Friday afternoon, deep in New York City’s Financial District, roughly 70 workers and students picketed outside the Starbucks location at 2 Broadway. Workers are on strike as part of the 2025 Red Cup Rebellion, a nationwide strike of unionized Starbucks locations demanding a first contract for hundreds of workers and a resolution to the company’s many outstanding unfair labor practice charges.

Unlike other Starbucks pickets, however, this one was a joint solidarity picket with the campaign to reinstate the CUNY Fired Four, the four adjuncts fired from Brooklyn College last summer in an act their union has described as having “all appearances of an ideological purge” in apparent retaliation for their activism for Palestine.

Picketers included rank-and-file City University of New York (CUNY) workers, students from the Brooklyn College Student Union and Hunter College Young Democratic Socialists of America, and other students and alumni. Members of CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC, the union representing CUNY faculty, staff, and graduate assistants) were also present, including the co-chairs of the Brooklyn College and Graduate Center chapters, and the union’s president and first vice president.

Showing the solidarity that this struggle is receiving from other workers, picketers were also joined by Amazon warehouse drivers in the process of unionizing with the Teamsters, as well as faculty from The New School, who are fighting deep cuts to staffing and educational programs.

While scabs kept the Starbucks store open, few people crossed the picket line, and the scabs mostly watched the strikers from the counter. Dozens of passersby also stopped to watch (and sometimes dance to the chants), and some briefly joined the picket line. New York City Starbucks Workers United is rotating which striking stores they picket each day, so that everyone comes together at the same location. Workers at 2 Broadway told us this was the biggest picket they’d had at their store.

In their brief speeches after the joint picket concluded, PSC President James Davis and a rank-and-file member of the Fired Four campaign both emphasized the connections between Starbucks baristas and CUNY adjuncts — their lack of job security and their vital roles in their employers’ functioning — and the importance of every sector of the labor movement supporting one another’s struggles. Before dispersing, picketers chanted, “Fight fight fight fight, workers of the world unite!”

The post Starbucks and CUNY Workers Picket Together in Solidarity appeared first on Left Voice.

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