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Starbucks will eliminate plastic straws from all of its locations to replace with recyclable strapless lid or alternative-material straw options within two years to prevent environmental threats to oceans.

Big chains open and close stores all the time as a matter of course. But recent moves by Starbucks and Chipotle to close US stores in the wake of employee organizing efforts are drawing allegations from workers and labor advocates that the companies are engaging in union-busting.

Starbucks announced last week it was closing 16 US stores over concerns about crime and other community

When Starbucks employees at a branch in Ithaca, New York, voted to unionize in April, the store’s working conditions were among their concerns. One longtime employee said the grease trap at the Starbucks location on Cornell University’s College Avenue had been broken since he’d started working there back in 2018. “It’s something we’ve been begging them to fix for years,” shift supervisor

On Thursday, workers at a Starbucks store in Buffalo, New York, voted to form a union, making it the first of more than 8,000 Starbucks locations in the US to unionize. A second Buffalo location voted against unionizing; a third had a majority vote for the union but, due to a number of challenges to individual ballots, the results aren’t final.

For the Starbucks employees at the union