A pro-union poster is seen on a lamppost in front of Starbucks on Broadway and Denny in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood on March 22, 2022.
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The first week of Howard Schultz’s return to head Starbucks ended with the merger of seven other cafes owned by the company, bringing the total to 16.
But potential Starbucks union members will probably have to step in for a tougher response from the company. Schultz, who has watched the coffee giant grow from a small chain in Seattle to a global giant, has a long history of opposing unions.
It is still too early to say whether Schultz will adopt a new book at a time when workers feel encouraged by rising wages and tight labor markets, but his latest actions and words may offer some clues.
On Monday, he announced that the company would stop buying shares to invest in its stores and employees, but at the town hall with workers the same day he reiterated his belief in the company’s team’s approach to labor management.
“I’m not anti-union. I’m pro-Starbucks, pro-partner, pro-Starbucks culture,” Schultz said. “We didn’t get here by having an alliance.”
Both organizers and labor experts expect the Schultz-led company to step up its efforts to end the push.
“I think they’ll probably redouble their efforts against the unions and do their best,” said John Logan, a professor of labor at San Francisco State University.
Starbucks, under former CEO Kevin Johnson, has already faced charges of terminating unions from Workers United, which has filed dozens of complaints with the National Labor Council. The NLRB also accused the company of retaliating against phoenix workers. Starbucks denied the allegations.
Johnson took relatively far from the public approach, leaving most of the efforts of North American President Rosan Williams. But when the unions began last year in Buffalo, New York, Schultz, not Johnson, was the one who visited to talk to baristas.
To date, more than 180 company-owned seats have petitioned for union elections, although this is still a small part of Starbucks’ total footprint in the United States of nearly 9,000 stores. Of the places whose votes were counted, only one cafe is against unification.
Schultz’s trade union opposition
Former Starbucks Chairman and CEO and US Presidential Candidate 2020 Howard Schultz is visiting Fox & Friends at Fox News Channel Studios on April 2, 2019 in New York City.
Stephen Furdman Getty Images
Schultz’s position against the unions extended to his first days in the company. In his 1997 book, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Glass at a Time, co-authored with Dori Jones Young, Schultz described the company’s first union battle when he was marketing director.
The growing company, led by CEO Jerry Baldwin at the time, bought Peet’s Coffee and Tea in 1984. Integrating the acquisition requires effort as the company’s cultures collide, according to Schultz. He wrote that some Starbucks workers began to feel neglected and therefore circulated a union petition after their demands to management went unanswered. The union won the vote.
“The incident taught me an important lesson: There is no more valuable commodity than the relationship of trust and confidence that a company has with its employees,” Schultz wrote. “If people believe that management doesn’t share the rewards fairly, they will feel alienated. Once they start not trusting management, the company’s future is compromised.”
Schultz left Starbucks shortly thereafter to start his own espresso chain, Il Giornale, and its early success led him to acquire Starbucks and merge the two companies. In “Pour Your Heart Into It,” Schultz said the barista “on his own” worked successfully to desert the Starbucks Retail Workers’ Union.
“When so many of our people supported desertification, it was a sign to me that they were beginning to believe that I would do what I promised,” he wrote. Their distrust was beginning to dissipate and their morale was rising.
But Starbucks employees at the time and union representatives at the time opposed the story. In a 2019 Politico article on Schultz’s political hopes, Dave Schmitz, organizational director of the local United Union of Food and Trade Workers in the 1980s, said Starbucks had filed a petition for desertification.
Schultz then did not respond to requests for comment on the Politico report.
On top of that, Schultz often painted the benefits of the café chain as a health cover for part-time workers, as his own idea as part of a broader belief that good treatment of employees would benefit the company as a whole. According to the Politico report, these benefits were part of the union’s contract with Starbucks.
“I was convinced that under my leadership the staff would understand that I would listen to their concerns. If they had faith in me and my motives, they would not need a union, “Schultz wrote.
Schultz will step down as the company’s chief executive in 2000, before returning for a new tenure in 2008 as the financial crisis turned Starbucks’ business upside down. While he served as chief global strategist, meanwhile, Manhattan baristas have tried to unite. Starbucks successfully thwarted the effort, but an NLRB judge eventually ruled in 2008 that the company had violated federal labor laws.
During his second term as CEO in 2016, Schultz called a California barista who circulated a union petition, successfully dissuading him from organizing his colleagues.
Two years later, Schultz retired from an active role at Starbucks. The following year, he publicly considered running for president as an independent centrist, but his potential candidacy failed to generate enthusiasm.
The pandemic changed things
While Schultz was away, Starbucks and its baristas endured a pandemic that changed the minds of many workers about their work and their own strength. In August 2021, Starbucks workers in Buffalo filed a petition for an alliance with the NLRB under Workers United.
Now that Schultz is back in the spotlight, attitudes around the unions have changed dramatically. A September 2021 Gallup poll shows that 68% of Americans approve of unions – the highest of 71% of approvals in 1965.
Each union victory in a Starbucks café gives a bigger boost to unions, and other high-profile victories on Amazon and REI further fuel the movement.
“[Starbucks and Amazon] I think the old anti-union campaigns that have always worked in the past will work this time too, but I think in some cases they find that is no longer true, “said Logan, a labor professor.” I don’t know. each of these union campaigns would have succeeded two or three years ago, but something has changed. “