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This week we learned of the firing of Starbucks shift supervisor Alexis Rizzo, a seven-year employee of the coffee chain and a labor organizer in Buffalo, New York, at one of the first two Starbucks shops in the US to unionize. Starbucks says Rizzo hadn’t been showing up for work on time; her supporters suspect something larger was at play.
Notably, her firing came just days after Howard Schultz—the business visionary who turned a quaint Seattle coffee-bean retailer into a global, Frappuccino-making juggernaut—was hauled in front of a US Senate committee. He was brought in to answer for the hundreds of charges of unfair labor practices brought against the company by the National Labor Relations Board, including 130 violations alleged just in the past 18 months.
Though he has been fairly criticized over the years for failings on issues important to hourly employees, like having a smooth system for scheduling shifts, it’s difficult to characterize Schultz as anti-worker. Over the course of three separate tours in the Starbucks CEO office, he oversaw a range of industry-leading policies and benefits that, at the time, were widely described as progressive. But it can safely be said that the one-time presidential hopeful is strongly, unabashedly anti-union.
At the Senate hearing, he doubled down on his stance that Starbucks doesn’t need labor organizers meddling with employees—not at a company that knows how to treat workers with dignity and respect. Certainly the company’s track record of introducing industry-pacing benefits speaks to a rare, if now somewhat more accepted, level of conscientiousness among giant US employers—even if the details of Starbucks’ programs suggest they were at least as much a marketing ploy as a bid to better the lives of employees.
But the pandemic laid bare what the US and its enormous service economy ask of workers, particularly those who work without the cushiness of a corporate job. We are wiser, now, to the superficiality of corporate programs supposedly meant to benefit employees—it’s not the announcements but the outcomes that matter. And the recent debates over America’s wokeness, ridiculous as they may be, only reinforce the argument that the public is suddenly a lot more interested in how people are treated, whether by police, the political system, or powerful employers.
In Gallup’s most recent annual survey on the matter, 71% of Americans said they approved of labor unions, up from 64% before the pandemic and the highest level recorded since 1965. The polls are just one piece of evidence that the conversation about American approaches to work, and employer approaches to workers, is changing. Schultz might still think that Starbucks is fighting for workers, but he doesn’t seem to have realized yet that the zeitgeist on worker issues has left him, and Starbucks, behind.
Once an undisputed leader on workplace benefits
In 1988, Starbucks began offering comprehensive health coverage to store workers, including some part-timers. Stock grants showed up in 1991, and last year were awarded to nearly a quarter million employees around the world.
In 2014, as a debate over the US’s soaring student debt gathered steam, Starbucks debuted a first-of-its-kind benefit offering tuition reimbursements for college degrees from Arizona State University.
New fathers working behind the counter at Starbucks won six weeks of paid time off in 2018, matching the company’s leave policies for new mothers and adoptive parents. This might be viewed as a minor miracle considering that in 2022, less than a quarter of private-industry workers in the US got any paid parental leave at all.
But it also marks the moment when Starbucks, perhaps given its track record as a longtime leader on labor issues, started to be held to a higher standard. As Quartz noted in its report on the new benefit for non-birth parents, the amount of leave offered to the barista class was half of what Starbucks was offering to new dads on its corporate staff. Two years later, the covid-19 pandemic would force companies everywhere to start confronting stark inequalities within their own ranks.
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ONE 👢💸 THING
Of course, the primary way in which employers express their appreciation for employees is in their paychecks. On that front, Starbucks has been keeping pace with other big US employers of retail or food-service workers. It pays store workers a $15 minimum wage and an average hourly wage of $17.50.
But at the March 29 Senate hearing where Schultz was questioned, Republican senator Mike Braun of Indiana suggested he wasn’t impressed.
“Even $17 an hour, that’s not a living wage in this day and age,” Braun said. “A large corporation shouldn’t necessarily be bragging about $15 to $20 wages. When you look at the typical structure of a large company, that should probably be $20-plus.”
That might be a pipe dream from a Republican outlier who takes a far more liberal stance on minimum wage than even some of his Democratic counterparts. But once upon a time, it wouldn’t have been asdifficult to imagine Starbucks accepting the challenge.
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5 GREAT STORIES FROM ELSEWHERE
🛩️ ProPublica’s bombshell report on the luxury travel and gifts bestowed on US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas by Texas billionaire Harlan Crow is a must-read for anyone interested in how the US’s high court is being influenced at the highest levels. Reporters Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski impressively triangulate the deluxe details.
📖 Prepare to read a lot this coming week about the Good Friday Agreement, which 25 years ago ended the long stretch of political violence in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles. But first, read Amy Davidson Sorkin’s review in The New Yorker of There Will Be Fire, a new book by Irish journalist Rory Carroll about a plot to kill UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet at a hotel in Brighton, England. Some 14 years after that harrowing night, there would be peace.
👩 If you don’t have an Emily in your life, you may just have a shortage of connections to women born in the US from 1996 to 2007, when Emily reigned as the most popular name given to newborn girls (it lost the crown in 2008 to Emma). But as Emilia Petrarca points out in The New York Times, there are plenty of Emilys in pop culture now to help you fill the void.
🎭 A bill in New York City put forward by the Committee on Civil and Human Rights would prohibit discrimination by employers over a candidate’s height and weight—including on the stages of Broadway. Stephanie Lexis, founder of the Broadway Body Positivity Project, tells Playbill’s Margaret Hall why government protections are needed. “When we push against fat suits, we’re told that it’s acting, but if I say a plus-size woman should play an ingenue, suddenly they can’t suspend their disbelief.”
🇵🇰 The life of cricket-captain-turned-Pakistani-prime-minister Imran Khan has only grown more eventful since he was ousted from office last April. Protests, an assassination attempt, and refuted allegations of a plot against him by the US have all helped to fill the space between acts. In an exclusive interview with Charlie Campbell for Time magazine, Khan addresses his country’s economic crisis—and his plan to regain power.
Have a venti-size serving of relaxation this weekend,
—Heather Landy, executive editor