Monday, April 11, 2022

Ithaca Starbucks workers vote to unionize

By Phoebe Taylor-Vuolo |

Starbucks workers in Ithaca celebrate after the vote count.
 (Photo courtesy of Casey Moore)

BINGHAMTON, NY (WSKG) — Starbucks workers in Ithaca voted to unionize last week. They’re the latest in a wave of unionization efforts at Starbucks stores across the country.

All three of Ithaca’s Starbucks locations are now part of the Starbucks Workers United union.

“Today, we unionize a store that is not even four months old. That really shows that the unions are in the future for Starbucks. And I hope that Starbucks will get behind that,” said Hope Liepe, a barista at a location on South Meadow Street in Ithaca.

The employees said Starbucks management has used union busting tactics, such as denying time-off requests and writing up workers.

“It’s been a lot of hours getting cut, a lot of support managers coming in and just kind of breathing down your neck during your shifts,” Rebekkah MacLean, who works at a Starbucks on College Avenue.


The Ithaca Commons location is one of three Starbucks stores now part of the Starbucks workers union. (Megan Zerez/WSKG)

A spokesperson from Starbucks called claims of union-busting “categorically false.”

Starbucks employees in Buffalo became the first in the country to unionize in December. Since then, unionization efforts have cropped up at Starbucks locations nationwide. On Thursday, locations in Rochester and Buffalo also voted to unionize.

The employees said they will negotiate for better hours and health care benefits. Evan Sunshine is one of the organizers at the Starbucks on College Avenue in Ithaca. He said the workers plan to push for a tip minimum as well.

“A lot of stores in Ithaca don’t get a lot of tips. I know on College Avenue, I only get $1 in tips per week,” Sunshine said.

Nearly all of the workers at the Ithaca stores were in favor of unionizing, with only three votes against the measure.

The spokesperson for Starbucks said the company respects its workers efforts, but is against the stores unionizing.

Four St. Louis Starbucks locations have filed paperwork to unionize. 
Stores in Ladue, Bridgeton, and St. Louis City appealed to the National Labor Relations Board to begin union elections. The stores join nearly 200 other Starbucks locations across the country in filing for unionization. According to workers at the Bridgeton location, the workers want higher pay, benefits, and a voice in store decision-making. (KMOV4)

On Friday, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz met with union-minded workers in the city. 
When a barista asked the CEO about the company's growing union movement, he responded with, "if you hate Starbucks so much, why don't you go somewhere else?" At this time, this barista is "leading the unionization effort at the Second and Covina store in Long Beach." (Perfect Union)

Starbucks union campaign pushes on, with at least 16 stores now organized.

Workers at six more stores in upstate New York have voted to unionize.




Pro-union pins were available during a watch party for a Starbucks union election in Buffalo in December.
Credit...Joshua Bessex/Associated Press

By Noam Scheiber
April 8, 2022

Starbucks workers have added to the momentum of a union campaign that went public in late August and has upended decades of union-free labor at the company’s corporate-owned stores.

On Thursday and Friday, workers at six stores in upstate New York voted to unionize, according to the National Labor Relations Board, bringing the total number of company-owned stores where workers have backed a union to 16. The union, Workers United, was also leading by a wide margin at a store in Kansas whose votes were tallied Friday, but the number of challenged ballots leaves the outcome officially in doubt until their status can be resolved.

The union has lost only a single election so far, but it is formally challenging the outcome.

Since the union secured its first two victories in elections that concluded in December, workers at more than 175 other stores across at least 25 states have filed for union elections, out of roughly 9,000 corporate-owned stores in the United States. The labor board will count ballots in at least three more stores next week.

The organizing success at Starbucks appears to reflect a growing interest among workers in unionizing, including the efforts at Amazon, where workers last week voted to unionize a Staten Island warehouse by a significant margin.

On Wednesday, the general counsel of the labor board, Jennifer Abruzzo, announced that union election filings were up more than 50 percent during the previous six months versus the same period one year earlier. Ms. Abruzzo expressed concern that funding and staff shortages were making it difficult for the agency to keep up with the activity, saying in a statement that the board “needs a significant increase of funds to fully effectuate the mission of the agency.”

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Starbucks has sought to persuade workers not to unionize by holding anti-union meetings with workers and conversations between managers and individual employees, but some employees say the meetings have only galvanized their support for organizing.

In some cases, Starbucks has also sent a number of senior officials to stores from out of town, a move the company says is intended to address operational issues like staffing and training but which some union supporters have said they find intimidating.

The union has accused Starbucks of seeking to cut back hours nationally as a way to encourage longtime employees to leave the company and replace them with workers who are more skeptical about unionizing. And the union argues that Starbucks has retaliated against workers for supporting the union by disciplining or firing them. Last month, the labor board issued a formal complaint against Starbucks for retaliating against two Arizona employees, a step it takes after finding merit in accusations against employers or unions.

The company has denied that it has cut hours to prompt employees to leave, saying it schedules workers in response to customer demand, and it has rejected accusations of anti-union activity.

As the union campaign accelerated in March, the company announced that Kevin Johnson, who had served as chief executive since 2017, would be replaced on an interim basis by Howard Schultz, who had led the company twice before and remained one of its largest investors.

Some investors who had warned Mr. Johnson that the company’s anti-union tactics could damage its reputation expressed optimism that the leadership change might bring about a shift in Starbucks’s posture toward the union. But the company soon announced that it would not agree to stay neutral in union elections, as the union has requested, dampening those hopes.

On Monday, the same day that Mr. Schultz returned as chief executive, the company fired Laila Dalton, one of the two Arizona workers the N.L.R.B. had accused Starbucks of retaliating against in March. The company said that Ms. Dalton had violated company rules by recording co-workers’ conversations without their permission.

