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Despite our different languages and cultures, Starbucks workers around the world are saying the same thing: We want to be treated with respect and dignity.
For five years, I've been brewing coffee and serving customers at Starbucks. I love connecting with people, crafting creative drinks, and learning about coffee. But what I've witnessed behind the green apron tells a different story than the one Starbucks executives want you to hear.
At the Workers United convention in Ohio earlier this year, I had the privilege of meeting Starbucks workers and the unions that represent them from Brazil, Chile, and the United Kingdom. Despite our different languages and cultures, Starbucks workers around the world are saying the same thing: We want to be treated with respect and dignity. We all shared stories of a company that talks about caring for its partners while systematically failing to support the people who make their business possible in the first place.
The barista from Chile I spoke with described conditions that were heartbreaking. They said they are required to work in extreme heat with no support to address the dangerous working conditions. When they went to bargain for better pay, they told me what Starbucks offered wouldn't even cover basic bills and food. The pay increase they were fighting for—literally less than a dollar—put into perspective just how little this multibillion dollar company values its workers.
Starbucks' issues in Latin America extend beyond how it treats its workers in the stores and into its supply chains, as it is now the target of allegations in a new lawsuit claiming their Brazilian coffee is made under slavery-like conditions. And the pressure campaign has grown as local unions and human rights groups recently demanded the Brazilian retail brand FARM Rio end its partnership with the coffee giant. These aren't just abstract allegations—the allegations involve real workers, real families, and real human suffering in the coffee giant's supply chain.
Starbucks executives can improve operations and public perception right now by listening to union baristas who are committed to building a better company.
This international scrutiny isn't limited to Latin America. In the U.K., workers described navigating complex bureaucratic channels just to organize. Everywhere I looked, I saw the same pattern: Starbucks partners demanding respect, safety, and fair treatment, while the company prioritizes all the wrong things.
Here in the United States, we're experiencing our own version of this neglect. Customers wait 30 minutes for lattes while we're understaffed, underpaid, and undersupported. Mobile orders pour in while only two people work an entire shift. We're forced to enforce policies that put us in danger—like denying the bathroom or water to people seeking shelter—while fearing for our jobs if we speak up. Meanwhile, Starbucks executives are focusing on what color T-shirts we wear instead of bargaining in good faith with the union and addressing real operational problems. The contradiction is stark: a company that claims to care about its partners while baristas rely on Medicaid because we can't get guaranteed hours to qualify for health insurance.
I can't imagine how many more stories there are just like mine that go unheard. Starbucks is under fire around the globe due to allegations of forced Uyghur labor in their Chinese supply chains, exploitation in Mexico, and its use of a Swiss subsidiary to avoid taxes. Yet, CEO Brian Niccol—who made $96 million in just four months last year and commutes to work in a private jet—has failed to address these serious issues abroad, all while the company has committed hundreds of unfair labor practices in the U.S. and he's ignoring union baristas' demand for fair contracts at home.
Starbucks won't turn this business around by allegedly violating labor law internationally and domestically, and failing to finalize fair union contracts. Fighting with baristas—whether in Seattle or São Paulo—is bad for business. We're the ones who open stores every morning, greet customers, make the coffee, and remember favorite orders. We're central to their turnaround strategy, and I have yet to see them address our concerns. We've been bargaining since April 2024 for a fair contract, but Starbucks continues to drag its feet.
But workers aren't staying silent. Just this month, we won our 600th union election in the U.S.. We're growing stronger, and we're building solidarity with Starbucks workers and customers across borders.
Starbucks executives can improve operations and public perception right now by listening to union baristas who are committed to building a better company. We've been ready to consider proposals that include actual improvements in staffing, guaranteed hours, and take-home pay.
The choice is yours, Starbucks. You can continue fighting the people you call "partners" while facing mounting international scrutiny, or you can finally live up to your claims about being the best place to work. The world is watching, and we're organizing.
"We oppose genocide—I didn't think that was that controversial—and we support the people who resist genocide," said one arrested protester.
Metropolitan Police arrested at least 27 protesters who gathered in central London on Saturday to publicly support Palestine Action, a nonviolent direct action group now officially designated a terrorist organization by the U.K. government.
According to Middle East Eye, Palestine defenders including 83-year-old Rev. Sue Parfitt, a former government attorney, an emeritus professor, and health workers gathered by a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square, where they held signs reading, "I OPPOSE GENOCIDE, I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION."
Members of the group Defend Our Juries informed Metropolitan Police of their plan prior to the demonstration.
"If we cannot speak freely about the genocide that is occurring... democracy and human rights in this country are dead."
"We would like to alert you to the fact we may be committing offenses under the Terrorism Act tomorrow, Saturday 5 July, in Parliament Square at about 1pm," the group said in an open letter to Met Commissioner Mark Rowley.
