Starbucks has fired another worker who led a historic union organizing campaign in 2021. Alexis Rizzo was a shift supervisor at Starbucks’s Genesee Street store in Buffalo, New York, one of the first two stores in the U.S. to form a union. She was fired just weeks after the National Labor Relations Board accused Starbucks of engaging in “egregious and widespread misconduct” to prevent workers from organizing, and just two days after former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz testified to Congress about the company’s union-busting record. Rizzo worked at Starbucks for seven years, since she was 17 years old. She told Democracy Now! her firing left her “devastated.”
Alexis Rizzo: “I’m going to be fighting tooth and nail to get my job back. I think it’s not at all a coincidence that this happened two days after Howard Schultz had his ego bruised in front of the Senate. I was fired that day. Two other partners in Buffalo were fired on the same day. Another very vocally pro-union shift supervisor here was written up on the same day. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence whatsoever. I think Howard Schultz was trying to prove to us that he does still have power over us, and this is how we can exercise it. But it’s not just that; for me, it’s losing my whole life.”
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