Starbucks CEO Pushed Managers to Thwart Unionization Efforts, Leaked Video Shows

People hold signs while protesting in front of Starbucks on April 14, 2022, in New York City.

MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO / GETTY IMAGES

BY Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams

April 23, 2022

Leaked footage of a video call in which Starbucks’ billionaire CEO urges managers to step up their efforts to thwart worker unionization is yet another sign of the company’s growing desperation, labor advocates said on Thursday.

In the undated video published by the pro-worker media organization More Perfect Union, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz — who earlier this month became the company’s CEO for the third time — implored managers “to encourage [employees] to really understand what it might mean to vote for a union.”

Offering no evidence, Schultz — who referred to unionizing employees as “so-called workers” and “a new outside force that’s trying desperately to disrupt our company” — said, “I wasn’t there, but there are stories that people potentially had been bullied not to vote.”

Starbucks North America president Rossann Williams also appears in the video, telling managers that it’s their “number one responsibility” to “do your role” to ensure that employees “get balanced information about what’s going on.”

Williams also implored Starbucks employees to be skeptical of accounts published by workers who say they’ve experienced corporate retaliation and union-busting.

“Don’t believe everything you see in social media,” she said. “For those of you that have reached out, it’s heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking for me to see and hear how some partners are talking about the company that I love.”

According to More Perfect Union, Starbucks has “regularly shut down stores, isolated new workers, held captive audience meetings, and subjected workers to a barrage of emails, texts, and videos with anti-union rhetoric.”

Starbucks Workers United, the union behind the organizing efforts, says it has filed more than 80 unfair labor practice complaints against the company with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

On Wednesday, Starbucks filed its own unfair labor practice charges against members of Starbucks Workers United, accusing them of a “consistent pattern of disturbing behavior.”

In response to the complaints, the union said that “Starbucks is getting desperate as it loses this war in battle after battle, because we — the Starbucks partners — continue to organize and fight for a real voice within the company. These charges are just the latest example of that desperation.”

NLRB prosecutors on Friday formally accused Starbucks of illegally firing a group of activists seeking to unionize their Memphis, Tennessee store. On Tuesday, the NLRB filed a third lawsuit against Starbucks for alleged labor violations against unionizing workers in a Phoenix store over the past four months.

Starbucks’ pushback against organizers comes amid a nationwide wave of barista unionization. Earlier this week, workers at five Richmond, Virginia stores voted to unionize, and on Thursday employees at a flagship location in the company’s hometown of Seattle elected to join Starbucks Workers United.

Since Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York filed for a union election last summer, employees at more than 200 stores across the country have sought to unionize.

“We can resist and thrive,” said Seattle organizer Brennen Collins, “even among a storm of disinformation and fearmongering perpetrated against our best interests.”

Egypt gig economy workers face rough ride

CAIRO, April 24, 2022 (BSS/AFP) - Young men on bikes and scooters zip
through Cairo, Egypt's sprawling megalopolis, dodging cars to deliver more
than a million orders each day, with little physical or legal protection.

  Egypt's digital gig economy is growing, as economic pressures push more of
its key demographic -- educated, urban youth -- into the work-on-demand
model.

  Engineer Mohamed Sherif, 37, joined online food ordering company Talabat as
a bicycle courier in Alexandria three months ago because he couldn't find a
job.

  "They bleed you dry left and right, but there's nothing else to do," he
told AFP.

  In early April, Talabat couriers called a two-day strike to demand higher
wages, with only a fraction of the 12,000 workforce joining.

  The work stoppage reflected, however, the state of Egypt's sizeable, app-
based gig economy.

  Inflation has climbed to a three-year high of 12.1 percent while the
Egyptian pound plunged to 18 percent of its value.

  The mounting economic hardships come as global commodity prices have soared
following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

  A courier who declined to be named said commissions have been stagnant
since 2020 at 9-18 Egyptian pounds (50 cents and $1).

  "You can work a nine or 10-hour shift, and just not get enough orders,"
Sherif told AFP.

  After paying for gas, oil and other expenses, "you could end up only making
30 or 40 pounds that day".

  In Egypt, where 60 percent of the 103-million-strong population are under
30 and 14.5 percent of university graduates are unemployed, digital labour
platforms have attracted 100,000-200,000 workers.

  Uber alone employed 90,000 drivers in 2019, all without contracts,
insurance or social security.

