Starbucks Battered for Worker Treatment

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 3, 8:30AM EST

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Starbucks Battered for Worker Treatment — © Barista (CC BY 2.0) by PRABOWO AJI

For many of its employees, Starbucks is not a good workplace. The starting wage often is $15 an hour. Starbucks does have reasonable benefits for some. Yet, everyone who works there knows the company is wildly profitable and once and future CEO Howard Schultz is a billionaire. Schultz has been battling with unions for the company’s future. Based on a new court ruling, at least in some geographic areas, he is losing. This means the unions could drive a wedge more deeply into Starbucks. (Click here for the 25 brands customers are abandoning.)
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A recent headline in The Guardian read, “Starbucks condemned for ‘intimidation’ of US union organizers.” Federal labor law violations are one issue. Another is the accusation that 60 union leaders were fired. This accusation is from the powerful National Labor Relations Board.
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Several members of the U.S. Senate have tried to get Schultz to testify on labor matters They have had no success.
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Starbucks has a market capitalization of $118 billion. It had revenue of $32 billion last year and a net income of $3.3 billion. Its total assets are almost $28 million. Schultz said when the earnings for the most recent quarter were released, “Starbucks performance in Q1 demonstrates the strength and resilience of our business and accelerating demand for Starbucks Coffee all around the world.” Workers did not benefit meaningfully.
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Schultz is among the richest people in the world. His net worth is $3.8 billion. He has his own venture capital firm, which Forbes says has invested in Groupon, Madison Reed, Allbirds and Lucy. His lowest-paid workers make little more than a living wage.

Schultz may soon be forced to appear before the Senate. The results will not be pleasant, nor should they be.

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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.