The company kept the store open during the second and third days of their strike — staffed, according to the union, with temporary workers and J-1 visa holders.
It’s a beautiful day to take a swim at one of these Bay Area public lap pools, curated by yours truly.
The company kept the store open during the second and third days of their strike — staffed, according to the union, with temporary workers and J-1 visa holders.
Even as she held a stack of flyers urging the public to “BOYCOTT GREEDY GHIRARDELLI,” Susan Garcia stood by the chocolate. “The big corporations have, you know, gotten in. Not on the product. The product is still excellent.”
The Original Ghirardelli Chocolate & Ice Cream Shop is one of three Ghirardelli locations in Ghirardelli Square, a single city block in San Francisco’s Russian Hill. It’s the only unionized Ghirardelli location in the city. Eighty-year-old Garcia has worked there for the past four years, but she’s been a customer for much longer. “I'm old enough to remember when this was a factory,” Garcia said. “We would come down here to go to Fisherman's Wharf, or get breakfast or whatever, and you could just smell the chocolate from everywhere.”
Sandra Caballero, Garcia’s coworker, has been at the shop for 19 years, 20 in September. She relies on the healthcare plan available to employees at the unionized location. “I got my daughter, and she gets sick very often. So, [the healthcare plan] helps me a lot. It's everything for me, you know?”
The union healthcare plan lay at the center of a three-day strike by workers at the flagship store, which began on Thursday, July 30th, and concluded on Saturday, August 1st. “There's nobody that crossed the line today, we're all there,” Caballero said on Saturday. “There's not even one person who went inside the store to work. We’re all together, because they all really worry about the health insurance.”
Sonya Karabel serves as spokesperson for UNITE HERE Local 2, the union representing over 15,000 hotel and restaurant workers across the Bay Area, including the 46 employees at the Original Ghirardelli. Karabel says Ghirardelli wants to cut the union health insurance plan afforded to workers like Caballero and her daughter, and move workers to a Ghirardelli-controlled company plan that would drastically increase costs for workers. “With the healthcare plan [the union workers] are on, if you go to the emergency room, it's $50. And so you know that you're safe going in if you're having a healthcare emergency, and you're not going to get hit with a giant bill. Under [Ghirardelli company] insurance, it could be hundreds or thousands of dollars for a serious medical visit.”
Ghirardelli, owned by parent company Lindt & Sprüngli, reported a record $1 billion in net trade sales revenue in 2025. In San Francisco, the company adds a surcharge to customer orders, listed as a healthcare fee. UNITE HERE filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday, July 30th, alleging that the company had violated federal labor law by refusing to disclose how much revenue they pull in from the 6% charge added to customers’ bills. “It's being described on the check as ‘SF Healthcare Mandate,’ which makes it seem like … it's a fee that the city requires; it's not,” Karabel said. “San Francisco does require that all large employers provide health insurance to their workers at a certain standard, but they do not require this fee. This is just the way that Ghirardelli is passing on the cost of providing workers' health insurance to their customers.”
San Francisco’s Health Care Security Ordinance requires Ghirardelli to report the amount of money it collected through the fee, and the amount it spent on healthcare for workers covered by the ordinance. In 2025, the company reported collecting $857,071 from the surcharge and spending $1.18 million on healthcare for covered employees, meaning that customers covered around 72% of the cost to the company for providing required healthcare to workers. The union maintains that Ghirardelli’s alleged attempt to weaken the healthcare plan is unjustified, given that the vast majority of the cost is borne not by the company but by its customers.
The company’s filing lists over 100 covered employees spanning multiple locations, not just the unionized flagship. The union wants to see the surcharge data for the unionized location alone; data it says the company is illegally withholding. Negotiations have been ongoing since May 2025, but the union said in a news release that they had stalled “in part due to Ghirardelli’s bad faith refusal to share pertinent information as required under U.S. labor law.”
Ghirardelli closed the Original location on Thursday and placed a sign on the door directing customers to the two non-union locations in the square. By Friday, it was open again, staffed — according to Karabel— by strikebreakers from temp agencies and workers on J-1 visas. “[J-1 visa holders’] visa is very tied to their employment, and they're here as temporary international workers,” Karabel said. “And so those workers basically are not able to participate in the strike, and have been part of keeping the store open.”
“There's nobody that crossed the line today, we're all there.”
Reports from the Polaris Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) show that these “guest” workers are disproportionately subject to exploitation. “Employers are using the program to fill labor needs, transforming a program designed to foster international goodwill into a source of cheap, exploitable labor,” SPLC’s report reads. “The savings an employer can realize by not paying an employee’s Medicare, Social Security or federal unemployment tax — around 8 percent on its total payroll expenses — have led staffing agencies to promote the program as an inexpensive labor force.”
The strike concluded as planned on Saturday, August 1st, and the store’s usual workers are back in the shop. Negotiations remain at a standstill. The strike at Ghirardelli is one of several Bay Area labor actions motivated by healthcare disputes in recent months. Warehouse staff at C&H sugar refinery, service workers in the University of California system, and patient care workers at Kaiser Permanente have cited healthcare plans as central reasons for striking.
“It's a simple story, and it's a story that's going on all over,” Garcia said. “People, for years, generations, have fought for their fellow workers by organizing to take care of each other. And a lot of the new companies … they never learned that lesson, you know? They weren't there when the fight began; they think, ‘Oh, we want to make a lot of money for the company. We're going to do it by cutting here and snipping here and snipping there’. And all of a sudden, they're going to wake up one day, and they're going to realize, ‘Oh, we're going to lose it.’”
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