Most mornings this semester, Café 47 stands noticeably quiet. Lines that once stretched past the pastry case have thinned, the reusable cup rack sits untouched and more students crowd the Motley or arrive to class with thermoses still warm from tea steeped over breakfast at Frary. This marks a deliberate shift in student practice: a refusal to participate in a corporate apparatus built on union suppression, retaliatory labor discipline and supply chains shaped by extraction and concentrated control.
Last semester, Pomona College entered a contract with Nestlé’s “We Proudly Serve Starbucks” program, despite a 2022 student-wide vote selecting Peet’s Coffee for Café 47. This decision sidestepped clear guidance from Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC) members who raised concerns about Starbucks’ political and ethical record, and advanced without a campus-wide survey, transparency or shared governance. Administrators cited delivery inconsistencies with Peet’s, yet this neither required a pivot to Starbucks nor justified excluding students from the decision. Pomona’s commitments to “ethical behavior” and “community” ring hollow when the college aligns itself with a corporation under national and international scrutiny for ongoing labor abuses.
Starbucks and Nestlé Labor Violations
This contract positions Pomona College as an active participant in — and beneficiary of — a corporation advancing one of the most consequential labor confrontations of our time. Union baristas have launched an open-ended unfair labor practice (ULP) strike — mobilizing over 1,000 workers across more than 40 cities — a movement spanning 12,000 workers at 650 stores into Starbucks Workers United. Judges at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have found more than 400 labor law violations, with over 600 additional charges still unresolved. Since January of 2025, union baristas have filed more than 125 unfair labor practice charges, documenting retaliatory firings, bad-faith bargaining and a pattern of intimidation that an NLRB judge recently described as a “scorched-earth campaign.” This record positions the company as the most prolific labor rights violator in modern U.S. history, entangling every contracting institution with the material consequences of its misconduct.
Beyond our borders, the global supply chains that serve Starbucks and Nestlé carry a documented record of labor abuses and environmental harm. In Brazil, a federal lawsuit details “slave-like conditions” on farms supplying Starbucks, and alleges the soliciting of underaged labor, twenty-hour workdays, contrived wage deductions and degrading living conditions. In China, labor watchdogs uncovered alleged “ghost farms” supplying Starbucks and Nestlé that rely on child labor, excessive hours, unsafe conditions and informal off-the-books employment to evade oversight.
Across regions, a pattern is clear: An industry seeped in racial capitalism, rooted in extractivism and exhausting transnational labor. This is the corporate landscape Pomona aligns itself with, and the backdrop against which students are choosing to redirect their everyday practices.
CSWA Students Against Starbucks Campaign
Our campaign, the Claremont Student and Worker Alliance (CSWA), is already reshaping Pomona’s campus economy. In a Nov. 14 meeting between CSWA and Bob Robinson, the assistant vice president for facilities & campus services, administrators verbally acknowledged that Café 47 sales have fallen by an estimated 20 to 30 percent — even after expanding hours.
The meeting also laid bare the bureaucratic barriers students face when presenting evidence to the colleges’ strategic demands and interests. Robinson dismissed international labor investigations as “insufficiently tangible,” instead deferring to Nestlé’s Nescafé Plan of “100 percent responsibly sourced coffee by 2025”— a branding claim contradicted by extensive violations on a global scale. At CSWA, our attempts to understand Pomona’s contract with Nestlé met similar resistance. We were told the contract was peripheral and therefore inaccessible, and promised sales and cost data before Thanksgiving in order to evaluate alternatives such as the Motley’s Fair Trade-certified supplier, Klatch Coffee, yet we received nothing. The mechanisms shaping Pomona’s corporate partnerships remain opaque to the students expected to underwrite their consequences.
Even the criterion of “student opposition” was reframed. Robinson called our CSWA petition “biased,” suggesting that naming Starbucks’ union-busting record implied Café 47 workers were not unionized. To be clear: Café 47 workers are represented by UNITE HERE Local 11 precisely because CSWA organized alongside them last spring — a major win for workplace democracy. The issue lies in Pomona’s choice to contract with a corporation facing hundreds of unresolved ULPs, and the material fact that our daily purchases bind our campus to that corporate apparatus.
Administrators also pointed to sustainability initiatives embedded in the Nestlé contract — chiefly the expansion of the Reusables.com program, projected to save over $20,000 a year. But what does it say that a college with a $3 billion endowment is willing to balance $20,000 in projected savings against documented labor abuses, global extraction and its own stated commitments — and call the scale even? Of course, the program has value: reusable cups strengthen a long-standing campus commitment to ecological responsibility and carbon neutrality. But ecological stewardship cannot be severed from labor ethics. Aligning ourselves with a corporate landscape that stretches workers to their limits cannot be offset by a $1 discount on a latté. The dignity of labor, the integrity of our values and the ethical horizon of our institution cannot be collapsed into a cost-saving metric.
A Cup Half Full
Our CSWA campaign against Starbucks has dramatically reorganized the campus economy, which will continue until Pomona commits the following: a transparent contract with its vendors, broad student representation in the contracting process and the dignity of all workers. Students across the Claremont Colleges have made their position unmistakable: We refuse to subsidize a corporation built on union suppression, retaliatory discipline and a transnational labor regime that exploits workers, from Buffalo to Chiapas to Yunnan.
Until Pomona turns its course, we are calling on students to withhold purchases from Café 47 and redirect patronage elsewhere. Your economic withdrawal directly pressures Pomona College and will force a transition to another vendor.
The path forward is clear: stand with students, stand with workers and become an institution that honors its values, centers labor dignity and ethical accountability, as well as aligns itself — publicly and materially — with justice.
- Learn more about Starbucks at Pomona College
- Sign our petition to remove Starbucks from Cafe 47
- Read the Starbucks Workers United Pledge
Questions? Comments? Want to join the effort? We’d love to have you!
Contact @claremontstudentworkeralliance@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram @_cswa
The Claremont Student Workers Alliance (CSWA) is a student-led organization working in thoughtful solidarity with organized labor fights across the Claremont Colleges and the Inland Empire.
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