"If we cannot speak freely about the genocide that is occurring, if we cannot condemn those who are complicit in it and express support for those who resist it, then the right to freedom of expression has no meaning, and democracy and human rights in this country are dead," the letter argues.
Parfitt told Novara Media that members of Defend Our Juries were "testing the law."
"I know that we are in the right place doing the right thing," she said. "...We cannot be bystanders."
"We are losing our civil liberties, we must stop that for everybody's sake," Parfitt said in a separate interview with The Guardian.
Prior to his arrest, Defend Our Juries member Tim Crosland, the former government lawyer, told The Guardian that "what we're doing here as a group of priests, teachers, health workers, human rights lawyers [is] we're refusing to be silenced."
"Because it goes to the core of what we believe in: that we oppose genocide—I didn't think that was that controversial—and we support the people who resist genocide," he added. "In theory we are now terrorist supporters and can go to prison for 14 years, which is kind of crazy. I think what we are here to do is just expose the craziness of that."
Crosland said as he was being arrested, "This is what happens in modern day Britain for opposing genocide, it's quite something isn't it?"
A bystander told Novara Media: "I just feel disgusted by this government. I voted for them and they're now arresting people who are calling for a genocide to end. And this is a Labour government, they're meant to have left-wing roots."
Members of the group Defend Our Juries publicly declare their opposition to Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza and their support for the proscribed group Palestine Action while Metropolitan Police officers look on before arresting them during a July 4, 2025 demonstration in London. (Photo: Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images)
In a statement, Defend Our Juries sarcastically said that "we commend the counter-terrorism police for their decisive action in protecting the people of London from some cardboard signs opposing the genocide in Gaza and expressing support for those taking action to prevent it."
"It's a relief to know that counter-terrorism police have nothing better to do," the group quipped.
Last week, British lawmakers voted to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group after some of its members vandalized two aircraft at a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire on June 20. The group—which was founded in 2020 and has also vandalized U.S. President Donald Trump's golf course in Turnberry, Scotland—is known for taking direction action against companies that supply weapons to Israel, which is accused of genocide in an ongoing International Court of Justice case concerning the war on Gaza.
On June 23, U.K. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced plans to proscribe the group under Section 3 of the Terrorism Act of 2000, introduced under former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair and widely criticized for its overbroad definition of terrorism. The House of Commons voted 385-26 Wednesday in favor of banning Palestine Action and the House of Lords approved the designation Thursday without a vote.
Palestine Action tried to delay the ban via legal action. However, the High Court on Friday denied the group's appeal for interim relief was denied on Friday, a decision that was upheld by the Court of Appeal.
The nonviolent group is now on the same legal footing in Britain as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Joining or supporting Palestine Action is now punishable by up to 14 years behind bars.
At midnight, Palestine Action will be proscribed under the Terrorism Act.Their real “crime”? Exposing the UK’s role in arming Israel’s genocide.This is a dark day for our democracy.Criminalising non-violent resistance won’t silence the truth.We are all Palestine Action 🇵🇸
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— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana.bsky.social) July 4, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Earlier this month, a group of United Nations experts urged the U.K. government to not ban Palestine Action.
"We are concerned at the unjustified labeling of a political protest movement as 'terrorist,'" the experts wrote. "According to international standards, acts of protest that damage property, but are not intended to kill or injure people, should not be treated as terrorism."
The U.N. experts warned that under the ban, "individuals could be prosecuted for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and opinion, assembly, association, and participation in political life."
"This would have a chilling effect on political protest and advocacy generally in relation to defending human rights in Palestine," they added.
Hundreds of jurists, artists and entertainers, and others have also decried the ban on Palestine Action.
"Palestine Action is intervening to stop a genocide. It is acting to save life. We deplore the government's decision to proscribe it," Artists for Palestine U.K.—whose members include Tilda Swinton, Paul Weller, Steve Coogan, and others—wrote in a statement last month.
"Labeling non-violent direct action as 'terrorism' is an abuse of language and an attack on democracy," the artists added. "The real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary's efforts to ban it. We call on the government to withdraw its proscription of Palestine Action and to stop arming Israel."
A range of voices continue to demand the return of the island's looted treasures from private and public venues, including the British Museum in London.
When the small statues of a 3,000-year-old Bronze Age priestess and her archer protector take the stage at a Christie's auction next week in London, the Nurnet nonprofit organization in Sardinia plans to make their own bid to bring the sacred bronze pieces back home.
Despite decades of protests against the sale of the island's patrimony, where thousands of UNESCO-recognized Nuragic tower complexes attest to Sardinia's central role in the Mediterranean Sea during the Bronze Age, 2,000 years before the rise of the Roman Empire, a range of voices continue to demand the return of the island's looted treasures from private and public venues, including the British Museum in London.
