Elaine Thompson/AP Photo
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz speaks at the Starbucks annual shareholders meeting in Seattle, March 22, 2017.
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. Goddam about time.
