Corporate hypocrisy is as old as corporations themselves. But there are levels. It is important to recognize astounding achievements in business insincerity. So let us send a note of congratulations today to Starbucks: rarely in modern history have we witnessed a company that so exquisitely combines a cultivated image as a caring, progressive employer with the well-documented, large-scale behavior of a gangster who expects to rule employees through bullying and fear.
The $100bn coffee-and-flavored-syrup chain meticulously refers to its employees as “partners”. What does it mean to be a partner to someone? Reasonable people might say that a partnership is a relationship in which you treat the other person as an equal, zealously uphold their basic rights, and deal with them in all cases as fully formed human beings deserving of respect. Luckily for Starbucks, they’ve had a great chance to exhibit these values over the past year, as thousands of employees at more than 230 of their stores across the country have voted to unionize. The historic union wave has offered the company an unprecedented opportunity to respect their “partners’” right to organize; to listen to their concerns and requests for change; and to bargain contracts with them in good faith, as partners, of course, should.
To say that Starbucks has failed to live up to their progressive reputation would be far too polite. It’s more like the union is Scooby-Doo, and they have yanked off the company’s pleasant mask to reveal Tony Soprano lurking underneath.
This week, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said that Starbucks had illegally withheld raises and other benefits from its unionized workers. This is one of the oldest pseudo-friendly union busting tactics in the book – a company in the midst of a union campaign will hand out goodies to its non-union employees and then shrug theatrically and say: “Gee, we’re not allowed to give these things to the union people!” (which, as the NLRB has affirmed, is a lie).
And that giant, illegal ripoff is not even the worst part. The union, Starbucks Workers United, says that the company has fired more than 85 workers for organizing. The company has begun permanently closing stores that recently unionized or were in the process of doing so. The NLRB still has hundreds of charges of illegal labor practices against Starbucks that it has yet to rule on. There were so many GoFundMe campaigns floating around for fired Starbucks workers that the union finally had to set up a national Solidarity Fund to try to help them all. In the midst of all of this brash intimidation, Starbucks has complained that the NLRB has unfairly favored the union, which is akin to a bank robber complaining that the police are unfairly favoring the bank.
What accounts for the hubris of a company that so boldly risks its own reputation to flout labor law and treat its “partners” like so many automatons who must be whipped back into submission? I’m no psychoanalyst, but I imagine that it flows from the same source as the hubris that made the billionaire Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz imagine that he could get elected president as an independent. It seems that none of Schultz’s sycophants were brave enough to tell him up front that he is, perhaps, the single worst presidential candidate you could ever imagine: Conservatives hate him because he pretends to be progressive; progressives hate him because he is, in fact, a cutthroat billionaire businessman who slathers himself in symbolic liberalism to ward off accurate criticism; and his own employees hate him because he treats their request for labor rights like an act of war.
Schultz, who returned to Starbucks as CEO this year for the express purpose of fumbling the company’s response to unionization, seems to imagine himself as some sort of kindly Stewart Brand figure who will redeem capitalism, but acts in practice like just another irate union-buster – Andrew Carnegie with an espresso machine. (A monstrous bit of Democratic party trivia: Hillary Clinton reportedly considered Schultz as labor secretary in her presidential administration, something that the next reporter to interview Clinton should absolutely ask her about.)
It may be that the very idea of a “progressive corporation” is, given the realities of American capitalism, an oxymoron. But anyone who has ever held a job understands what a good employer is. It is someone who treats workers as humans. When you get right down to it, the demands of the many Starbucks workers who have unionized are downright modest. They have asked the company to sign a pledge to simply allow workers to choose to organize “without fear of reprisal”. The company has not only refused to sign, but has dedicated itself to instilling fear of reprisal in the hearts of every single employee. That is not how a good boss treats his workers. That is not how a genuine progressive treats anyone. And it is certainly not how you would treat a “partner”.
In Boston, recently, I stopped by a unionized Starbucks store where workers have been on strike for more than a month. Through scorching days and lonely nights, these young workers, who could have spent the time doing anything more fun, have maintained a 24/7 picket line. That is not something people do if they do not care – about their co-workers, about their rights, and about the company itself. Schultz, who sits in his $30m mansion and sends out messages exhorting his employees to show “collective courage”, has not been there. He should pay it a visit. I bet they could teach him a lot about what real progressive values look like.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York