“A partner’s interest in a union does not exempt them from the standards we have always held,” Reggie Borges, a company spokesman, said in a statement, using the company’s term for an employee.

Starbucks Union Drives






Noam Scheiber is a Chicago-based reporter who covers workers and the workplace. He spent nearly 15 years at The New Republic magazine, where he covered economic policy and three presidential campaigns. He is the author of “The Escape Artists.” @noamscheiber


Starbucks Just Fired a Union Organizer for Allegedly Breaking a Sink

Starbucks fired the 20-year-old barista and organizer just days before employees begin voting on whether to unionize.

By Paul Blest




A PRO-UNION POSTER IS SEEN ON A LAMP POLE OUTSIDE A STARBUCKS LOCATION IN SEATTLE'S SEATTLE. (PHOTO: TOBY SCOTT/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Starbucks fired a barista and organizing committee member at a store in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Saturday after blaming her for purposely breaking a sink—just days before employees at the store begin voting on whether to unionize.

Sharon Gilman, 20, a student at nearby North Carolina State University, had worked at Starbucks since May 2020 and also trained other baristas at the store. Gilman told VICE News Sunday that she didn’t purposely break the three-compartment sink while she was washing dishes, and that she believes she was fired for being a pro-union employee who’d spoken to the press.

“My name was on the letter, my name was on the press release when we went public,” Gilman told VICE News. “I think this is Starbucks' way of making a statement of what could potentially happen if we were to vote yes for the union.”

The Raleigh store is one of more than 200 that have filed for a National Labor Relations Board election since the first store, in Buffalo, voted to unionize in December, according to a tracker compiled by labor outlet More Perfect Union. Workers at 15 of 16 stores where results have been counted since have voted for a union, including six in New York last week.

Workers at the Raleigh store will begin their vote on union representation later this week.

The incident in question happened on Feb. 13, just one day before Gilman and six other coworkers published an open letter to then-Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson stating their intent to form a union at the Starbucks store. That night, Gilman was washing dishes in the back of the house and was cleaning the floor drain using the spray head of the sink when the spray head snapped

“The sink just kind of fell off the wall onto me,” Gilman said. “I wasn't injured, but it did fall off and I was holding it up and there was water spraying.”

“I heard her scream when it happened, and could see how scared she was when the sink collapsed on her,” Elsa Englebrecht, another Starbucks worker and leader in the union campaign, said in a statement provided Sunday by the union.

Gilman said she and her co-workers took photos and video of the broken sink, which was later fixed. But more than a month later, on March 26, Gilman arrived at work to find her district manager wanting to talk to her, which she assumed was about the union.

The district manager instead told her she needed to write a statement about the sink, said a repairman had determined the sink couldn’t have been broken by accident, and that the store had video of when the sink broke. In an email, Starbucks spokesperson Reggie Borges told VICE News that “video footage confirmed [Gilman] forcefully pulled on the hose until it snapped.”

On Saturday, two weeks after she found out she was under investigation, Gilman was fired.

Gilman told VICE News that she didn’t break the sink on purpose. “Nothing memorable happened [that night]. I was not frustrated. I was not angry,” Gilman recalled of that night. She also said that she doesn’t believe she has the physical strength to break the sink in the manner she was accused of doing.

“I was in disbelief. I don’t work out. I’m not a freaking macho man,” Gilman told VICE News. “As a 20-year-old female, I didn't know that I had the strength to pull, to break a metal sink clear off the wall.”

Gilman did not admit to wrongdoing in the statement she wrote to her manager about the sink, but she said she couldn’t argue with the company’s interpretation of the video. Both the company and Gilman also confirmed that she originally said she was cleaning the back of the sink and then later said she was cleaning the floor drain; Gilman said she initially didn’t remember everything about the situation at the time she was asked.

“I've never been fired from a job before,” Gilman, who said she’d never been written up in the nearly two years she worked at the store, told VICE News. “I think I had a little bit of a panic attack when it happened. I didn't know what to do.”

Both Gilman and the company also said she was offered a chance to watch the video but declined.

“I suppose I just didn’t see the point in arguing back to them, because at the end of the day they’re corporate and I’m just a barista. They’ll see what they want to see,” Gilman said. “There are partners at my store that have broken company policies, but their names weren’t on the letter or in the press release, so they’re safe.”

“I’m 20 years old, a junior in college, overwhelmed with everything, and this just sprung on me a month and a half after the whole thing happened,” Gilman said. “I didn’t see the point in arguing with them because I’m replaceable. It’s sad but true.”

“At the end of the day, they can just hire a new person and go on with their lives,” she added.

Workers at this particular Starbucks store have complained of malfunctioning equipment in the past. In the letter sent to Johnson, workers raised a particular incident in December—which some employees at the store now refer to as “fume-a-geddon”—in which the plastic encasement of a store oven melted and the store’s lobby was filled with fumes and smoke.

“This incident led to one of our best shift supervisors leaving the company because she no longer felt supported,” the partners wrote in the February letter. “We will no longer tolerate an unsafe work environment.”

Alyssa Watkins, a shift supervisor and lead organizer at the store, told VICE News that after the ovens began to fail, she suffered from lightheadedness and a migraine that lasted for more than two days. Watkins filed a complaint with the North Carolina Department of Labor’s OSHA division on Dec. 6, but in February, the agency notified her that it closed the complaint after the store replaced the ovens.

Though this particular Raleigh store opened only two years ago, Gilman said the store often has trouble with espresso machines and card readers not working. “It’s not an abnormality for something like this to happen at our store,” she said.

Gilman is not the first organizer at a Starbucks store to be fired. Starbucks Workers United, the union representing Starbucks workers, told VICE News last week—before Gilman was fired—that it believes at least 16 Starbucks workers have been fired in retaliation for their union activity

“Our ballots are supposed to be mailed at the start of this week, and the incident they're firing her for happened two months ago,” Watkins said in a statement provided by the union. “It's very clear this is an effort to stop our unionization.”

