Starbucks’s CEO saw his unionizing baristas as a threat to his life’s work. They said he didn’t understand how the country and their lives had changed.
To Schultz, the unionization drive felt like an attack on his life’s work. In previous speeches to his employees, he had cast the union as “a group trying to take our people,” an “outside force that’s trying desperately to disrupt our company” and “an adversary that’s threatening the very essence of what [we] believe to be true.”
He told his baristas that they weren’t merely selling drinks, they were creating a sense of belonging for customers in an increasingly atomized world. In interviews, he cast Starbucks’s mission in spiritual terms.Scott Pelley on “60 Minutes” in 2006. “We’re in the business of filling souls.
made two trips to the city in the fall of 2021. On his first, store managers told him of broken equipment that the company never seemed to fix and flooding in their cafes: “things that I had never heard before,” Schultz recalled in an interview. To Schultz, unions existed to protect workers from bad companies, like the ones who had abused his father. “That’s why unions were created,” he said in an interview. A union had no place at a company that cared about its workers like Starbucks, Schultz believed. It would pit employees against their bosses, turning partners into adversaries.
Others complained about the chaos in their cafes. “I found meth in the bathroom,” a shift supervisor said. “And after we closed, the person came back and was beating on the windows and doors. He was obviously on drugs.” She said she called the police three times before they came.Schultz told them that he had just announced the shutdown ofbecause local police and elected officials weren’t able to keep them safe. And he worried that more closures could be on the way.
There the store manager, Nancy Martinez, told him how in the hours after the shooting she had rushed with boxes of coffee to Uvalde’s civic center where parents had gathered to find out if their children had survived. She said she had spotted one of her regulars, the father of 9-year-oldLater that evening, she continued, she had scoured Facebook for news and learned that Ellie was among the victims.
And now he believed he was seeing it in Uvalde, where Martinez’s baristas were racing to fill drive-through orders. Schultz wanted his executives at the corporate headquarters to feel what he was feeling too, so he pulled Martinez aside and invited her to visit Seattle. “Starbucks says we’re ‘performance-driven through the lens of humanity,’ ” she recalled thinking. “But where’s the humanity in that?”the National Labor Relations Board for its union vote, Schultz announced raises for some hourly employees.
Tensions between Starbucks and the union had been building all spring and summer. Union officials accused Starbucks of firing more than 120 pro-union workers in retaliation for organizing. The dismissals spanned the country and, in several instances, drew the condemnation of the National Labor Relations Board. In August a federal judge ordered Starbucks toSchultz denied that anyone had been dismissed for union activity.
“I have the distinct honor and absolute privilege of introducing our iconic founder!” Starbucks’s head of investor relations announced. Inside, Schultz was introducing Narasimhan, who talked about his humble origins in India and his arrival decades earlier in the United States with nothing. “Sitting in front of you,” he told the investors, “I am the epitome of the American Dream.”Schultz and his team then outlined all they were going to do to “restore trust” with their employees who increasingly wondered if that dream still applied to them.
Between speeches, Schultz, his gray hair swept back, worked the room like a politician tending his base. He draped an arm over the shoulder of one major investor. A few seconds later he was cupping his hand on the nape of another’s neck and pulling him close. Soaring inflation, which was dragging down other companies, seemed to be sparing Starbucks. “So far, we’ve been immune, immune!” Schultz was telling them.
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