"We think that the purchase could be of interest to the entire Sardinian community of enthusiasts," the all-volunteer organization Nurnet said in a statement, in launching a GoFundMe campaign for the auction. °The institutions do not have regulations that allow them to intervene in the short term and allocate the funds. We decided to intervene, with the savings of the members and the help of enthusiasts."
The history of Sardinia, especially the extraordinary findings from its Nuragic civilization in the Bronze Age, remains in a state of eternal recovery.
The Sardinian group successfully purchased four bronze pieces in 2015 at a similar auction, and then donated them to a local museum.
Last week, in fact, the Monte Prama Fondation, which has recently gained international attention for its 50-year restoration of massive stone giant sculptures from the Bronze Age, called on the British Museum to repatriate thousands of ancient Punic gold jewelry and Nuragic items that had been notoriously raided in the 19th century.
Despite the massive hoard of artifacts, which have been documented in various reports and a 270-page book, only a handful are on display at the London museum, while the rest have remained in storage for over a century.
While the British Museum Act of 1963 forbids the return of artifacts obtained by the institution, critics point to the museum's ability to "loan" their treasures back to the host country.
"Returning the bronzetti," Nurnet pointed out, "is also a way to tell a beautiful Sardinia story, to bring this work of art back to domu sua," the Sardinian language for "home."
For Nurnet advocates and other Sardinian groups, the extraordinary detective work of a Sardinian policeman and actions of the Cleveland Museum could serve as an example for the British Museum and other institutions.
In fact, the bronze priestess on sale at Christie's next week shares a common origin—the shadowy Switzerland art market in the 1990s.
On a recent trip to the Ferruccio Berreca Archaeological Museum in Sant'Antioco, I visited a small bronze archer in a glass case, straddling the piece of stone, with two long unwieldy horns thrusting up on his helmet, as if challenging anyone to a charge. Yet, this miniature figure in bronze, a little over eight inches tall, which was tall for the rest of the pieces in the Bronze Age collection, stood there with a gesture of confidence, his hand outstretched in an offering, as if willing to tell the story of his twisted journey.
Centuries before Homer composed The Odyssey, the Sardinians cast miniature bronzes or bronzetti, including ships, among hundreds of other types of bronze pieces. They were vessels of stories. Found mainly in sacred water temples or a rare tomb, they served as exquisite votive offerings dating back to the 12th or 11th centuries B.C.
In 1865, a shepherd uncovered a trove of bronzetti at the Nuragic sanctuary site of Abini in the heart of the central mountains, including an otherworldly figure with four arms and four eyes, with two long horns jutting from its helmet, holding the two round shields that some associated with the ancient Shardana or "People of the Sea" that arrived in Egypt, while others believed it referred to Plato's Symposium on the original four-eyed humans divided in half by Zeus.
These tiny artifacts, often no more than 5-12 inches, spread across sacred sites on the island, including the most remote uplands, and then crossed over the sea into Etruscan tombs, at numerous sites in Tuscany, Lazio, and Apuglia. They journeyed along the Italian boot of civilizations, entering the Greek Sanctuary of Hera Lacinia at the tip of Calabria, on the Ionian Sea, on the eastern coast of Italy.
Each one of these boats, like the hundreds that remained behind in Sardinia, observed archaeologist Fulvia Lo Schiavo, was "not only a work of refined artistic craftsmanship and a precious and sacred object," but it was also "in itself a story and a message," following its own cosmology and narrative.
The Cleveland Museum had hailed one bronzetti figure as an "exceptionally fine example" of bronze work in the lost-wax method, produced by "a rather mysterious group of people who lived in Sardinia in the first millennium B.C. and who left no written records." In the catalog of their notable acquisitions in 1991, the American museum dated the artifact back to the ninth century B.C. They called it "the warrior," and used it as the logo for a section in the museum.
Anyone in Sardinia would have called it "the archer," given the extraordinary longbow hanging off the shoulder of the figure, the distinctive arm guard on the left forearm, a quiver for the arrows on his back. At least, that's what Lieutenant Roberto Lai thought when he saw the Polaroid photo of the bronze figure for the first time. Serving with the heritage protection unit of the Carabiniere police, Lai had been placed in charge of sorting through a treasure trove of documents and artifacts traced to a notorious trafficker of art in Basel, Switzerland in the mid-1990s.
Thanks to two strange, fatal car crashes in Sardinia over a 10-year period, both of which left behind briefcases of cash, diaries with addresses of clandestine diggers and their contacts, and a chart of acquisitions, Lai was able to connect the dots with the infamous Swiss brigand and his warehouse.
Turning over the photo of the archer, Lai got the surprise of a lifetime. "Grutt'e Acqua" was scrawled across the back, tracing the piece to its origins at the 1500 B.C. Nuragic site on the smaller island of Sant'Antioco, where Lai had grown up. It was neither "mysterious," that fulsome code word often trotted out to cover a lack of historical inquiry, nor legally acquired, in Lai's view.