Starbucks has repeatedly insisted it has not retaliated against organizers. “We have in no way, shape, or form retaliated against a partner because of their interest in unions or unionization efforts,” Borges told VICE News Friday. “There's been no situation where that action was taken strictly because that partner has an interest in unionization or has unionization ties."

But in a few similar cases the NLRB has heard so far, they’ve disagreed. In March, the agency issued a complaint against Starbucks after it fired Phoenix barista Alyssa Sanchez and suspended shift supervisor Laila Dalton, finding that the company retaliated against them. Dalton was fired April 4, the same day interim CEO Howard Schultz held a town hall with employees where he said unions were “assaulting” American companies like Starbucks.

In February, the company fired seven pro-union Memphis workers after they gave a local news crew an interview inside their store. Bloomberg News reported Friday that the NLRB found the firings were illegal and will file a complaint against the company unless it settles with the workers, which the NLRB confirmed in an email to VICE News.

Starbucks Workers United said in a release that they will file a charge with the NLRB against Starbucks over Gilman’s firing, and that a protest at the store is set for Monday morning.

“In terminating Sharon, Starbucks continues to treat us inhumanely, and displays a callous disregard for the right of Starbucks partners to unionize,” the union said in a Sunday press release.
Follow Paul Blest on Twitter.

Labor Officials Find Starbucks Illegally Fired 7 Union Organizers in Memphis
A pro-union poster is seen on a lamp pole outside Starbucks' Broadway and Denny location in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood on March 23, 2022.
TOBY SCOTT / SOPA IMAGES / LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES
PUBLISHED April 11, 2022

Labor board prosecutors have determined that Starbucks illegally fired seven union organizers who formerly worked in a unionizing store in Memphis, Tennessee, backing up the union’s claims that the terminations were clearly unlawful.

According to Bloomberg, the labor board is planning to issue a formal charge against the company for firing the workers unless the company offers a settlement. The workers — dubbed the “Memphis Seven” by the union — represented nearly the entire organizing committee at the store. Starbucks terminated them in February, alleging that they had violated a number of company policies, including the dress code and rules against entering the back room while off the clock.

At the time, Starbucks Workers United said that the firings were Starbucks’s “most blatant act of union-busting yet.” The company cited “policies that have never been enforced” to fire the workers, the union said, claiming in a complaint filed after the terminations that the company was illegally retaliating against the workers for organizing.

“I’m hoping Howard Schultz is a smart man and he settles, but from the union-busting tactics that have continued, I don’t think he’s going to,” Nikki Taylor, one of the fired workers, told Bloomberg. “We’re going to win either way.”

It is a violation of federal labor laws for employers to take actions to retaliate against pro-union workers, including termination, surveillance, or other forms of punishment. The consequence for illegally terminating a worker, which is incredibly common in union-busting campaigns, is usually very light — typically, the company simply has to rehire the worker and compensate them for lost pay, which is just the normal cost of operation for the employer.

Even after the labor board finds that an employer illegally retaliated against a worker, such cases can take months or years to litigate. Since fired workers would likely be ineligible to vote in upcoming union elections, firing pro-union workers often proves to be an efficient way for companies to union bust.

The National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is hoping to speed up the litigation process in order to bring more immediate relief to workers who have been on the receiving end of illegal retaliation, Bloomberg reported.

Meanwhile, the company has been escalating its anti-union campaign, firing numerous workers since the first clean sweep of the Memphis organizers. Over the weekend, the company fired Sharon Gilman, a pro-union worker at a store in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a student at North Carolina State University.

In February, a sink fell on Gilman while she was washing dishes, startling her. The company, which has lied about its reasons for terminating pro-union workers before, claimed that Gilman purposefully broke the sink — but Gilman and the union believe that she was fired for her support of the union.

As Howard Schultz retakes the helm at the company, Starbucks’s union-busting campaign may escalate even further. Schultz has been openly anti-union in recent events, and last week said in a town hall that companies like Starbucks are “being assaulted in many ways by the threat of unionization.”

In a recent Q&A with workers in Long Beach, California, Schultz snapped at a pro-union worker. When union organizer Madison Hall questioned Schultz’s claims that he isn’t anti-union, Schultz said, “If you hate Starbucks so much, why don’t you go somewhere else?”

The union has been incredibly successful so far, despite fierce opposition from the company. On Friday, Starbucks Workers United won union elections at all three stores in Ithaca, New York, making Ithaca the first town in which all Starbucks locations are unionized. Sixteen stores have now successfully unionized, and the union recently hit a milestone of 200 union filings across the country.


It's Organized Starbucks Workers vs. Oligarchs in the City of Buffalo

Buffalo's baristas give us hope. Buffalo's pols, meanwhile, are giving oligarchy our hard-earned tax dollars.


Starbucks employees celebrate after voting to unionize in Buffalo, New York on December 9, 2021. (Photo: Eleonore Sens/AFP via Getty Images)

SAM PIZZIGATI
April 10, 2022 by Inequality.org

Want an up-close look at what’s going right — at how much is still going wrong — in the ongoing struggle against America’s oligarchs? These days you can see both on the shores of Lake Erie. Just shuffle off, as a Great Depression-era standard once advised, to Buffalo.

And what should you do when you get there? Go find a Starbucks. With a little bit of luck, you could find yourself gazing at the most impactful Starbucks outlet anywhere.

Until this past December, Starbucks had no unions at any of its over 9,000 corporate-run U.S. locations. But workers in upstate New York changed all that. Rank-and-filers at a Starbucks in Buffalo stared down and beat back the extravagantly funded opposition of a $50-billion corporate colossus. Against all odds, they voted to unionize.