  - 'Taking advantage of vulnerability' -

  Fairwork, a project by the University of Oxford, worked with the American
University in Cairo to rate the working conditions of seven of Egypt's
largest digital labour platforms.

  Uber, Talabat and grocery app Mongez scored one out of 10, while
ridesharing startup Swvl -- which made headlines for its $1.5 billion Nasdaq
debut earlier this year -- scored just three out of 10.

  Omar Ramadan, whose home maintenance and cleaning services startup
FilKhedma rated highest at five out of 10, said working conditions are seldom
discussed in the tech ecosystem.

  "It's very rare to talk about how much we're paying people, if this is fair
or not, if we're taking advantage of people's vulnerability."

  A third of Egyptians live in poverty, and nearly the same number are
vulnerable to falling into poverty, the World Bank says.

  The average family's monthly income is 6,000 EGP ($325).

  Following the strike this month, Talabat said in a statement that couriers
earned around 4,000-6,000 EGP per month, and up to 10,000 EGP "if they work
eight hours or more".

  But couriers say this excludes the cost of petrol -- which has gone up by
three percent in recent days -- and paying for and servicing the scooter or
bicycle they use.

  Couriers using motorcycles earn up to twice as much as those making their
deliveries by bicycles or on foot, said Sherif.

  - A legal grey area -

  Couriers also put their lives at risk as they navigate the chaotic streets
of Cairo, where traffic rules are more than often disrespected and accidents
happen almost daily.

  Talabat Egypt's public affairs head Asmaa Khalil denied claims made by some
couriers that they have no adequate insurance to protect them.

  According to her, Talabat pays into accident and life insurance, but the
schemes are handled by external contractors that recruit and manage their
couriers.

  Bicycle courier Sherif criticised this method, calling it a way by
employers "to get rid of the dirty work".

  Khalil said that, legally, Talabat has "no obligations" towards its
couriers and offers insurance and other benefits only "out of goodwill".

  For Wael Tawfik of the Legal Collective to Promote Labour Awareness, the
best recourse for workers is to set up a trade union.

  But Sherif said it would be a tough task for couriers to set up a union
because "unlike factory workers who all work in the same place, couriers only
meet each other by coincidence".

  Only 13.6 million people receive state-sponsored social security benefits
in Egypt, where 63 percent of the workforce are employed in the informal
economy, according to the International Labour Organization.

  "Employment law, tax law, social security, it's all unclear how the gig
economy is supposed to behave," Ramadan said.

  "Everyone in the gig economy is in a grey area," he added.

Work Sucks. Here’s The Real Reason You Hate Your Job

Work should help us thrive, but our jobs leave us hopeless, exhausted, and deflated. Where did we go wrong?

Image by Geralt

Joel Nihlean

Apr 5,2022

Economist and mathematician John Maynard Keynes made a bold prediction about the future of work.   Back in 1930, he said that within 100 years — by 2030 — we’d be working a 15-hour workweek.

We’ve still got time, but things aren’t looking too good.

Keynes’ prediction isn’t as silly as it sounds, though. When he made it, working hours were in a steady decline. It was easy to follow the trend lines to their logical conclusion. Union efforts were winning battles to shrink the workweek and new technologies were making workers more productive in less time.

A much shorter workweek was a reasonable conclusion.

But by the late 1940s, the workweek stopped shrinking. It leveled off into the 40 hours a week we still know — and loathe — today.

For a while, the growing productivity meant growing wages, too. Productivity and worker pay grew together. But by the late 1970s, it all began to come undone. Since 1979 — because of tax cuts for the wealthy, aggressive financial deregulation, less frequent raises to the minimum wage, and other intentional policies — productivity has continued to increase while worker pay has generally stagnated.

There isn’t a labor shortage.

Now — even though our system relies on there being more workers than jobs — we’re facing a nationwide labor shortage. The coronavirus pandemic shook the labor market hard, particularly in low-wage service industry jobs. Many were laid off or furloughed, and now they aren’t coming back.

Some are complaining that “nobody wants to work anymore,” but the problem is not that there’s a lack of people looking for jobs, too strong a social safety net, or too rich of benefits. People are just fed up with bad jobs.

The same is true of the white-collar office workers now resigning. As companies call their staff back to the office, employees are refusing to return to toxic work environments. They’re looking for less stress, more meaning, and better pay, too.

