New York, NY- The Starbucks Baristas Union and the international human rights group Global Exchange have united to call on Starbucks to fulfill its commitment to coffee farmers as well as its café workers. The Union is joining Global Exchange's demand for Starbucks to purchase at least five percent of its coffee from Fair Trade Certified sources. The move creates an unprecedented coalition of Starbucks workers in this country and coffee farmers abroad.

"We see our struggles for humane wages and working conditions as united," said Daniel Gross, a member of the Union. "No longer will Starbucks be allowed to run roughshod over its Baristas or coffee farmers."

Currently, less than one percent of Starbucks coffee is Fair Trade Certified. Coffee farmers outside of the Fair Trade system typically live in poverty because of low prices for coffee beans and wild fluctuations in the market. Fair Trade allows farmers to rise up from a grim existence towards a living wage and safe working conditions.

"The right to a living wage is universal," said Global Exchange Fair Trade Organizer Valerie Orth, with Global Exchange. "We hope Starbucks will guarantee its café workers the right to freedom of association."

Fair Trade certification is an independent international monitoring system which guarantees a fair price that goes directly to farmers. Fair Trade producers operate on an environmentally sound basis in small-scale democratic cooperatives.

Even Starbucks CEO Orin Smith acknowledges the plight of coffee farmers yet still the company refuses to budge. According to Smith, "the people in these countries are challenged to feed themselves, to clothe their family, to give them any kind of an education. This is an incredibly marginal existence."

Global Exchange is a membership-based international human rights organization dedicated to promoting social, political and environmental justice. Global Exchange led the campaign that originally pressured Starbucks to carry Fair Trade in 2000.

Starbucks Baristas in New York City recently organized a union with the IWW IU/660, the first in the United States at the company. The Industrial Workers of the World IU/660 provides innovative union solutions for workers facing the exploitative employment conditions of the retail sector. ###