That stunning rank-and-file victory has inspired a “labor spring” that’s now sweeping across the United States. Starbucks Workers United has so far won 16 elections nationwide, and workers at 176 other Starbucks storefronts have officially filed for union recognition.

First Starbucks, then Amazon. Who knows where America's most inspiring grassroots union upsurge since the 1930s is going to surface next?

How are the Corporate Starbucks power suits reacting? They’re panicking. The company has even brought back retired chief exec Howard Schultz for his third stint as Starbucks CEO. In his nine-year second stint, the intensely anti-union Schultz pocketed $553 million.

But Schultz the third-timer is clearing feeling the new worker pressure. On April 4, his first day back on the job, the billionaire announced that he was halting the $20 billion in stock buybacks the company had planned for the next few years. Stock buybacks, notes CEO pay analyst Sarah Anderson, serve to artificially inflate the value of a company’s shares — and the value of executives’ stock-based pay.

Why is Howard Schultz making this abrupt about-face on stock buybacks his first order of business? His announcement of the change proclaimed that “suspending” buybacks “will allow us to invest more profit into our people and our stores — the only way to create long-term value for all stakeholders.”

Translation: We’ll pause our greed-grabs until we can crush the union-organizing momentum that workers in Buffalo have inspired. Then we’ll get back to enriching the already rich.

That strike you as too cynical an interpretation of the current Corporate Starbucks gameplan? Take a look at the latest press reports. With Schultz back in charge, notes one, firings of union activists “appear to have accelerated,” with several union leaders in Buffalo either “fired or forced out.”

But crushing the union momentum that Buffalo baristas have inspired won’t come as easily as Schultz seems to believe. The rank-and-file challenge to America’s oligarchy has already burst past the confines of Starbucks. Most notably, Amazon workers at a huge Staten Island warehouse have scored the first-ever union win within the Amazon empire. First Starbucks, then Amazon. Who knows where America’s most inspiring grassroots union upsurge since the 1930s is going to surface next?

America’s oligarchs, on the other hand, still wield enormous power at our every political level. Just how entrenched does our oligarchy remain? We now have a new and particularly outrageous example — from Buffalo, the second-largest city of the nation’s second-largest “Blue State.”

Local pols in Buffalo, with the help of the state of New York, are now handing the billionaire owner of Buffalo’s pro football franchise $850 million to build a spanking new state-of-the-art stadium. That $850 million ranks as the single largest taxpayer subsidy in the plutocratic history of American professional sports.

Buffalo, to be sure, already has a football stadium. This existing stadium, open since 1973, sits right across the street from the site where the new stadium will go and functions fine for watching football games. But the facility lacks the luxury boxes, high-end restaurants, and other goodies that make big bucks for the owners of pro teams that play in newer ballparks and arenas.

The current owner of the Buffalo Bills, the Florida-based Terry Pegula, has spent the last decade not-so-subtly hinting that he’ll move the Bills to Toronto if the good citizens of Buffalo don’t “fix” his stadium problem. In 2014 and 2018, this extortion ploy won Pegula $95 million from state taxpayers for stadium renovations. But the renovations haven’t produced, Pegula claims, enough new revenue.

The new subsidy deal, Pegula apparently feels, hits the new-revenue sweet spot. The deal certainly does hit taxpayers in their wallets. State taxpayers will be on the hook for at least $600 million. Erie County taxpayers will pony up another $250 million. The tab for Pegula will come to $350 million, but a healthy chunk of that will come out of the pockets of season ticket holders. They’ll have to fork over $1,000 for personal seat licenses if they want to continue to watch the Bills punt, pass, and tackle.

One point worth keeping in mind: Bills owner Pegula, who owes his fortune to fracking, holds a net worth now running well over $5 billion. He could afford to bankroll the entire new stadium himself.

New York governor Kathy Hochul, even so, is calling the financing deal for Pegula’s new stadium a “point of pride” for all New Yorkers. For Hochul’s husband Bill, the deal could also be a potential “point” of serious personal profit. Bill Hochul serves as senior vice president and general counsel for Delaware North, the company that currently runs the concessions at all the Bills’ home games.

“Quite a sweetheart deal,” charges Native American leader Matthew Pagels, the president of New York’s Seneca Nation, a community that’s just lost a battle with the state over revenue-sharing funds.

New York’s new subsidy for the billionaire Pegula, agrees Stanford economist Roger Noll, rates as a “terrible deal.” The governor’s claim that subsidizing the Bills will pay off big for the regional economy, Noll just told a New York business publication, holds no water. Years of research, he points out, show that new stadiums typically have next to no impact on city-wide income and employment.

“Concessionaires in the stadium sell more food,” Noll explains, “but restaurants elsewhere sell less.”

None of this research, of course, matters to oligarchs. Billionaires like Terry Pegula have the power to get what they want. They may not all have super yachts as large as their Russian oligarch counterparts. But their presence and power foster a systemic corruption just as destructive.

Starbucks workers in Buffalo have delivered America’s oligarchs an unexpectedly solid blow. But our oligarchy will only crumble when we all start hammering together.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.


SAM PIZZIGATI
Sam Pizzigati, veteran labor journalist and Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, edits Inequality.org. His recent books include: "The Case for a Maximum Wage" (2018) and "The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970"(2012).



The Problem With Starbucks Benefits, According To Employees

BY FELIX BEHR/APRIL 11, 2022 9:41 AM EDT

In recent weeks, multiple stories have come out about people who worked at Starbucks specifically for their IVF benefits. At the end of February, Autumn Lucy shared with Business Insider how the only way she could afford in vitro fertilization (IVF) was by picking up a part time job at Starbucks because most insurance companies do not cover IVF. True, she made no money from working, but she got the benefits package that allowed her to finally become a parent.

