Starbucks Workers Deserve a Raise

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 12, 9:30AM EDT

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Starbucks Workers Deserve a Raise — © Photo by Tim Boyle / Getty Images

The New York Post reports that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said to a worker, “If you hate Starbucks so much, why don’t you go somewhere else?” Among other things, Schultz’s return to Starbucks is meant to slow, if not stop, the effort by some employees to form a union. The process already has started, and started successfully. The coffee shop company faces the fact that tens of thousands of its workers could become unionized and challenge what members receive in pay and other benefits. Schultz cannot stop that. The lowest-paid Starbucks workers have a point about the level of their pay.
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While Starbucks employees have good benefits, at least for people who have extremely low pay, the coffee company continues to offer wages that people can barely live on. Last year, Starbucks put its minimum hourly wage at $15. However, that may be due as much to a worker shortage as the desire for the company to pay its workers better. It remains among the lowest-paying companies in America.
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Starbucks is immensely profitable, in part due to how little it pays its workers. And Schultz is a billionaire who has made most of his money from the rise in the company’s stock.

In the most recently reported quarter, Starbucks had revenue of $8.1 billion, which was up 19% from the same period the year before. Net income was $816 million, or 31% higher.
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The argument of most companies that have retail workers is that they are “unskilled” and can be paid at low levels. However, that ignores the fact that people need a modest amount of money to live on.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.