A pro-union poster is seen on a lamppost in front of Starbucks’ Broadway and Denny location in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle March 22, 2022.
Toby Scott | Sopa Pictures | Light Rocket | Getty Images
Howard Schultz’s first week at the helm of Starbucks ended with seven more company-owned cafes unionising, bringing the total to 16.
But prospective union members at Starbucks are likely to face a tougher response from the company. Schultz, who oversaw the coffee giant’s growth from a small Seattle chain to a global giant, has a long history of opposing unions.
It’s too early to tell if Schultz will embrace a new script for a time when workers are feeling emboldened by rising wages and a tight labor market, but his recent actions and words may offer some clues.
On Monday he announced the company would suspend share buybacks to invest in its business and people, but that same day at a town hall with workers, he reiterated his belief in the company’s team approach to labor management.
“I’m not an anti-union person. I’m pro-Starbucks, pro-partner, pro-Starbucks culture,” Schultz said. “We didn’t get here by having a union.”
Both organizers and labor experts expect the company, led by Schultz, to step up efforts to quell the industrial action.
“I think they’re probably going to redouble their anti-union efforts and do whatever they can,” said John Logan, a professor of labor law at San Francisco State University.
Starbucks, under former CEO Kevin Johnson, has previously been accused of anti-unionism by Workers United, which has filed dozens of complaints with the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB has also accused the company of retaliating against pro-union employees in Phoenix. Starbucks has denied the claims.
Johnson has been relatively cautious publicly, leaving most of the effort to North American President Rossann Williams. But when the Buffalo, New York locations started the union push last year, it was Schultz, not Johnson, who visited to speak with baristas.
To date, more than 180 company-owned locations have petitioned for a union election, though that’s still a small fraction of Starbucks’ total U.S. presence of nearly 9,000 stores. Of the places whose votes were counted, only one cafe spoke out against forming a union.
Union opposition by Schultz
Howard Schultz, former Starbucks Chairman and CEO and 2020 US Presidential nominee, visits Fox & Friends at Fox News Channel Studios on April 2, 2019 in New York City.
Steven Ferdman | Getty Images
Schultz’s anti-union stance dates back to his early days at the company. In his 1997 book, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, co-authored with Dori Jones Yang, Schultz recounted the company’s first union struggle when he was marketing director.
The growing company, then led by CEO Jerry Baldwin, bought Peet’s Coffee and Tea in 1984. Integrating the acquisition took effort because of the clash of corporate cultures, Schultz says. He wrote that some Starbucks workers, feeling neglected, circulated a union petition after their requests to management went unanswered. The union won the vote.
“The incident taught me an important lesson: There is no asset more precious than the bond of trust that a company has with its employees,” Schultz wrote. “If people think management isn’t sharing rewards fairly, they’re going to feel alienated. Once they start distrusting management, the future of the company is in jeopardy.”
Schultz left Starbucks shortly after to start his own espresso chain, Il Giornale, and early success led him to acquire Starbucks and merge the two companies. In “Pour Your Heart Into It,” Schultz said that one barista “alone” successfully worked to decertify the Starbucks retail workers’ union.
“To me, when so many of our people supported decertification, that was a sign that they were beginning to believe that I would do what I promised,” he wrote. “Their suspicions began to dissipate and their morale rose.”
But employees who worked for Starbucks at the time and union officials at the time have resisted the narrative. In a 2019 Politico article linked to Schultz’s political hopes, Dave Schmitz, the organizing director of the local United Food and Commercial Workers Union in the 1980s, said that Starbucks filed the request for decertification.
Schultz did not respond to requests for comment on the Politico report at the time.
Additionally, Schultz often painted the coffee chain’s benefits, such as health insurance for part-time workers, as his own idea as part of a broader belief that treating employees well benefits the company as a whole. According to Politico’s reporting, these benefits were part of the union’s contract with Starbucks.
“I was confident that under my leadership, people would see that I was listening to their concerns. If they believed in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union,” Schultz wrote.
Schultz stepped down as the company’s CEO in 2000 before returning for another role in 2008 as the financial crisis turned Starbucks’ business upside down. Meanwhile, while he served as chief global strategist, baristas in Manhattan attempted to unionize. Starbucks successfully quashed the effort, but an NLRB judge ultimately ruled in 2008 that the company had violated federal labor laws.
During his second term as CEO in 2016, Schultz reportedly called a California barista who circulated a union petition and successfully dissuaded 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 centist, but his potential candidacy did not arouse enthusiasm.
The pandemic has changed things
While Schultz was away, Starbucks and its baristas endured a pandemic that changed many workers’ attitudes toward their jobs and their own power. In August 2021, Starbucks workers in Buffalo petitioned to unionize at the NLRB under Workers United.
Now that Schultz is back in the limelight, attitudes towards unions have changed drastically. September 2021 Gallup polls show 68% of Americans support unions — the highest since a 71% approval rating in 1965.
Each union victory at a Starbucks coffee shop gives momentum to the union movement, and other high-profile victories at Amazon and REI have further fueled the movement.
“[Starbucks and Amazon] I think the old anti-union campaigns that always worked in the past will work this time, but I think they’re finding out in certain cases that’s not true anymore,” said Logan, the working professor. “I don’t think any of those union campaigns would have been successful two or three years ago, but something has changed.”