers, share their experiences and views.
Sarah, one of the striking workers at 5th & Pike in Seattle, reported: “We’ve been experiencing really severe [union busting] tactics. They’ve cut out hours severely. A lot of people have lost hours. I am an eight year supervisor I pretty much always gotten around 38 hours a week. I’ve been getting scheduled for 26 hours a week. That’s a 32 percent reduction in my income. We live paycheck to check. We can’t weather that kind of thing.”
Katie McCoy works at a Starbucks in Maryville. “We kind of started backwards I’ve noticed,” Katie says, “We started with the strike – the big bang – and then we filed for a union election. But I feel that is how you create that credible strike threat. That’s how you show corporate you’re not fooling around and not willing to play their games anymore.”
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Stephan Kimmerle is a Seattle DSA activist and a Co-convener of its District 2 group. He's been involved in the labor and socialist movement internationally—from being a shop steward in the public sector in Germany to organizing Marxists on an international level. He visited and wrote about the revolutions in East Germany and Serbia, the struggles in Palestine/Israel, as well as Turkey and Kurdistan. Now, he is working part-time jobs while being a stay-at-home dad of two wonderful children.
