On Monday, in downtown Seattle, Sarah Pappin finished her shift at Starbucks and boarded a flight to the other Washington, chasing her boss of the past nine years. Howard Schultz, the founder and three-time C.E.O. of the coffee chain, was scheduled to testify before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, and Pappin wanted to hear from him in person. The hearing, which took place on Wednesday morning, was called “No Company Is Above the Law: The Need to End Illegal Union-Busting at Starbucks.”
Pappin became a union activist early last year, when she and her co-workers first petitioned to join Starbucks Workers United. As she got more involved, talking to other baristas in stores across the country, she was able to observe up close the company’s responses. There were firings and threats and puzzling closures of profitable locations. Starbucks denied that these steps had anything to do with the burgeoning union, but Pappin saw them as pure retaliation. “It’s impossible to overstate the viciousness of this anti-union campaign—how much of it comes from Howard Schultz being in charge, the amount he takes it personally,” she told me.
The Senate committee had asked Schultz to appear in February, but he didn’t agree to until earlier this month, when Bernie Sanders, the committee’s chairman, threatened to send a subpoena. Schultz also stepped down as C.E.O.—almost two weeks earlier than planned—perhaps to avoid having his comments imputed to the corporation. A spokesman for Starbucks told me that the change was meant to allow Schultz’s successor, Laxman Narasimhan, to preside over a previously scheduled shareholders’ meeting, where he announced record net revenues of $8.7 billion for the first quarter of this year. Before that meeting, union baristas—some current, some fired—rallied with supporters outside Starbucks headquarters. There were scattered employee walkouts at dozens of stores.
Although Schultz was speaking to Congress as Starbucks’s former C.E.O., he didn’t attempt to distance himself from the corporation. He sat with his hands crossed and shoulders confidently pulled back, sipping occasionally from a Starbucks commuter mug, as he described the company’s approach to the “people who have joined a union.” Based on the tallies from union elections, he estimated that only one per cent of his retail workforce in the U.S. (some thirty-four hundred people) had voted to become part of Starbucks Workers United. He denied that the company engaged in any union-busting, referring to every description of unlawful conduct, even those substantiated by federal judges, as “allegations.” “I have the right, and the company has the right, to have a preference,” he said. “Our preference is to maintain the direct relationship we’ve had with our employees.”
Unsurprisingly, Schultz stuck to his usual script, about himself (rags to riches, generous entrepreneur) and about Starbucks—which, in his account, is progressive and high-road, paying baristas above the minimum wage and providing health and education benefits. In exchange, Schultz has expected loyalty. He broke up an early Starbucks union in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, considering it a betrayal. He has opposed any collective action that puts him at odds with his green-aproned retail “partners” in some sixteen thousand American stores.
During the past year and a half, nearly three hundred Starbucks locations have voted to affiliate with Starbucks Workers United. Workers have complained of understaffing, unsafe conditions during the pandemic, cuts to hours, and race discrimination. In most other countries, a corporate chain like Starbucks would deal with a single union representing all of its employees. But, in the United States, the default by law is to organize shop by shop, under the supervision of the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that regulates collective bargaining in the private sector. This process—of meeting in secret, signing union cards, winning an election, and eventually bargaining for a contract—is time-intensive and costly, and feels, to the workers involved, like a spiky gauntlet. For employers, each bureaucratic stage presents another opportunity to pull workers away from the union—or, simply, “to stall, to stall, and to stall,” in Sanders’s words—until the enthusiasm fades.
Under Schultz’s leadership, Starbucks (and its legal team at the employer-side firm Littler Mendelson) has expanded this template of strategic avoidance. According to the N.L.R.B., the company has withheld benefits and wage increases from employees who join Starbucks Workers United, fired lead organizers, and shut down clusters of stores in the wake of union elections. “It’s impossible to organize new stores in Seattle right now, because workers are, like, ‘We don’t want our stores to be closed!’ ” Pappin told me. More recently, the N.L.R.B. has sanctioned Starbucks for refusing to engage in collective bargaining. Schultz denies this charge and stated repeatedly that corporate representatives have met some dozens of times with unionized stores. Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota, pointed out that, in her state, those sessions have lasted, on average, less than six minutes. Starbucks has walked away any time the union has demanded to bargain by Zoom—which it says is important to keep workers informed. No store is anywhere near signing an agreement: in the U.S., it often takes more than a year to negotiate a first contract.
At the hearing, the most incisive line of questioning came from Smith, who highlighted the “imbalance of power” between a billionaire and his employees. Until that point, the Democratic and Republican senators alike seemed to imply that the process of unionizing was somehow neutral—an equal match between workers who want to organize and corporations that don’t. Whether or not to unionize, Smith told Schultz, “is not your decision to make. I believe that there is an inherent value in coming together to organize that would address this imbalance of power.” Schultz again stated his right to keep unions out. He also bristled at the term “billionaire,” while admitting that he does have billions of dollars.
Schultz’s stubbornness and his close identification with an inescapable brand make him a useful deponent. Yet there’s little in his stance toward organized labor that distinguishes him from any other corporate executive. Before the hearing, Liz Duran, a union leader at the Reserve Roastery, in Seattle, where charges of unlawful retaliation have been substantiated by the N.L.R.B., told me that she was “sick of talking about Schultz” and didn’t expect him to say anything of interest. (She was scheduled for work anyway: her shift started at 5 A.M., two hours before the hearing began.) Katie Merritt, who works at the Starbucks in Madison Park, the location closest to Schultz’s home, said that Schultz was an avatar of a much bigger phenomenon. “Union suppression is happening so much in fast food and retail, so many different industries,” she told me. “This is not new. He’s not the only one.”
In early March, the HELP committee held a more general hearing on “Defending the Right of Workers to Organize Unions Free from Illegal Corporate Union-Busting.” The senators heard from Liz Shuler, the head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.; Sean O’Brien, the leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; and Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union, the parent union of Starbucks Workers United. All three praised recent organizing campaigns, bemoaned the feebleness of labor statutes, and argued for something like the PRO Act, an ambitious and rather hopeless package of reforms that would make it easier to unionize and harder to union-bust. I was more intrigued by the testimony of John F. Ring, who was appointed to the N.L.R.B. by Donald Trump and is now an attorney at the law firm Morgan Lewis. Ring spent much of his allotted time detailing the virtues of federal labor law. In his view, virtually no reform was needed. The laws, he said, were functioning as they should, “to insure industrial peace” by keeping unions in their place.
The Starbucks Union Fight Comes to Congress
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