It’s been called the Big Quit, the Great Reset, the Great Reshuffle, and a dozen other not-so-great names. Organizational psychologist Anthony Klots was the first to call it the Great Resignation when he was quoted in a Bloomberg article on how to quit your job. That one stuck.

People are burned out. And after the pandemic, many are rethinking the place of work in their lives, reflecting on what gives them meaning and happiness.

And work isn’t it.

Increased productivity didn’t translate to time off, instead, we got bullshit jobs.

Our economy has perverted the notion of work, distorting its purpose. Specifically, useful jobs are made unrewarding. The pay is low, the benefits are next to nil, and the hours are grueling. On the other hand, the pencil-pushing jobs that don’t create any tangible benefit for society are often incredibly lucrative.

This is the thesis of anthropologist David Graeber’s 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs. In it, Graeber observes something we all knew deep down was true. Some jobs are pointless. They exist solely to make the rich more money and to keep us busy. Work is adult daycare.

“Only a little more than half of all workers — and less than half of millennials and Gen Z — feel that their job makes a meaningful contribution to the world.”

Contrary to what Keynes predicted — that as technology improved, automation would ease our work week to fewer and fewer hours so we can more completely enjoy life away from the labor needed to maintain it — companies have filled the hours gifted to us by increased efficiency and productivity with bullshit jobs.

These new jobs do nothing to improve the human condition. They serve no real purpose other than accelerating the accumulation of wealth and power of a greedy few while keeping us busy, cooped up at a job all day. Think of the movie Office Space. Essentially, these frivolous jobs exist for their own sake.

From the movie, Office Space, Twentieth Century Fox

The numbers back Graeber up. According to a 2021 poll by YouGov, only a little more than half of all workers — and less than half of millennials and Gen Z — feel that their job makes a meaningful contribution to the world. Nearly a quarter of US adults firmly believe that their job is meaningless.

The essential workers we spotlighted and celebrated during the height of the pandemic (but didn’t pay more or learn to appreciate) aren’t the ones working bullshit jobs. Their work, as it turns out, is foundational to our collective survival.

Bullshit jobs are the ones that keep us busy most of our waking hours doing work that’s hard if not impossible to connect to any collective, societal good. They alienate us and exhaust us. They leave us without the energy to fight for any meaningful change.

Paradoxically, these pointless jobs are often white-collar jobs with big salaries. The highly-valued and highly-paid jobs are the most likely to be unfulfilling, useless dead ends that do nothing to make the world a better place.

“Imagine what we could achieve if we committed our labor to actually improving the human condition.”

If things were different, if we cast off these pointless jobs, our entire system would start to come undone. The 40-hour workweek, minimum wage jobs, regular economic crashes, a permanent pool of the unemployed that we cycle in and out of, unaffordable housing, homelessness, funneling wealth to a small group of billionaires and oligarchs — none of it would be justifiable if we eliminated our attachment to the profit motive as the primary driver of our economy.

If we all worked exclusively to improve the human condition, we could all work less.

We could choose a different world; work less and enjoy life more.

Work is an essential fact of life. However, it’s not what life is about. Our purpose on this planet is not to endlessly toil for the benefit of an elite few. We don’t live to work, we work to live.

The point of work should be to guarantee our ability to experience life. We only get one shot at it, and there are so many things to enjoy — from community and the love of friends and family, and appreciating or creating art and eating good food, to say nothing of forming new friendships or bettering oneself. A good job can offer some of these things, but work for its own sake has taken over most of our waking hours.

Every president in the last 100 years has promised to create more jobs and better-paying jobs, but that’s not what we need. More jobs don’t always make things better, especially if those jobs are pointless, alienating, dangerous, or demeaning.

“We can achieve all the necessary benefits and even rich fruits of our labors with far fewer hours.”

What we need is a better understanding of the role work is meant to play — creating a world where we all can thrive — so we can make jobs better reflect that. Jobs shouldn’t be a means to mere survival while we shovel more money to billionaires.

Imagine what we could achieve if we committed our labor to actually improving the human condition. By replacing the profit motive with the drive to improve the human condition, we could set about building infrastructure in forward-thinking and sustainable ways, ensuring everyone is housed and receiving any necessary medical care, building our green energy capacity, focusing on tangible, positive changes for our communities. These kinds of projects are rarely profitable and that’s why we don’t see many of them today.