Lai knew the legacy of the nuraghe at Grutt'e Acqua or Grutti 'e Acqua, variously translated as "the grottoes of water," or "the grottoes and water," was not just a pile of rocks, but an intricate architectural wonder of waterways and millennial planning. But he wasn't alone.
The tomb raider also knew, like any shepherd in Sardinia, that the ornate water temples or sacred wells nearby housed the bronze sculptures that had been left as communal offerings. Trudging up my same path, the raider most likely bypassed the Nuragic reservoir that sat at the basin of the hill, a green pool encased by small boulders with the mystic air of a lake in the woods.
"Electrified" by the discovery of the photo and its connection to his island, Lai followed the trail left by the trafficker, his Polaroid in hand, only to come up empty-handed with its match to any institution or collector. Where had the archer gone? No final receipts of his transactions were to be found. The cultural heritage detective didn't give up. Over the next few years, he obsessively dug through any announcements or catalogs or listings at museums, auctions, and private collections with artifacts from Sardinia and Italy. The collections were endless. They still are today.
An entire book on ancient Sardinian artifacts behind lock and key at the British Museum dated back to "boatloads" of "very remarkable" items that had been plundered at 36 tombs in the 1850s. Much of it came from the Tharros and Mont'e Prama areas. The British Museum had its own Sardinian archer, too, though he dramatically drew back his arrow, as if to protect himself. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles featured its Nuragic archer, though it differed in the details. In 1990, The New York Times featured a show at the Merrin Gallery in New York City: "Bronzes Conjure Up Images of a Fabled Past." It included the "raw power" of a Nuragic priest from the ninth century B.C. (The Merrin Gallery would be embroiled in fraud and the acquisition of "questionable antiquities" for years.)
In fact, hardly any major archaeological museum didn't have artifacts from the Bronze Age in Sardinia. While Christie's famous auction house once called off a million-dollar auction for a 4,000-year-old stone carving from the island in 2014, after the Italian police objected to the "robbery of the heritage and civilization of Sardinia," it still continues to peddle Sardinian bronzes. One five-inch Nuragic figure from the Bronze Age went for $125,000 in 2017. It also came from a private dealer in Switzerland.
The trafficking of these prized pieces, among other riches, was an old tradition, of course, dating back to the Roman period. In 1365, the governor of Cagliari brought ancient jewels dug up from a prehistoric site to the Court of Spain, as an elaborate offering from the island. The honeycombing of ruins was so bad that a law was passed in 1481 to stop the digging for treasure, especially among the clergy.
Not just for jewels. By the mid-16th century, a common proverb recounted how the stone walls of the Nuragic, Phoenician, and Roman city of Tharros were "transported away in cartloads." In 1851, the pioneering archeologist and clergyman Giovanni Spano called on government officials to protect the prehistoric sites, which he feared had fallen into the hands of "other people who will not know how to appreciate them."
In 1923, National Geographic magazine lamented the national pasttime of tomb raiders and archaeological thieves in Sardinia, as if the craze hadn't let up. Even the Nazis craved Sardinian artifacts. During a visit to the island in the late 1930s, Adolf Hitler's deputy Hermann Göering attempted to take a priceless glass-beaded necklace that had been recently excavated at a Punic necropolis dating to 300 B.C.
One evening, scrolling online, doing his usual regimen of going museum by museum, the Sardinian detective landed on the Cleveland Museum of Art site. He was stunned by the match. It was the archer in his Polaroid.
It took 18 months of high-level negotiations, including the involvement of the attorney general in Ohio, but the Sardinians managed to convince the American museum to return the stolen artifact. In exchange, in fact, the Italian government had to agree to two conditions: that the archer, among other stolen goods, would be returned to its native place, and that Italy would loan 13 exhibits of similar value for the next 25 years.
When the archer finally arrived at the Ferruccio Barreca Archaeological Museum in Sant'Antioco in 2009, Lai stood by for its installation. The archer's placement in that little glass case was deceiving with its significance. The detective would eventually write a book, as well as a graphic novel, on the true crime adventure, as well as other histories of Sant'Antioco. Lai declared the Nuragic archer had returned to "where history had placed it."
Or recovered it, perhaps. Just like the Nurnet effort today with the bronze figures at the Christie's auction.
In effect, their campaign amounts to a new trend that should be called "restorative archaeology." In a period of cultural revival, it speaks to the process of "re-storying" the island and its history.
Meanwhile, the history of Sardinia, especially the extraordinary findings from its Nuragic civilization in the Bronze Age, remains in a state of eternal recovery.
At least until tomb raiders, and institutions like the British Museum, follow the example of the Cleveland Museum.