Starbucks Union Workers Won? : The National Labour Relations Board has filed a complaint against Starbucks for preventing their unionised stores from accepting tips through credit cards. This was something that workers had been fighting for at Starbucks for quite some time, but that policy alone, preventing these unionised workers from being able to get tips through credit cards, has cost these Starbucks Union workers a tremendous amount of money.
Starbucks Union Workers Won :
You won’t even believe, how much I’m going to get to those details in just a second, but here is how this all played out, okay. The complaint said this: Starbucks Union Workers United has made credit card tipping Accord a demand of their Union campaign, but last year Howard Schultz who is of course the interim CEO of Starbucks announced that, the feature would only be rolling out to non-unionized stores.
The union filed charges against Starbucks with the lrb alleging that it was a union busting tactic and now luckily the lrb has officially backed. The Starbucks Union workers and Starbucks Union Workers United specifically in their complaint.
So Well, according to a more perfect union in some stores, credit card tipping has added three to four dollars an hour to workers paychecks. Yeah, this was not at all subtle; seriously, sometimes you see a story and you’re like, Well, is that union busting or is it not?
It’s around the edges; let’s see what the National Labour Relations Board says. This one’s not at all around the edges; okay, that’s robbing those workers of all of that money, and all those stores that are unionising, and they’re punishing them on purpose.
Howard Schultz, who of course is the founder of Starbucks and has now served as CEO several different times, came back to fight the unions and remember when he briefly considered running for president, he was painted as a left-winger, someone on the left, and see they would use the word progressive for I mean, but to the media, they’re like, Oh, what do you mean he’s a progressive?
just like Nicole Wallace is on MSNBC and she was the communications director for George W Bush and Dick Cheney; that’s corporate media for you yeah, so thank you to the perfect union for covering this story and getting their truth out there Starbucks, many of you know, is not like around the edges, and you’re not a tiny little company.
Barely surviving, you’re making billions in profits, and this is a terrible business strategy, let alone being immoral. They’re punching themselves in the face ten thousand times over this Starbucks used to rightly or wrongly be considered somewhat of a progressive brand.
Now nobody would say that. no right like yeah, maybe somebody on cable news would say it right but none of the rest of us would say it. Now I’m reluctant to go into a Starbucks congratulations and I mean the tactics they’ve used are just so brazen right and if it weren’t for like if we were dealing with Trump’s lrb these workers would have no protection at all.
In fact, do you remember that Google employee James Da more who had written that memo in regard to why there aren’t enough women coders Whatever you think about that guy right, he ended up getting fired because he wrote some stuff that was deemed offensive to women in that memo, and he’s like, I’m gonna take this fight to the NLRB and remember Trump’s backing him.
All these Republicans are backing him. They’re like, Oh, Free Speech! Free speech: He went to the NLRB where all these people were appointed by Donald Trump and, of course, they were totally against workers. You know what they told him?
Just something to keep in mind because, while we give Biden justified flak for his leadership, there are some elements of his administration that deserve some credit. Other benefits that Starbucks withheld from their unionised workers include pay raises and additional health benefits last May additional sick days after Starbucks ended their coveted policies last September and even more pay raises last December.
unfortunately, the unionbusting is effective because Even if they win on busting this union, they still lose; they’ve lost, stock market cap; they’re losing valuation by the minute; and by the way, this is another reason to organise.
So when you’re getting underpaid, you’ve got a giant corporation that brags about how many billions they make every year in profits and refuses to share any of it with you when you do organise action like this, you hit them where it hurts, which is their bot.
3.7 billion okay, my guess is that at some point Starbucks is going to look back at this some other executive at Starbucks and go, Yeah, it would have cost us this to give them decent wages right and instead it costs us this like all the way up hereto try to fight them and make us and they look like the worst guys in America.
In fact, I’m going to leave you with this final statistic it’ll blow your mind. The nlrb has cited Starbucks with over 900 violations of federal labour law since Union Drive began in 2009. Yeah, look man, there’s parts of what I think about labour that folks might not be perfectly happy with on the left, and I’m telling you this isn’t even close to 900 violations.
It’s one thing to say, Hey, I’m withholding wages because we’re going to go into or raises because we’re going to go into salary negotiations, but they’re not saying they’re going into negotiations, yeah, exactly right, and the tips have nothing new, so no, there this is as clear a case of union busting as I’ve ever seen, and a way to destroy your brand well played.