Under our current system, work exists solely to generate profit for someone else. And since there is no natural cap to how much profit is desirable, nor how much work is necessary, we just work more and more. We can achieve all the necessary benefits and even rich fruits of our labors with far fewer hours. But, to do this, the aims and outcomes of work must be focused not on profit, but on improving the human condition.

We could work far fewer hours for far fewer years of our lives and in far better conditions. The only reason that we don’t is that a profit-based economy simply does not function that way. In a world of abundance, we’ve been made to endlessly toil for tyrants whose names we often don’t know — unless they are Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg — building their wealth, their mansions, their compounds, and their futures.

We must dismantle the system that abuses work for the benefit of a vanishingly small few. Fighting for a world where we are all prosperous is the most fundamental of human endeavors.

 

Follow Joel Nihlean on Twitter or sign up to get an email whenever he publishes. Read more from Joel.

Why Is Capitalism Creating An Economy That Is 40% Bullsh*t Jobs?

As a society, we’re forcing millions of people to go to offices five days a week, eight hours a day, and do nothing

Mitchell Peterson  

May 18, 2021

Cover photo from the author.

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.) — and particularly its financial avatars — but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. -David Graeber

Irecently read David Graeber’s classic book, Bullshit Jobs, and as suspected, it was entertaining while being mind-blowingly enlightening. His anthropological knowledge, crowdsourced first-hand accounts, and writing chops made this the fastest book I’ve read in a long time.

As a whole, it’s an awesome observation of a terrifyingly stupid economic phenomenon and in classic Graeber fashion, an excellent societal critique.

So, what is a bullshit job, and are you working one?

His definition of a bullshit job is: a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as a part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend this is not the case.

A bullshit job is not to be confused with a shitty job. Making Big Macs, collecting garbage, or cleaning office buildings are not bullshit jobs. They all serve a purpose, and society would surely notice their absence. Service jobs or blue-collar work are rarely bullshit, and the last year showed that.

There are also whole sectors of the economy that are basically bullshit from a value production standpoint — I particularly like economist Michael Hudson’s critiques of the FIRE sectors (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate). The world would be much better off without political lobbyists, corporate lawyers, PR firms that launder the image of dictators, or advertisers that manipulate us into thinking we can’t be happy unless we’ve purchased the correct hair products, sneakers, or fleet of jet skis.

It’s all horrifying, a lot of it is useless, and some jobs within those industries could fall into the category of bullshit jobs, but they’re not all necessarily the bullshit Graeber is talking about.

So, where are all of these bullshit jobs, who’s working them, and why do they exist?

They’re everywhere, but one would be surprised to hear that they are not all in the government — not by a long shot. Free market fundamentalists have an impossibly hard time believing that a firm would hire someone to do nothing, but they do it all the time — I’ve got evidence Mr. Friedman!

Typically, bullshit jobs are white-collar office positions that pay well. From the testimonials, a secretary at a Dutch publishing company whose main responsibility was keeping a bowl of mints full comes to mind. Or the guy hired to run an in-firm communication network that nobody at the company used. Or the security guard who had to watch over an empty room in a museum for eight hours a day and wasn’t allowed to bring anything to help him pass the time.

The rise of managerial and administrative positions over the last fifty or sixty years has added to the vastness of the BS. Scores of middle manager and executive VP positions have been created, often serving no purpose beyond leading meetings and keeping a hawkish eye on employees who don’t need hyper-diligent supervision. Many of them wrote to Graeber about how little they do and how, among their manager-level coworkers, they’re not allowed to say it out loud.

The bullshit is everywhere, and reading people’s first-hand experiences was fascinating, comical, and sad. It is surprisingly difficult mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to spend forty hours a week knowing you’re making zero difference and utterly wasting your time.

There’s also the phenomenon Graeber terms, the bullshitization of work

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Parallel to the bullshit jobs phenomenon, it is increasingly common that productive, important workers, like nurses or teachers, are spending more time not doing what they’re hired to do.

They’re filling out compliance forms, attending BS meetings, or doing performance reviews. To be clear, every job has elements of bullshit. And the data-driven, quarterly metrics, fill-out-these-forms, and submit them to x-y-and-z aspects of most work are going up.

Also, there are millions and millions of people whose jobs aren’t complete bullshit, but they go to the office every day and could finish their work in a few short hours. But, modern capitalism being modern capitalism — one doesn’t get the full value they create nor have they sold their services alone — they’ve sold forty hours of their week, so they stretch out their daily tasks, pretend to be busy, and are forced to stay until five pm.

