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MARCH 17, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
Starbucks Turns to Its Venerable Union-Buster
Longtime CEO Howard Schultz has returned, apparently to squelch his
baristas' campaign for a voice on the job.
Like Tom Brady, though likely for far more sinister reasons, Howard
Schultz just can't stay retired.
The longtime CEO of Starbucks, who'd stepped down in 2017, was
abruptly brought back
yesterday by the company's board of directors to handle what those
worthies consider the crisis presented by their employees'
increasingly assertive drive for more voice on the job. The Starbucks
board
,
by the way, is stocked with fast-food executives and even one member who
handles Apple's business in China-in other words, experienced
enforcers of worker powerlessness. But the decisive force behind the
sudden retirement of Starbucks's current CEO and the elevation of
Schultz almost had to be Schultz himself.
In announcing the return of Schultz, Starbucks said his CEO-ship was
"interim" until a permanent replacement could be found. After a brief
previous retirement, Schultz returned once before for nine years. Just
how "interim" his renewed gig is remains to be seen.
In a sense, Schultz is the very personification of the ineradicable
authoritarianism of the American CEO. Unlike, say, the Koch brothers or
the generations of right-wingers who've run Walmart, Schultz has
staked out the terrain of the enlightened capitalist, offering various
benefits to his baristas, and even flirted with running for president as
an independent in 2020-a fair measure of his egomania. But even as a
presumably benevolent boss, his opposition to worker power is every bit
as foaming as his Ebenezer Scrooge peers'. When he first took over
Starbucks in 1987, he waged a determined and successful campaign to
decertify the handful of outlets that were unionized, and when Buffalo
baristas threatened to unionize in the past few months, he flew to
Buffalo to make clear to them why they shouldn't.
As Schultz himself later wrote, concerning his 1987 efforts, "I was
convinced that under my leadership, employees would come to realize that
I would listen to their concerns. If they had faith in me and my
motives, they wouldn't need a union."
That's the language of a benevolent parent trying to rein in his
rebellious kid. It's also the language of a CEO who wants to treat his
employees as children rather than as adults with a compelling claim to
agency.
Today, after successful unionization campaigns in outlets in Buffalo and
Mesa, Arizona, baristas in more than 100 Starbucks stores across the
nation have filed for union elections. After yesterday's board
meeting, Starbucks board chair Mellody Hobson disparaged proposals from
some shareholders that management should stand back and simply let
baristas choose their course, also indicating that they'd continue to
compel those baristas to attend meetings where their bosses could
"persuade" them not to go union.
Whether Hobson and Schultz know it or not, the Biden-appointed general
counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, Jennifer Abruzzo (whom I
profile in the next print issue of the
**Prospect**) has declared such meetings to be an illegal "unfair labor
practice" subject to a host of pro-worker remedies. She's also
declared that if a majority of employees sign union affiliation cards
and the company still doesn't recognize their union, the NLRB will
order the company to recognize it and enter into bargaining.
In other words, Schultz returns to a more level playing field than the
one to which he's accustomed. About goddam time.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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