A similar story was shared with NBC news in late March. A couple couldn't have children without IVF and the only company in their area that offered benefits that covered this was Starbucks. So, Leah Russell applied, was hired, and learned that the benefits were structured in such a way that her actual paycheck could not cover the deductible.

Fortunately, her partner's salary could keep them afloat.

The point, though, is that even if one works full time, the amount one actually makes means that you often can't pay for the benefits you receive. The issue extends beyond IVF as well. Back in May, when Business Insider was covering how Starbucks was suffering the labor shortage, workers were already saying that even though they appreciated the benefits, that wasn't what they wanted: "Benefits do not make up for lackluster pay; free Spotify doesn't pay rent."

This is not to say that workers are demonizing the benefits Starbucks offers. "From tuition assistance to health care coverage," the Twitter account for Starbucks Workers United wrote back in August, "we appreciate the benefits Starbucks offers to partners. This doesn't mean things couldn't be better." Again, in the piece about staffing, another worker admitted "Our benefits are amazing, however in lieu of some of the frivolous ones such as Headspace, a meditation app, we would prefer higher wages and better staffing."

However, it is cheaper for Starbucks to offer free Spotify or Headspace because the subscription to these apps is less than what they'd have to pay in higher wages. It's analogous to the perk wars Corey Pein covered in Silicon Valley in which businesses will offer free steak suppers to those who worked late because the $20 spent on steak results in $200 made from their work. It is perhaps for this reason that even though Howard Schulz repeatedly states that there is no need for a representative between the workers and corporate, there has been a pattern of firing union agitators who if successful would push for more material benefits that a free subscription to Spotify, per Vice.

Starbucks taps new chief strategy officer amid growing union tension

Published April 11, 2022
Aneurin Canham-Clyne
Associate Editor
RESTURAUNT DIVE

Courtesy of Starbucks

Dive Brief:
Starbucks has hired Frank Britt, who previously served as CEO of workforce development firm Penn Foster, as chief strategy officer, a Starbucks spokesperson confirmed. Matthew Ryan previously served as CSO but has not worked at Starbucks since 2018.

Britt will be responsible for developing long-term strategies focusing on employees and customers, and joined the company in April, according to a bio on Starbucks' website.

The news of Britt's hire follows a dramatic week for Starbucks, which began with interim CEO Howard Schultz suspending stock buybacks and ended with Starbucks Workers United winning six elections in two days.

Britt's bio highlights his tenure at a workforce development firm, "helping provide educational access and training opportunities to front-line employees." That experience may prove useful at Starbucks, which is facing a nationwide union campaign reaching more than 200 stores. The coffee chain also posted a job listing on April 6 seeking a labor lawyer with experience handling unfair labor practice charges and strike contingency planning.

Starbucks is also contending with tension between its interim CEO and union supporters. Schultz attended a number of discussions with Starbucks employees over the last week, capped off by a meeting Friday where Schultz allegedly asked Madison Hall, a pro-union worker in Long Beach, California, "If you hate Starbucks so much, why don't you go somewhere else?"

On Monday, Schultz wrote a Starbucks blog post suggesting Starbucks Workers United union's goal is at odds with the company's values. In the post, Schultz writes that the company will become "the best version of Starbucks by co-creating our future directly as partners" and said employees "must not be distracted by the different vision being put forward" by pro-union workers.

"While not all the partners supporting unionization are colluding with outside union forces, the critical point is that I do not believe conflict, division and dissension ... benefits Starbucks or our partners," Schultz wrote.

The blog post includes a video of Schultz speaking with Starbucks employees at the listening session in Long Beach, California, but the clip does not include an exchange between Schultz and Hall. Hall has not responded to Restaurant Dive's requests for comment on this alleged exchange.

On Thursday and Friday, Starbucks Workers United won elections in six stores in New York, including every store in the city of Ithaca, in vote counts observed by Restaurant Dive. In a seventh vote count at a store in Overland Park, Kansas, the union led 6-1 in counted ballots, but 7 ballots were challenged. Workers United's Chicago and Midwest Regional Joint Board said those ballots were challenged by the company's lawyers, and said the union expected a victory once challenges were resolved.

In Overland Park, three pro-union workers were fired before the vote count, and union supporters launched a strike between April 7 and April 11 at the store. The pro-union workers allege they were retaliated against for organizing, but a Starbucks spokesperson said all three workers were terminated for disciplinary infractions not related to organizing.

A new strategy-focused executive could help Starbucks better navigate growing union pressure and ease shareholder fears. Last month, a contingent of of 73 shareholders wrote a letter to Starbucks urging it to change its approach to the union's growth to protect Starbucks' reputation. The shareholders represent over $3.4 trillion in assets, and they are especially concerned with complaints lodged by the National Labor Relations Board against Starbucks' anti-union response.






ANTISEMITISM HISTORICALLY AND CRITICALLY EXAMNINED

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.88974/mode/2up

 

INTERVIEWS

Craft Talk

IN DEFENSE OF WITCHES: THE LEGACY OF THE WITCH HUNTS AND WHY WOMEN ARE STILL ON TRIAL BY MONA CHOLLET, TRANSLATED BY SOPHIE R. LEWIS. NEW YORK: ST. MARTIN'S PRESS. 320 PAGES. $29.
Mona Chollet. Photo: © Mathieu Zazzo.

It is a misconception that witch hunts only occurred during the Middle Ages—many took place during the alleged lucidity of the Renaissance. Men exploited the climate of suspicion to dispose of women they didn’t want around. Whole family lines were wiped out. Nonconforming women were denounced, humiliated, and killed. Centuries later, this kind of persecution continues in insidious ways, underpinned by relentless misogyny and victim blaming. The same female figures are still considered dangerous: the single woman, the childless woman, the aging woman—all dismissed with fear, pity, or horror.

This is the premise of Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial (translated by Sophie R. Lewis): the indictment of modern women is tethered to archaic conceptions formulated in the fifteenth century. Swiss-French author Chollet has spent fifteen years as an editor at the monthly French newspaper Le Monde diplomatique, covering international politics and economics. In 2017, she took a sabbatical to write In Defense of Witches, drawing from writers, sociologists, philosophers, pop culture, and conversations with friends: prismatic ways by which to examine the witch as a timeless symbol of female insolence, independence, and perpetual subjugation. I recently met with Chollet, who discussed overturning the witch’s symbolism, the commodification of despised women, and her own reluctant feminism.

SARAH MOROZ: What was your starting point for this book?

MONA CHOLLET: I wanted to write about child-free women and aging women. I couldn’t decide between the two subjects, and neither was satisfying on its own. Then I thought, I could write a book about women who are not socially accepted. I realized that both these kinds of women are, in their own way, witches. Single women are perceived as a threat to society. I started to read about witch hunts, which really continue today. They don’t take the same form, but there is still a feeling of suspicion—single women worry people. It’s a relief when a woman is tied to a man. I went back and forth between the witch hunts of yesteryear and the circumstances of today, showing how certain “types” of women—definitions forged in the fifteenth century—are still considered dangerous. I wanted to write about all the situations in which the figure of the witch is embodied, maybe not even on a conscious level. A woman who’s aging, who’s single, who doesn’t have kids—she awakens something threatening, or is disapproved of. She’s not explicitly treated like a witch, but the past gave us an interpretive framework for this figure that still applies. We see an old woman and automatically reject her. I think there’s a historically informed dimension to that, and these definitions still shape the ways in which women are detested.

In her foreword to your book, Carmen Maria Machado writes, “like so many things capitalism touches, [the witch] is in danger of dissociating from her radical roots. What could have once gotten a woman killed is now available for purchase at Urban Outfitters.” This is something you allude to in your text, too: “witchcraft is also an aesthetic, a fashion . . . and a lucrative money-spinner.” How do you wrestle with this misappropriation of such a charged historical figure?

There’s an interesting movement of salvaging the figure of the witch—overturning the stigma and the pejorative associations. There’s this twisting of her into a powerful figure when, in fact, she was very vulnerable, targeted as weak and incapable of defending herself. She was tortured and killed. There was no victory at the time—witches were powerful only in the imaginations of the people persecuting them. She has been recast and valorized: that’s a good thing but, of course, there’s the spiral into commercialism. As women, we still need to be reminded of our strength, so it’s not surprising that there is a market for merchandise.

Did you hope to reach a particular audience with this work? And did the book’s reception in France surprise you?

I had no precise intention, but I was really struck by the fact that we haven’t granted the proper weight to this period. I think there’s an enormous heritage that explains a lot about the way women feel about womanhood and about how we’re treated. Doing this work helped me realize an ultimately simple thing: even when we talk about the single lady with her cat today, there’s an obvious trace of the witch with her familiar, the chat diabolique.

I was also writing about topics that were very personal. When you work on something close to who you are and your own needs, people are touched by that. Things in which you felt really alone suddenly become shared. As for the reception, based on events in bookstores, it was always young women who were attending and who told me the book had changed things for them.

Did you get a response from men too?

I know a few men who read it, but when I was doing book signings, men were asking me to sign the book for their girlfriend/sister/mother/daughter. They weren’t going to read it. It’s not new or surprising that men don’t read many books written by women—even less so when they’re focused on women-specific subjects—but it’s frustrating. Because men live with women, they should be interested in their experiences.

You draw clear parallels between an antiquated culture of suspicion and modern-day considerations of nonconforming women. Given this stubborn persistence of certain gendered attitudes, how do we change the narrative?

I’m almost fifty, and over the course of my adult life, the evolution has already been amazing. I grew up in a world where feminists were just a few strange women, always mad, and not to be trusted. Feminism was so unpopular. Now, it’s extraordinary the way young women behave—they don’t want to please men at all costs—and I admire that very much. I was raised to please men and be an “acceptable” woman, to not be angry, or too demanding. I see how young women push that, and push men to evolve and understand things about them. This social blackmail—that if you’re not a “nice” girl, you’ll never be loved—today, they don’t care! My hope is that men will be forced to evolve and be interested in women’s experiences. But it’s a big struggle. In France, I’m really struck by the violent reaction against this. Many men are resisting this evolution with all their strength, because they’ve been living in a world that is so comfortable. It’s really about including your experience of the other in your vision of the world. And many men are not willing to do that.

In the book, you admit to your own timidity with feminism. You call it poule mouillée feminism or the “‘scaredy-cat’ branch of feminism.” You write: “I stick my head above the parapet solely when I can do nothing else, when my convictions and aspirations force me to. I write books like this one to boost my courage.” Can you expand on this?

I was raised in the 1980s and it was such a conservative time. Women were not supposed to be bold. But I became a feminist anyway because I needed to. It’s mostly related to the fact that I wanted to write. And when you write, you become very threatening to men. You feel you are transgressing. As a young journalist, too, it was not easy to work at newspapers because men were always outnumbering us and were always in positions of power. There was a future where women weren’t welcome. And then there’s the fact that I never wanted to be a mother. So, I had no choice. I had to embrace feminism. Of course, it’s a good thing. I wanted to insist on the fact, though, that I was afraid, and I’m still afraid. I think it’s good to be honest about it. We can’t always be strong and confident. It’s not easy—it has a social cost. But not being a feminist also has a social cost.

Is there a specific threat underpinning the fear?

There are a lot of consequences: harassment online and even among family. It’s very violent to be called ugly or crazy or both, to be threatened with rape or murder. But maybe it’s also a fear of not being the “nice girl” that I was raised to be. There’s a great French philosopher, Manon Garcia, who wrote We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women’s Lives. She talks about submission and the advantages it has had—and that’s a good analysis. There are women who defend the social order as it is. For them, it’s a better bet. You saw what we call the tribune Deneuve? [In January 2018, one hundred high-profile French women, including actress Catherine Deneuve, denounced #MeToo as “going too far” in the French newspapers, including Le Monde and the left-leaning Libération.]

Yeah, ugh, I saw that.

Of course, I was sorry to read that. But I think it translates an attitude. It’s like what Andrea Dworkin wrote about right-wing women—some women chose to be on the side of patriarchy, because they feel they gain from it. They don’t want to fight all the time, to go against the tide.

If you were always a “nice girl,” who or what helped you transition into being less “nice”?

It was cumulative experience that brought me out of it. The injustice of being a woman moved me. I read Susan Faludi’s Backlash at a young age, right when it was published—it wowed me. I was helped along by reading.


Sarah Moroz is an arts and culture journalist who has written for The Cut, the New York TimesThe Guardian, and other publications.

BIOLOGY TWOFER

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The labour movement stands in solidarity with Ukraine

For more than six weeks now, LabourStart has been providing comprehensive coverage of the trade union response worldwide to the unprovoked and illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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An article I wrote last week may be of interest to many of you - In a divided world, the labour movement is united on Ukraine

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As you may recall, two years ago LabourStart hosted a global May Day event online.  It was a huge success, lasting 12 hours, and featuring labour leaders and activists from around the world.  Nearly 50,000 people participated in the event.

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Margaret Thatcher and the miners

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Why 1840?

Weekend Reader – This Storm is What We Call Progress: From 1840 to Today

January 14, 2021

By Yehuda Fogel

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PAUL KLEE ANGELUS NOVUS  
Coll IMJ, photo (c) IMJ


How do we find ourselves in a time of rapid change?

This is a question that haunted Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940), one of the tragic figures of Jewish modernity. Born in Germany, Benjamin was a close friend of the foundational scholar of Kabbalah, Gerschom Scholem. The two German Jews were both deeply invested in the question of tradition, revelation, and identity, albeit in very different ways. Their friendship is famous and fruitful; their epistolary correspondence is one of the most philosophically intriguing and perplexing correspondences we have. Benjamin died by his own hand, fleeing the Nazis at the border of Spain. Hannah Arendt and Theodore Adorno, major figures in 20th century thought, championed Benjamin’s work after his passing, paying tribute to their lost friend.

Scholem was mainly a scholar of Kabbalah and mysticism (not necessarily the same, as readers of his know!), and Benjamin a less explicitly Jewishly oriented scholar, who thought about the world more broadly. Robert Alter, in his masterful reading of their work, points out that Benjamin and Scholem operate through opposing frameworks. Scholem systematized fragments, and Benjamin fragmentized systems.

“Scholem devoted his life to expounding a body of lore that was intrinsically fragmentary, or at the very least anti-systematic. The power of his work is his success in conceptually defining a system from this welter of literary scraps, though some of his critics have accused him of imposing system where it may not exist. Benjamin’s aim was the converse: to preserve the fragmentariness of his materials through the mobility of montage, combining constant quotation with aphoristic observation, and thus allowing systematic thought to emerge from juxtaposition itself. Perhaps the task was in the end undoable.”

Both of these urges speak to us today. Our world is marked by a deep fragmentation, an alienation that manifests theologically, sociologically, and psychologically. In our age of screens and solitude, it is far too easy to feel removed, afar, outside of the system. Theologically, we often feel alienated from God. Sociologically, we feel alienated from our society or surroundings. Psychologically, we feel alienated from ourselves. We strive to find systems in the fragments of our lives, integrating the entirety of our lives into a holistic totality. Sometimes it works.

This isn’t to blame the screens for our alienation – it is as much an outgrowth of our attempt at holding on to ourselves in a rapidly changing world. The inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has deemed the “Law of Accelerating Returns,” that the rate of growth of a variety of systems – including technology – progresses at an exponential rate with time. Basically, this means that the world changes at a faster pace as time goes on. Major paradigm shifts in science have led to the time between generations shortening, as children reared in the Palm Pilot generation barely recognize those of the Snapchat generation. How does humanity find itself in a world of rapid change?

The Vilna Gaon, R. Elijah of Vilna, foresaw this idea of the rate of change speeding up in a commentary about an enigmatic Talmudic passage about the Messianic process. A verse in Yeshaya (60:22) seems paradoxical, as God indicates that the Messianic age will come both “in its time,” as well as when God “hastens it.” Here’s what the Talmud (Sanhedrin 98a) says:

אמר רבי אלכסנדרי רבי יהושע בן לוי רמי כתיב (ישעיהו ס, כב) בעתה וכתיב אחישנה זכו אחישנה לא זכו בעתה

Rabbi Alexandri says: Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi raises a contradiction in a verse addressing God’s commitment to redeem the Jewish people. In the verse: “I the Lord in its time I will hasten it” (Isaiah 60:22), it is written: “In its time,” indicating that there is a designated time for the redemption, and it is written: “I will hasten it,” indicating that there is no set time for the redemption.

Dealing with this contradiction, one sage offers that “if they merit, “I will hasten it,” and if they do not merit, it will come “in its time.” The Vilna Gaon turns this passage on its head, suggesting that there will be a time in which the very sense of time unfolds, our very rate of change speeds up so that is paradoxically both “in its time” and “hastened.” This is the time we live in – a storm of rapid change, as time feels like it speeds up around us. How do we find ourselves in this storm of progress?

One place to turn to is 1840. A year of intense messianic expectations for some, 1840 marked the beginning of an efflorescence of scientific and mystical thought, and mirrors many of the same dynamics of our world today. Scientific advances made international communication and connection newly possible, the rate of change and progress rapidly exploded. A curious vision of the Zohar sees the year 1840 as a year in which the ‘upper waters’ and ‘lower waters’ would both erupt, which some saw as a statement about the advances in science (lower waters) and mysticism (upper waters). The Vilna Gaon and the Leshem, two very different Kabbalistically-minded thinkers, both saw 1840, or 5600, as a year marked by profound possibility.

As David Bashevkin, in his article in Tablet Magazine on this topic, points out that the Hassidic Rabbi of Izhbitz saw the possibilities of profound spiritual change as rooted in the changes in technology:

Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner, for example, started his Hasidic court, the Hasidut of Izhbitz, in 1840, seeing the moment of turmoil and upheaval as a joyous rapture in which “the words of Torah can become more accessible and attainable to the minds of mankind.”

Izhbitz modeled a rare fusion of modern sensibilities with traditional Hasidic sensitivities, meeting the uncertainties brought about by the year’s technological, political, and economic changes with optimism and resilience. Where others saw a period where traditional religion was simply obsolete and others just saw anxiety over its demise, Rabbi Leiner and others saw opportunity: Previous generations, they argued, were pressed by physical hardships to think of little more than survival. Now that technology has freed so much of our time and our space, it was time to reconsider the essential questions of humanity.

Perhaps we need not be fatalistic or dystopian about the fears and anxieties of our age. Perhaps this storm of progress marks a time of powerful possibility, our anxieties reflecting a new vulnerability that we feel as our past modes of living are now changing.

God communicates this same paradox. On the one hand: “I, God, am unchanged.” (Malakhi, 3:6.) On the other, “I will be that which I will be.” (Shemot 3:14). Perhaps God is unchanged in constant change, static in His dynamic quality. Like our time – changing, yet unchanged.

Walter Benjamin was particularly obsessed with a monoprint by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee called Angelus Novelus, which now resides in the Israel Museum, after stints with Adorno and Scholem. The painting has a complicated history, in what itself makes for a powerful meta-commentary on the ideas of history. Benjamin’s idea of the ‘angel of history’ was inspired by Angelus Novelus, and it refers to this sense that humanity experiences amidst the constant change of our world. We look towards the past, towards our roots, and are blown ever more towards the future. Read his fascinating words:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Our world is changing, for better and for worse. We want to find truth and meaning in the possibilities of today, facing the storm of progress with hope and curiosity, instead of fear and anxiety. We want to learn Torah in the gaps that we feel in our lives, and use this time for what it can be. We rely on tradition in times of rapid change, and we sanctify the old and the new together. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Kook said this:

הישן יתחדש

והחדש יתקדש

The old shall be made new

And the new shall be made holy

This is the spirit that 18Forty attempts to embody. We hope to confront some of those challenges and present a new vision for the value of religion in the modern age. We hope to look at the many domains of alienation – theological, sociological, psychological – and approach the pressing questions of today in a way that provides meaning and comfort. We call ourselves 18Forty to remember that humanity has undergone rapid change before and emerged for the better. If we ask the right questions, maybe we can too.

 Polemical encounters esoteric discourse and its others / edited by Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad.

Related titles
Available in other form: Link to related record 
Abstract
In its historical development from late antiquity to the present, western esotericism has repeatedly been the issue of polemical discourse. This volume engages the polemical structures that underlie both the identities within and the controversy about esoteric currents in European history. From Jewish and Christian kabbalah through heretical discourse and interconfessional polemics in early modernity to the legitimization of esoteric identity in modern culture, the 12 chapters, accompanied by an editors’ introduction, provide a cornucopia of relevant cases that are interpreted in a framework of polemical discourse and ‘Othering’. This volume sheds new light on the ultimately polemical structure of western esotericism and thus opens new vistas for further research into esoteric discourse.
Contents
Preliminary Material / O. Hammer and C.K.M. Von Stuckrad -- Introduction. Western Esotericism And Polemics -- Christian Kabbalah And Anti-Jewish Polemics: Pico In Context / Kocku Von Stuckrad -- Christian Orthodoxy And Jewish Kabbalah: Russian Mystics In The Search For Perennial Wisdom / Konstantin Burmistrov -- Adorno’S Kabbalah: Some Preliminary Observations / Steven M. Wasserstrom -- \'Authorized Guardians\': The Polemics Of Academic Scholars Of Jewish Mysticism Against Kabbalah Practitioners / Boaz Huss -- The Trouble With Images: Anti-Image Polemics And Western Esotericism / Wouter J. Hanegraaff -- Between Heresy And Orthodoxy: Alchemy And Piety In Late Sixteenth-Century Germany / Hanns-Peter Neumann -- Between Theosophy And Orthodox Christianity: Johann Salomo Semler’S Hermetic Religion / Peter Hanns Reill -- The Masonic Necromancer: Shifting Identities In The Lives Of Johann Georg Schrepfer / Renko Geffarth -- René Guénon And The Traditionalist Polemic / Brannon Ingram -- Contested Diviners: Verbal Battles Between Dowsers And Skeptics / Olav Hammer -- Seeking Ancient Wisdom In The New Age: New Age And Neognostic Commentaries On The Gospel Of Thomas / Dylan Burns -- United In Diversity, Divided From Within: The Dynamics Of Legitimation In Contemporary Witchcraft / Titus Hjelm -- Notes On Contributors / O. Hammer and C.K.M. Von Stuckrad -- Index / O. Hammer and C.K.M. Von Stuckrad.
Publisher
Leiden ; Boston : Brill
Creation Date
2007