It’s way more common than you think

The Pew Gov poll Graeber cites throughout the book while being a few years old now, showed that 37% of workers thought of their jobs as completely useless. That’s a rough figure but still, one in three people feels that their job makes zero impact on the world.

Add the ancillary services for those BS jobs, like cleaning and maintaining the BS offices, as well as the services that arise from people being too busy, like dog washers or meal prep services, and the hardly-necessary portion of the economy inches even closer to half the workforce.

The problems in the world are many, and a huge percentage of the working population is spending most of their lives engaged in meaningless bullshit.

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Being an anthropologist, Graeber goes through the history of what we call work in Europe and America. He traces the feudal practice where most people sent their own children to be servants in others’ homes for seven to fifteen years as part of their “progression” into adulthood. The thought was that one wasn’t a perfected human until they had been taught to be properly subservient.

There’s also what we refer to as the protestant work ethic. And there’s a puritanical vein to all of this as well. It’s the mentality that persevering through the drudgery is an act of character, a show of moral fortitude. The work isn’t important: the suffering is.

Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. H.L. Mencken

Valuing ourselves and our worth based on a job is a psyche that runs deep, and yet, most people hate their jobs. In one of the middle manager testimonies, this guy named Clement said it best: “the pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we’d rather not be doing… if you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work, you’re not living right.”

I feel I need to make the caveat that, of course, working hard is a virtue. But what are we working on? To what end? And, is there any balance with other things in life like family, community, and personal development?

Hard work is a virtue, but why the hell aren’t we, as a society, working harder to solve the myriad of real problems we have? Poverty, homelessness, hunger, global freaking warming, the many refugee crises, political corruption, plastic in the ocean, plastic everywhere, the disappearing rainforests, air pollution, the sixth mass extinction in planetary history, the rise of fascism, obesity, and COVID-19 are just a few of the problems we need to address.

And roughly one in three workers feels that they’re completely wasting their time for forty-plus hours a week.

What are we doing?

David Graeber was a much smarter man than I’ll ever be, and he didn’t offer a list of policy solutions, so I’m not going to either. He does mention that UBI would be a step in the right direction. In the final chapter, he has passages from his correspondence with activists from the Wages for Housework movement and wrote about how they came to the same conclusion that UBI makes sense.

People are doing critically important things for a society like raising children or caring for their elderly parents but have to worry about making rent or living on the street. While, at the same time, chunky middle managers are trying to get the buffalo sauce stains out of their khakis and pretending to be busy for eighty grand a year.

Again, what are we doing?

UBI would go a long way to disconnecting work from basic survival. It would give people a bit of room to breathe and freedom from the economic boot on their neck. On its own, it wouldn’t be enough, but it’d be something.

The mindset also needs to change. We are more than our jobs. Graeber made the point that on our tombstones, we rarely put VP of International Development, Head of Procurement, or Assistant Regional Manager — except maybe Dwight Shrute.

So why do we identify so strongly with our jobs?

They say economics is the study of who gets what and why in a society. These days in the US and to a degree in Europe, the prevailing economic ideology is warped to the point of psychosis.

We’d rather let the six Walton kids — who inherited every penny and didn’t build a thing — have six mega-mansions each, six mega-yachts, six Gulf Stream jets, and unimaginable wealth for each of their offspring for the next sixty-six generations than let a portion of the population earn more or work a little less for the same money?

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals they would be dangerous if they had any leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. -George Orwell

In the first half of the 20th century, economists like John Maynard Keynes predicted that because of technology, by the year 2000, we’d have 15 hour work weeks. Why does the premier economic mind of his time, the man who created the post-WWII, Bretton-Woods framework that rebuilt Europe and the world, sound like a crackpot in 2021?

We could be living that life. Instead, wages have stagnated for people doing service or blue-collar jobs, so they’re working harder than ever to simply get by. At the same time, many middle managers and administrators are cleverly “staying busy,” but swimming in shame because they’re getting paid while not contributing to society.

With current technology, it would not be that hard to materially provide for all on earth. The planet can easily sustain the needs of the many; it cannot sustain the greed of the rich.

Let’s change our mindset around work, value, and whether people “deserve” to live if they’re not completely sacrificing themselves to the economic machine.

Let’s cut the bullshit.

It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.
David Graeber

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