Starbucks Is Sending 1 Lucky Barista To Costa Rica, But Not If They're In A Union

Union stores are excluded from the company's North America Barista Championship. The union calls it part of a broader pattern of retaliation.

Dillon Dix was excited to compete this year in Starbucks’ North America Barista Championship, a company-wide contest in which the winner would receive a paid trip to Starbucks’ coffee farm in Costa Rica. But he found some disappointing news in the fine print about the contest: Unionized Starbucks stores are not eligible to participate.

Dix called the move “really petty.”

“It’s quite shocking and hard to comprehend the reasoning behind it, other than purely in a union-busting sense,” the 25-year-old said.

Union baristas say their exclusion is another punishment for having organized roughly 400 of the chain’s 9,000 corporate-owned U.S. stores since 2021. Starbucks has publicly committed to reaching contracts with the union, Workers United, but in recent weeks the union has filed 47 new charges alleging unfair labor practices, including one related to the barista championship.

According to internal documents viewed by HuffPost, Starbucks says union stores can’t participate in the competition because it’s a workplace benefit that must be bargained over if workers unionize. The company has made the same legal argument in withholding other perks from newly organized shops, including participation in Starbucks’ “black apron” program, which trains baristas to become elite “coffee masters.”