TUESDAY, JANUARY 6, 2009
EFCA poster boy: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

Need another reason to hate Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz?  (Besides that he sold the Seattle SuperSonics to a bunch of Oklahoma City yahoos that clearly had no intention of keeping the team in Seattle.)  How about that he has overseen the spending of millions of dollars on anti-union consultants and lawyers to block his employees' attempts across the country to form a union.  

As the Seattle Times reports today, Schultz's company, already thumped by the National Labor Relations Board last month for unfair labor practices, including the firing and punishing of pro-union baristas at several New York cafes, has now settled a separate NLRB dispute this week in Michigan. And on Wednesday, Starbucks is set to begin proceedings there in a third case in which it allegedly fired a barista because of his union activities. 

Settlements like the one announced yesterday by Starbucks attorneys never come with fines and rarely with admissions of wrongdoing. Among other things, the Employee Free Choice Act would allow the NLRB to order fines in some situations like these, providing some disincentive for employers who insist on interfering in their employees' freedom of association.

Current law says workers have the right to decide for themselves -- free from threat of firing, punishment, harassment or other employer coercion -- whether they want to form a union. But the law has no teeth and is broken with relative impunity by companies like Starbucks, which has reportedly spent millions on high-priced lawyers to subvert unionization campaigns using those illegal tactics.

Here is an account -- from portfolio.com -- of the of one group of workers to form a union at a single Starbucks store:

Four years ago, a small but hardy band of baristas attempted the near-impossible task of unionizing a single Starbucks store on Madison Avenue in New York. The leader of the effort, a young firebrand named Daniel Gross, took on what he called "the myth of the socially responsible Starbucks," complaining of subsistence wages, sadistically unpredictable schedules, and understaffing. He noted that only four out of 10 Starbucks employees actually receive its vaunted health benefits -- a lower rate than at Wal-Mart -- either because, as part-time workers, they don’t work the 240 hours a quarter required to qualify, or because, at between $7 and $9 an hour, they can’t afford the premiums, copays, and deductibles. (A Starbucks spokesperson says it’s because they have coverage from other sources and that 80 percent of its employees are covered by some kind of insurance.)

As soon as the unionization drive was announced, Schultz sent out a company­wide email expressing his dismay and disappointment. It was almost as if his feelings had been hurt. He visited the epicenter of the unionization effort, the store on Madison Avenue where Gross worked. Gross, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a.k.a. the Wobblies, says that when he tried talking to Schultz, he was rebuffed, though Schultz denies it. Gross was later fired.

After his visit, the I.W.W. says that Starbucks sent antiunion managers into the store and sicced high-priced lawyers from the Washington, D.C., law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld on Gross and his cohorts. The local office of the National Labor Relations Board sided with the union, filing complaints that Starbucks had engaged in numerous unfair labor practices and twice taking it to court. One case was settled; the other, which required weeks of testimony, is still pending. 

(The baristas eventually prevailed just weeks ago.) 

Gross and his lawyer, Stuart Lichten of Schwartz Lichten & Bright in New York, estimate that Starbucks has gone through several million dollars in legal fees to suppress the union. Even if the Wobblies had successfully unionized the Madison Avenue store, Lichten says, Starbucks could easily have shut it down; after all, there are plenty of other Starbucks stores nearby. Why then, I ask him, would the company spend so much to squelch something so weak?

Partly, Lichten says, it’s to keep Gross from ever returning to Starbucks. But partly too, he adds, it’s because of the boss’s vanity. Under Schultz’s benevolent rule, unions should be unnecessary; it is "a personal insult," he says, that anyone feels otherwise. "They also see it as retro," he adds. "It’s not new-age to have a union. Unions are for General Motors. They’re the 'third wave,' or whatever they call it." Schultz says he won’t talk about the matter because it’s still in litigation.

Workers should face such hurdles to exercise their legal right to decide for themselves whether they should have a union. This is America. Democracy doesn't stop at the employers' door. And yet, Human Rights Watch lists the United States alongside many Third World nations as a violator of basic human rights, due to the degree to which we restrict the freedom of association and the freedom to form unions.

Each year thousands of workers in the United States are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized by employers in reprisal for their exercise of the right to freedom of association. In the 1950’s, victims numbered in the hundreds each year. In 1969, the number was more than 6,000. By the 1990’s, more than 20,000 workers each year were dismissed or otherwise victims of discrimination serious enough for the government-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to issue a reinstatement and “back-pay” or other remedial order…

Learn more about the Employee Free Choice Act, and then contact your representatives in Washington, D.C. and tell them to make the EFCA's passage a priority in the new Congress.

^{Copyright © 2009 --  Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO}