Starbucks baristas behind union drive describe 'super stressful' workplace

Max Zahn 

·Reporter

Wed, 2 February 2022, 

A union drive at Starbucks (SBUX) stores nationwide that began weeks ago at a store in Buffalo, New York has spread to 54 locations in 19 states, organizers said this week. Fifteen of those stores filed for union elections on Monday, demonstrating the growing momentum behind the movement.

The explosion of labor activity at one of the country’s largest food and beverage chains defies the decades-long decline of unionization in the U.S., where just 6.1% of private sector employees and 3.1% of food service workers belong to a union, Department of Labor data shows. It raises the question of why long-dormant employees at a company known for liberal management have begun to revolt.

Employees have drawn strength from pandemic-related labor shortages that have bolstered worker leverage across the economy but especially in the restaurant industry. Plus, workers have responded to the advocacy taken up by their colleagues, as a victory among one group of employees emboldens others.

But less attention has been paid to another crucial factor: the job itself. Yahoo Finance spoke with four current Starbucks employees involved in union campaigns who criticized a stressful workplace where they say COVID-related staffing shortages and exposure risks have resulted in heavier workloads, delayed breaks, and frustrations over a lack of personal protective equipment.

'A constrained labor environment'

The workers also stressed their disappointment in seeing the Seattle-based coffee giant — which opposes the union campaign — fall short of its reputation as a worker-friendly corporate bastion of liberal values.

“Before I started the job, I had a grand view of Starbucks — it was one of my dream jobs,” says Nikki Taylor, a shift supervisor at a Starbucks in Memphis, Tennessee who has worked at the company for two years. “Once you get inside and see what you’re dealing with and what it’s giving you, it’s not.”

James Skretta at Starbucks Workers United office in Buffalo, New York, U.S., December 7, 2021. REUTERS/Lindsay DeDario

During the two busiest periods of the day, in the morning and late afternoon, the store usually staffs eight or nine people to handle the rush of orders, Taylor said. During the pandemic, the store has often operated during those peaks with just four or five employees, she said. (The company allows workers to suspend mobile or in-store orders when a location is understaffed, Starbucks Spokesperson Reggie Borges told Yahoo Finance.)

Plus, she has worked with constant fear of contracting COVID and bringing it home to her 8-year-old daughter, she said, saying those anxieties became reality three weeks ago when Taylor tested positive for the virus. She recounted one instance in which a customer entered the store and told her he was infected with the virus.

“It’s super stressful,” Taylor says.

On an earnings call on Tuesday, Starbucks acknowledged the workplace disruption imposed by the labor shortage. Chief Operations Officer John Culver described elevated turnover and difficulty staffing stores over the course of the pandemic. “It’s no secret we’re in a constrained labor environment,” Culver said.

In October, the company raised its starting wage at U.S. stores to $15 per hour from a prior rate of $12 per hour. The move brought the average wage for U.S. hourly employees to almost $17 per hour.

Starbucks has also made recent changes to COVID-19 policies. Last week, the company reversed a plan that would have required employees to get vaccinated or subject themselves to weekly testing.

A week before that, the company advised all employees to wear company-provided paper masks instead of cloth masks. But workers told Yahoo Finance they’re frustrated that the company has not provided the more protective N95 or KN95 masks. The company told Bloomberg it had chosen not to do so due to supply constraints. Employees can avail themselves of two five-day paid leave periods if they believe they've been exposed to COVID-19, Borges said.

In response to a request for comment, Starbucks sent a letter posted online by Executive Vice President, President North America Rossann Williams in December after the initial union victory at a store in Buffalo.

A portion of the letter says: "From the beginning, we’ve been clear in our belief that we do not want a union between us as partners, and that conviction has not changed. However, we have also said that we respect the legal process. This means we will bargain in good faith with the union that represents partners in the one Buffalo store that voted in favor of union representation. Our hope is that union representatives also come to the table with mutual good faith, respect and positive intent."

Full-time and part-time employees at Starbucks receive health care benefits, access to a 401(k) retirement plan, paid vacation days, parental leave, and the opportunity to receive full tuition payment for a bachelor's degree through Arizona State University’s online degree programs — though eligibility for such benefits depends on a minimum number of hours worked.

'We have to do everything'

In addition to its rapid pace and COVID risks, a job at Starbucks requires an under-appreciated array of skills and tasks, said Len Harris, a shift supervisor at a store near Boulder, Colorado. She contrasted the job of a Starbucks employee with that of a traditional restaurant worker responsible for a single task, like serving or dishwashing.

“We have to do everything,” Harris said. “We have to learn how to make drinks, clean dishes, have to learn how to take orders, and work an oven. We have to wear all the hats.”

“Not only do we have to get out orders quickly but with a smile,” she adds.

A man wearing a protective face mask is seen outside a Starbucks Coffee shop in Manchester, following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), Manchester, Britain, May 14, 2020. REUTERS/Phil Noble

Catherine Creighton, Director of the Cornell University Industrial Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab who spoke with workers behind the initial Starbucks union drive in that city, said the confluence of a labor shortage, infuriating profits taken in by the company amid the pandemic, and an increasingly stressful work environment amounted to a “perfect storm” for labor strife.

“COVID has been a huge disruption — people are hitting the pause button and saying, ‘What’s going on? I have to think about things. This isn’t right.’”

To be sure, all of the workers who spoke with Yahoo Finance said they enjoyed parts of the job at Starbucks, especially the relationships they’ve formed with coworkers and regular customers. “I love working at Starbucks,” says Kylah Clay, a barista at a store in Boston, Massachusetts. “In the early morning, getting to chat with customers and help them start their day in a positive way — to me, it’s very rewarding.”

The union drive remains confined to a small fraction of the company’s nearly 9,000 stores nationwide run by Starbucks.

But workers said a union would grant them a say in improving the day-to-day work environment, and allow them to advocate for better pay and benefits. They told Yahoo Finance that they consider the company's treatment of employees a hypocritical departure from its commitment to liberal values.

The company's record on that score includes former CEO Howard Schultz's defense of same-sex marriage in 2013, a racial justice effort involving messages on customer cups a couple years later, and a vow to hire 10,000 refugees.

In June 2020, in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, the company allowed workers to wear Black Lives Matter shirts and pins, a reversal of a policy that had banned them from worker attire.

“Starbucks parades around as pro-LGBTQ rights and outspoken about the Black Lives Matter movement,” says Joseph Nappi, a barista at a store in Cleveland, Ohio. “It can't be pro-LGBTQ and pro-BLM but be anti-union and anti-labor. I don’t think you can reconcile those.”

Creighton, the director of the Cornell University IRL Buffalo Co-Lab, said the small, well-educated workforce at Starbucks stores makes the workplace vulnerable to a union drive. But she wondered whether the trend could extend to other industries.

“Now the next question is: Is it going to tsunami across the economy or just at Starbucks?” Creighton asks.

Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find him on twitter @MaxZahn_.

Starbucks CEO gives a nod to barista labor push: ‘We always listen to our partners'

Brooke DiPalma
·Reporter, Booking Producer
Wed, 2 February 2022, 12:40 pm·3 min read

Starbucks' (SBUX) CEO Kevin Johnson is keeping a close eye on unionization efforts made by a growing number of the coffee giant's store workers.

The small segment of cafe employees, which Starbucks calls "partners," have been making big waves recently after two Buffalo, N.Y.-based stores led an organized labor push. With stores in other cities poised to have votes of their own, Johnson emphasized there are only "two company-operated stores that are certified unions" so far.

In a phone interview with Yahoo Finance after Starbucks' fiscal first-quarter earnings results, he weighed in on the movement, which has now spread to 54 stores across 19 states. This comes only weeks after the after one Buffalo store voted to create the coffee giant's first ever union back in December, and three more Buffalo stores are holding votes on February 23rd.

"There's roughly 50...that have filed petitions to the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] to go through the process to see if partners in those stores want to vote for a union," Johnson said. "Those have not occurred yet and I think that's an important thing just to point out," he added.

The company has publicly resisted the efforts, but vowed to work to address worker concerns. The dozens of stores pushing for a union vote, however, are a small fraction of the 9,900 locations run by Starbucks in North America alone.

For those locations where employees do vote to unionize, Johnson says they are following the protocols to have this change rollover smoothly, "We're following the NLRB process and we respect that process and we'll continue to do that," he told Yahoo Finance.

Starbucks Barista Gianna Reeve, part of the organizing committee in Buffalo, New York, speaks in support of workers at Seattle Starbucks locations that announced plans to unionize, during a rally at Cal Anderson Park in Seattle, Washington on January 25, 2022. - They are joining a third Seattle Starbucks location that announced plans to unionize last month.

 (Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) 

In the phone call, Kevin Johnson did acknowledge the unions are not completely new to the coffee chain, but the company has experience with its channel-licensed partners.

"We have a few thousand stores in our channel-licensed partners, like many of the big grocery channels...that have a Starbucks within their grocery store that are unionized, so we've got experience with our licensed partners on how they run unionized stores," he added.

U.S. partners include stores like Kroger (KR), Target (TGT), Safeway and Albertsons (ACI). Johnson emphasized that the labor push is not making on a difference on how his business operates.

Starbucks has poured $1 billion of investment into boosting wages for workers. This announcement meant that the average pay for all Starbucks' U.S. hourly partners is nearly $17 per an hour, with average hourly rates ranging between $15 to $23.

All of which raises a fear that higher pay may start to take a toll on the bottom line, a risk Wall Street analysts have cited in an environment of increasing wage inflation.

"We had some of the investments started in October...we had another wage increase in January, we got some more coming this summer, so at the end of the day, we always listen to our partners, we always will, whether they're a union store or not," Johnson insisted.

PRIVATIZATION PUTSCH

Philippine Congress allows full foreign ownership in telco, rail

BEFORE THE ELECTION

Wed, 2 February 2022,

A passenger plane flies past a Globe Telecoms tower in Pateros, Metro Manila, Philippines, August 2, 2018. Picture taken August 2, 2018.

 REUTERS/Erik De Castro

By Andreo Calonzo and Cecilia Yap

The Philippine Congress approved a bill allowing full foreign ownership of telecommunications and railways services, opening up one of the world’s most restrictive economies.

The House of Representatives and the Senate ratified Wednesday night a reconciled bill amending the 85-year-old law that caps foreign ownership of public utilities to 40%. The measure will now be up for President Rodrigo Duterte’s approval into law.

Senator Grace Poe, the bill’s sponsor, said in a statement Wednesday that all industries will be liberalized except electricity distribution, petroleum pipeline transmission, water distribution, seaports and public utility vehicles. Lawmakers already earlier agreed in their versions of the bill that telecommunications, shipping and railways should be further opened to foreign investors.

The Philippines is among the world’s most restrictive economies to foreign direct investment, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “The Philippines must act quickly in terms of carrying out economic reforms that further trade and investment activities,” European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines President Lars Wittig said before the bill’s passage.

Foreign state-owned enterprises, however, are barred from owning capital in any public utility or critical infrastructure in the Philippines, Poe said.

© 2022 Bloomberg L.P.

THIRD WORLD USA

'We have critical nursing shortages across the country,' doctor warns

Adriana Belmonte

·Senior Editor

Thu, 3 February 2022

The U.S. nursing industry, already strained by the ongoing pandemic, is struggling with staffing as the country continues to deal with a wave of hospitalizations and deaths caused by the Omicron version of the coronavirus.

“I still think we have critical nursing shortages across the country,” Dr. Elizabeth Clayborne, an emergency physician at the University of Maryland Capital Region Medical Center, said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “And that is something that needs to be addressed not just in Maryland, but in several states. And I see that being a problem for several months to come.”

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan implemented drive-through COVID testing, which helped lessen the number of patients going to emergency departments to get tested. But actions like these can only do so much for an industry that still doesn't have enough nurses to go around.

“The main issue that we’re battling in my facility and several hospitals across the country is just a staffing shortage,” Clayborne said. “My family and I actually just recently recovered from COVID. So it’s not an uncommon story that a lot of our facilities that are trying to take care of COVID patients are struggling because they do not have the staff to deal with the numbers that are still coming in.”

And while hospitalizations related to COVID-19 are ebbing nationally, states — especially those with lower-than-average vaccination rates — saw major surges in hospitalizations during the winter. ICUs are currently at 30% or less capacity in all but five states.

For hospitals lacking the staff and ICU capacity to treat the influx of patients, the labor crunch can have dire consequences for all kinds of patients.

"For every additional patient a nurse cares for, a patient's risk of dying increases by as much as 7%," a New Jersey-based nurse, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told Yahoo Finance. "The average person may not think this is important, but when you have an unexpected emergency and end up in the ER, how many other patients do you want your nurse to have? 2 or 6?"

In September 2021, the American Nurses Association penned a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra calling on the administration to "declare a national nurse staffing crisis and take immediate steps to develop and implement both short- and long-term solutions."

A study by the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences noted that "1.2 million new registered nurses (RNs) will be needed by 2030 to address the current shortage." The shortage, which was brewing prior to the pandemic, involved factors including rising demand driven by aging Baby Boomers, retirement among nurses, lack of staff in certain areas of the country, hospital conditions, burnout, and more.

“This isn’t the first time we’ve had a nursing shortage in the U.S.,” Donna Havens, Connelly Endowed dean and professor at the M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing at Villanova University, told Yahoo Finance. “It seems to be cyclical, maybe every 8-10 years. So yet again, we’re facing a major nursing shortage but a real issue I believe might be COVID because the nurses are getting sick. They’re retiring anyhow, but they’re sick. They don’t want to do this anymore. They’re feeling they’re too old to do this.”

The number of registered nurses available by state as of May 2021. (Map: University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences)

'Shortage of nurses willing to work in unsafe conditions'

Zenei Cortez, a nurse based out of California and president of National Nurses United, described the situation as a staffing crisis and placed the responsibility on hospitals.

“There is not a shortage crisis but there is a staffing crisis,” Cortez told Yahoo Finance. “There was no real serious nursing staffing crisis before COVID-19, but as a hospital industry, it unfortunately created a staffing crisis, which isn’t new and it has existed for many decades. I would say what they call a shortage of nurses is a shortage of nurses willing to work in unsafe working conditions.”

Recent guidance from the CDC has only worsened the problem. According to new guidelines, health care workers who are fully vaccinated and test positive can return to the workplace if they’re asymptomatic or have had mild/moderate symptoms for 5 days with or without a negative test. Though the likely intention was to help with staffing issues, it was met with poor reception from health care workers worried about working in potentially dangerous environments.

The NJ-based nurse lambasted the CDC policy as "very unwise."

CDC guidelines for health care workers returning to work. (Chart: CDC)

"Infection control policies will not even let nurses drink water at their desk during their 12-hour shift, but it's okay for a co-worker to be COVID-positive and eat next to me in the break room?" the nurse said. "There is no separate break room for those who are COVID-positive. Should these nurses be not allowed to eat or drink on their 12-hour shift? I find it extremely dangerous and, frankly, offensive that the Center for Disease Control cares so little about controlling the spread of COVID in health care workers."

Cortez described the current circumstances with the Omicron variant as similar to when the pandemic first hit the U.S. in early 2020 when hospitals were short on PPE and staff found that there weren't enough of them to go around to help their patients.

“We were fighting for staffing," she said. "We were fighting for a lot just to stay alive in the workplace and keep our patients safe. So it’s somewhat like the same thing is happening again."

During the first wave of the virus, health care workers across the country found themselves in less than desired work settings. PPE was in short supply, meaning that some hospital workers had to come up with their own solutions, like using trash bags as makeshift protective wear.

“I hate to use the word ‘danger,’ but it’s like reliving what it was like at the beginning of the pandemic,” Cortez said. “Unfortunately, the hospital industry did not prepare. They were just using I would say bandaid solutions, not really planning ahead. So it’s really distressing that they would do this and not really prepare for what’s coming up ahead.”

Theresa Ogunjimi, a registered nurse, rests for a moment inside a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) unit at United Memorial Medical Center, as the United States nears 300,000 COVID-19 deaths, in Houston, Texas, U.S., December 12, 2020. REUTERS/Callaghan O'Hare

Staffing ratios aren't federally mandated, but National Nurses United has lobbied for that to change. The union has proposed legislation that would keep the ratio at one nurse for every two patients in an ICU and one nurse for every three patients in an emergency room.

"Hospitals are unwilling to give raises to nurses to retain them and instead hire travel nurses to fill short-term contracts," the NJ-based nurse said. "However, a travel nurse will never be able to provide the same level of care that a staff nurse that knows the hospital and providers can. As a staff nurse, it is extremely disheartening to work next to someone who is doing the exact same job as you but making 3 to 4 times as much as you. And you as the staff nurse have to train the travel nurse and orient them to the facility, as well as help them on a day-to-day basis because they do not know the facility as well as you do. Hospital administrators are putting profits before patient safety, and patients will suffer as a result."

The nurse added that "the only thing keeping most staff nurses at their jobs is that they are close to retirement or they do not yet have enough experience to become a travel nurse. This means that the hospital spends thousands of dollars training new graduate nurses just to lose them to travel contracts as soon as that nurse has enough experience to leave. It makes no fiscal sense, and it is a huge burden on the staff nurses to constantly be training new nurses just to have them leave, whether they be new grads or travelers."

Amy Downer, an operating room nurse at Maine Medical Center joins fellow nurses to demand increased protections in their work environments. (Photo by Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

'You've got an aging nursing workforce'

Demographics of the workforce are also an important factor.

As many nurses age out of the industry, some become the patients themselves, meaning they are even more people that need to be taken care of.

“Nurses are getting older,” Havens, the nursing professor at Villanova, told Yahoo Finance. “I think the stats tell us that the average nurse taking care of patients in a hospital is about 50 years of age. And you think about the work that they do — the lifting, the pulling the weekends, the nights, the triple shifts. You’ve got an aging nursing workforce, many of whom had planned on retiring now when COVID hit.”

According to the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences, "between 2000 and 2018, the average age of employed registered nurses increased from 42.7 to 47.9 years old. And nearly half (47.5%) of all RNs are now over the age of 50."

There are reasons for optimism in addressing the shortage: Havens said that in her program that she oversees, there’s “overwhelming interest” in entering nursing.

“We are seeing more applicants than we ever have in the history of the College of Nursing at Villanova,” she said. “We had 1,800 applicants last year for 100 spots. We’re seeing people really want to be nurses — not just those right out of high school but those who already hold a degree in another field are coming back to become nurses.”

Sauk Valley Community College nursing students work on a mannequin patient as SVCC Dean of Health Christy Vincent talks about the school's nursing program with First Lady Jill Biden during a tour of the school in Dixon, Illinois, on April 19, 2021. (Photo by Susan Walsh / POOL / AFP)

Unfortunately, though, there is also a shortage of nursing faculty to teach this growing field of prospective nurses as many are aging out as well.

“Last year, I believe the number was 80,000 qualified applicants who wanted to be nurses were turned away because universities across the country didn’t have enough faculty to admit them and teach them,” Havens said. “The faculty are getting older.”

She stressed that the government needs to step in to help programs incentivize more people entering the educational field of nursing, like paying faculty more, helping to cover the cost of education, enhance laboratories, and even pay professors to teach in the clinical setting.

“What research has told us all over the years is the way you organize nurses in an organization to deliver care is really important,” Havens said.

Adriana Belmonte is a reporter and editor covering politics and health care policy for Yahoo Finance. You can follow her on Twitter @adrianambells and reach her at adriana@yahoofinance.com.

Regulators can’t touch Facebook—but the market can

Rick Newman
·Senior Columnist
Thu, 3 February 2022,

A lot of people want to punish Facebook (FB): For its domination of social media, its relentless data mining, its reluctance or maybe refusal to police disinformation. Politicians on both the left and the right would dismantle the social-media giant, if they could.

Facebook and its parent company, Meta, have been essentially impervious to such external pressure. Market forces, however, may now accomplish what legal authorities can’t: Punishing Facebook for a business model that relies heavily on the exploitation of users’ personal data.

Meta stock plunged by 27% on February 3, the biggest one-day drop since Facebook went public in 2012. The selloff followed a quarterly earnings disappointment, which, up till now, has been foreign to Facebook. But the real bombshell was the company’s acknowledgment that new efforts by Apple (AAPL) to protect user privacy made it harder for Facebook to target ads to those Apple customers, a new challenge that could cost Facebook more than $10 billion per year.

As Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley explains, Apple launched a new privacy feature for its mobile devices last year that changed the way apps can track what users do with their iPhones and iPads. Before the change, apps such as Facebook could automatically track your activity, allowing them to know your likes and interests and target ads accordingly. Users could disable that feature on their devices, but most didn’t.

Apple has made privacy protection a distinguishing feature of its products, and the change means app tracking is now off by default on Apple’s newest operating system. If there’s anybody out there who really wants Facebook’s micro-targeted ads, they can change their settings so Facebook can track what they do. But an unstated part of Facebook’s entire business model is that it doesn’t ask permission to track and vacuum up data, because if it did, too many people would say no.

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Facebook and other app developers protested and even threatened legal action, but Apple stood firm. The net result has now shown up in Facebook’s bottom line: The company can’t target ads as effectively as it wants to the estimated 1 billion people worldwide who use an iPhone. That means companies that advertise on Facebook will get weaker results, lowering Facebook’s ad rates and driving some of them to advertise instead on Google or other platforms where they feel they can get more bang for the buck.

Advertising dynamo

Facebook has been a digital advertising dynamo for more than a decade, locking in gargantuan profits as an early mover in the race to monetize the personal information of its nearly 3 billion worldwide users, including those on Instagram, which Meta also owns. Facebook didn’t invent the model, but it perfected the strategy of offering users a free service in exchange for data that was worth a fortune when sliced and diced for advertising purposes.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pauses while speaking as he testifies before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 10, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

The market has been shifting, however, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—who has stoutly rebuffed nearly every effort to rein in his company’s business model—may be losing his wizard’s touch. Facebook has endured a barrage of bad publicity since it became clear a low-budget Russian disinformation campaign used Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign to smear Democrat Hillary Clinton, in an effort to help elect Republican Donald Trump. The Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that Facebook violated its own rules on data dissemination to allow a research firm working for the 2016 Trump campaign to target political ads at users based on info that was supposed to remain private.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley want to break up Facebook, as do many other lawmakers. The Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from 48 states are pursuing legal action against Facebook, claiming it’s a monopoly that ought to be subject to antitrust measures. There have been numerous hearings during recent years where Zuckerberg and other senior Facebookers have parried with interrogators and insisted that no, Facebook is not evil.

The law has largely been on Facebook’s side. But public opinion no longer is, and that, in turn, is aligning market forces against Facebook for what may be the first time since Zuckerberg and some fellow geeks dreamed up the scheme at Harvard in the early 2000s. In the Interbrand global rankings, Facebook ranked No. 8 among global brands in 2017. That was its high-water mark. By 2021, Facebook had fallen to 15. That probably understates the company’s problem, however, since those types of rankings involve name-recognition as much as quality perception.

Consumers worldwide have become markedly more concerned about data privacy as they’ve become more aware of the ways companies gather information on them and use it to make money. Europe leads in privacy protection, but the United States may be catching up. A recent Morning Consult poll found that 56% of registered voters support a federal law that would prohibit social media companies from targeting ads based on personal data—which is the core of Facebook’s business model. Only 23% said they would oppose such a law, while 21% said they weren’t sure.

Private sector

Congress doesn’t seem likely to pass such a law any time soon, but this is where the private sector comes in. Apple has clearly caught on to the growing desire for privacy, to the point where it has even fought the US government by refusing to help unlock the iPhones of criminals and terrorists. Those were unpopular positions at the time, but Apple stuck to its principles and the tech giant now seems to be in pole position just as consumer concern on the issue is peaking. Android phones, powered by Google’s software, don’t yet have similar protections, but Google parent Alphabet could flip on the issue, much as Apple did.

Apple is the world’s biggest and most valuable company, and the kind of gargantuan foe even the king of social media can’t face down. Facebook will remain profitable and probably continue to agitate its many detractors. But the market is now disciplining Facebook, and Zuckerberg can’t blow that off the way he can a few dyspeptic senators. At least four research shops downgraded their outlook for Facebook following the Feb. 3 rout, including JPMorgan, BMO and Loup Ventures. More downgrades are probably coming.

Facebook changed its name to Meta last year to emphasize a pivot to the so-called metaverse, where people will supposedly live digital lives independent of what they do in the physical world. But the metabucks haven’t arrived yet, and Meta may now face a turbulent period of marginal decline in its legacy business while it tries to establish first-mover advantage in a different realm. It won’t have many sympathizers.

Rick Newman is a columnist and author of four books, including "Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success.” Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman. You can also send confidential tips.

Brian Flores lawsuit against the NFL: Belichick text messages ‘speak for themselves,’ lawyer says

Josh Schafer

·Producer

Fri, 4 February 2022

A lawyer who specializes in sports business law told Yahoo Finance Live that the lawsuit recently filed by former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores provides sufficient evidence of racial bias in the New York Giants hiring process.

“I think the text messages truly do speak for themselves,” Darren Heitner, the founder of Heitner Legal, said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “I do wonder if this case will ever get past motion to dismiss and enter the discovery phase where potentially Bill Belichick would be deposed. I think what it shows … is that the Rooney Rule has really become a type of ‘check the box’ platform.”

In the 58-page document, Flores provides screenshots of a text message exchange allegedly between himself and New England Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick.

The text exchange between Brian Flores and Bill Belichick.

The messages suggest that Belichick knew the Giants had decided on another candidate — Brian Daboll — prior to interviewing Flores. Flores alleges that text messages show how the Giants were only complying with an NFL mandate known as the Rooney Rule, which requires at least two head coach interviews with diverse candidates, by interviewing him.

“What sticks out the most is that there’s obviously a problem,” Heitner said. “The problem is that the Rooney Rule was put into place years ago to try to ameliorate the issue of not enough minority coaches being put in place. As we sit here today, only one Black head coach is coaching in the NFL.”

Flores filed the class-action lawsuit against the NFL and three teams — the Giants, the Dolphins, and the Denver Broncos — alleging racism in his firing from the Miami Dolphins and the league’s hiring practices.

Head coaches Brian Flores of the Miami Dolphins and David Culley of the Houston Texans talk during pregame at Hard Rock Stadium on November 07, 2021 in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

“The allegation that the Giants’ decision had been made prior to Friday evening, January 28, is false," the Giants said in a statement. "And to base that allegation on a text exchange with Bill Belichick in which he ultimately states that he 'thinks' Brian Daboll would get the job is irresponsible. The text exchange occurred the day before Coach Daboll’s in-person interview even took place."

Flores also alleged that his experience is not unique and is part of the larger diversity and representation issue in America’s largest professional sports league. Just one of the NFL’s 32 teams currently has a Black head coach while the league’s player pool is about 70% Black, according to statistics cited in the Flores lawsuit.

"The NFL and our clubs are deeply committed to ensuring equitable employment practices and continue to make progress in providing equitable opportunities throughout our organizations," the NFL said in a statement released Tuesday. "Diversity is core to everything we do, and there are few issues on which our clubs and our internal leadership team spend more time. We will defend against these claims, which are without merit."

PDF Brian Flores lawsuit agains... by David Fucillo

‘Going to be a very tough burden’

Flores had coached three seasons for the Dolphins, leading the franchise to consecutive winnings seasons for the first time since 2003 before the franchise fired him on January 10. The 40-year old coach started interviewing with teams later that month, when the alleged bias from the Giants in the hiring practice took place.

While Heitner believes Flores could have a case against the Giants, he’s not as confident in Flores’ evidence against the other teams accused. Flores is alleging that executives at the Dolphins gave up on the coach early in his tenure after he refused to lose games for a better draft pick and convince a “prominent quarterback” to sign with the Dolphins prior to free agency.

Both instances with the Dolphins are part of a league issue surrounding tanking and tampering and are being investigated by the NFL, per multiple reports, and might not be seen as “racial,” per Heitner.

The case against the Broncos centers around a 2019 job interview when Flores claims team executives arrived an hour late to the meeting and appeared disheveled. The lawsuit alleges it was “obvious they had been drinking heavily the night before.”

“It’s going to be a very tough burden for them to prove either the Dolphins or the Broncos committed some sort of racial backlash based on the fact he didn’t end up getting the job with the Broncos and then was ultimately terminated by the Dolphins,” Heitner said.

CINCINNATI, OHIO - AUGUST 29: Brian Flores the head coach of the Miami Dolphins against the Cincinnati Bengals at Paul Brown Stadium on August 29, 2021 in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

Yahoo Sports reported that former Cleveland Browns coach Hue Jackson may join Flores’ class action suit, but Heitner posited that the case isn’t likely to be certified as a class action lawsuit because Flores’ experiences are too personally specific.

Patrick Rishe, sports business director at Washington University in St. Louis’ sports business program director, agreed but noted that the lawsuit’s impact on how race issues in the NFL are viewed by the broader public could be the most significant outcome from the lawsuit.

“There's no question that the high profile nature of this Brian Flores lawsuit is going to be an eye opener,” Rishe said. “Not just within the NFL, not just within professional sports, but across all of human resource decision making in America. There are going to be companies and leaders that need to recognize and be aware of this.”

Josh is a producer for Yahoo Finance.

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Skiing is not going to exist' – global warming threatens future of winter sports, warns former Olympian Vonn

Brent Sanchez

Thu, 3 February 2022

The Austrian glaciers where Lindsey Vonn honed her craft are essentially gone. The slopes she grew up speeding down have melted away.

Now a few years removed from her decorated alpine skiing career, the Olympic gold medalist is sounding the alarm on the impact of climate change for the next generation of downhillers.

“Skiing is not going to exist, winter sports are not going to exist if we continue down this path,” Vonn told Yahoo Finance. “We see it firsthand.”

For the first time in Winter Olympics history, athletes will be competing on 100 percent man-made snow.

It’s not surprising since it never snows much in and around Beijing.

But, because of climate change, even places that once were buried in snow are struggling to keep the slopes covered.

New research led by University of Waterloo climate experts shows that without a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, many former Olympic sites would no longer be viable hosts in just a few decades time.

“You can't deny that global warming exists and that the world is changing, and that we have to make the change in a huge way,” Vonn said. “But to many it’s not quite as apparent, so I’m not sure how we can make a change substantial enough to fix what's happening.”

Activists like Mustafa Santiago Ali have spent their entire careers fighting to raise awareness about climate change and stave off its devastating effects.

“Every aspect of society will be impacted by climate change,” said Santiago Ali, who currently serves as Vice President of Environment Justice, Climate and Community Revitalization for the National Wildlife Federation. “The good point is that we can actually make change happen and begin to mitigate many of those impacts.”

Ali is encouraged by the pledges from the Biden administration to curb emissions and heavily invest in efforts to mitigate global warming. And, as a grassroots activist, he believes in the power of the average citizen to make meaningful change — before it’s too late.

“We have a lot of work to do, and time is ticking.”

AOC calls America's surging education costs a 'moral hazard'

Ben Werschkul

·Senior Producer and Writer

Tue, 1 February 2022,

Just before Christmas, President Joe Biden extended a student loan moratorium that's allowing millions of Americans to temporarily stop making student loan payments without accruing interest.

In a new interview with Yahoo Finance, progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that Biden could endanger the country if he doesn't make the reprieve permanent before it expires on May 1.

“I cannot understate the danger and the risk — economically, politically, and just where we are right now as a country — of allowing the moratorium on student loan payments to lapse in May,” she said in an interview for Influencers with Andy Serwer releasing this week.

While Biden used student loan forgiveness as a talking point on the campaign trail, he's put off taking that step in office by repeatedly extending the freeze on public student loan repayments that began under then-President Donald Trump. Borrowers with private student loans haven't had that reprieve; they have had to continue paying those loans during the pandemic.

Speaking to Yahoo Finance, Ocasio-Cortez suggested that forcing millions of borrowers to start taking on student debt payments could not only threaten the recovery, but would also be unethical in light of the economic hardships a generation of young student debtors already faces.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) during a House Financial Services Committee hearing on student debt in 2019. She made a payment on her personal debt in the middle of the hearing to highlight the issue. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

"We are at such a delicate point in the financial and just general economic recovery post-COVID that to then re-start payments that are essentially the size of a mortgage payment, sometimes even larger, on a generation that was already so devastated ... It could throw out of balance already what is a very fragile recovery," she said.

Not to mention, Ocasio-Cortez added, "Forgiveness ... it's the right thing to do."

‘Prepare for payments to resume’

During the 2020 campaign, Biden promised to forgive $10,000 in federal student loans per person. While he has not made good on that promise yet, his administration canceled debt for certain borrowers including those who were defrauded by a for-profit college chain. Some Democrats including Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) want him to go further and forgive up to $50,000 in student loans per person.

During a Yahoo Finance live interview last week, Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein characterized student debt negotiations in the White House as “a very intense, ongoing process."

The White House has asked Congress for legislation to address surging student debt in the U.S., but negotiations have gone nowhere in the deeply divided Senate. Consequently, the administration is publicly urging borrowers to “prepare for payments to resume” in May.

Some moderate to conservative voices have urged the administration to “wind down” the moratorium. “It's time that we get back to a new normal, where people who owe student loans are beginning to repay again,” Shai Akabas, the director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Yahoo Finance in December.

‘I don't think it's a legitimate argument’

While student debt has become a hotly debated topic during the pandemic, Ocasio-Cortez is quick to point out that borrowers were defaulting even before COVID-19. The U.S. government holds over $1.61 trillion in loans among approximately 43.4 million borrowers, working out to an average federal student loan balance of $37,113, according to a recently updated report from the Education Data Initiative.

Ocasio-Cortez rejects the notion that a president might not have the authority to eliminate the debt outright. “I don't think it's a legitimate argument,” she said of those who have raised that question, including White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain.

Protesters in 2021 put up a sign in front of The White House to call on President Joe Biden to sign an executive order to cancel student debt. (Paul Morigi/Getty Images)

Ocasio-Cortez joined a group of progressive lawmakers last week including Sen. Warren in urging the administration to clarify that it does have the authority to cancel student debt. They're asking the administration to release a memo “outlining your legal authority to broadly cancel federal student loan debt and immediately cancel up to $50,000 of student loan debt per borrower.”

If the Biden administration can legally pause student debt payments, Ocasio-Cortez reasons, it must have the authority to cancel them. In Congress, she would go even further. She touts her sponsorship of the Student Debt Cancellation Act, aimed at eliminating both federal and private student loans for all former and current students.

“The true moral hazard here is the surging costs of education in the United States," she said.

Ben Werschkul is a writer and producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, DC.

AOC: Capitalism 'is the absolute pursuit of profit' at all costs

Erin Fuchs
·Deputy Managing Editor
Thu, 3 February 2022

In his annual letter to CEOs this year, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink urged other chief executives to harness the "power of capitalism" to influence society and serve as a catalyst for positive change.

Progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, has a very different view on the nature of capitalism. In a new interview with Yahoo Finance taped on Jan. 27, Ocasio-Cortez suggested that people often have different definitions of terms like socialism or capitalism.

"When we toss out these big words, capitalism, socialism, they get ... sensationalized, and people translate them into meaning things that perhaps they don't mean," she told Yahoo Finance's editor-in-chief, Andy Serwer. "So to me, capitalism, at its core, what we're talking about when we talk about that is the absolute pursuit of profit at all human, environmental, and social cost."

Ocasio-Cortez, widely known as AOC, has attacked this notion of capitalism frequently since she beat longtime incumbent Joseph Crowley, the No. 4 House Democrat, in 2018 to represent a New York district covering parts of the Bronx and Queens. She is one of four democratic socialists in Congress, along with Cori Bush of Missouri, fellow New Yorker Jamaal Bowman, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

The Democratic Socialists of America defines this system as "one where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society." For her part, Ocasio-Cortez envisions a "more just economy" as one where workers have more power — as they do in unionized workplaces or in worker cooperatives that workers collectively own and operate.

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 03: U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) (L) stands with Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) during a news conference on the eviction moratorium at the Capitol on August 03, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

"You know, we're here in the Bronx," she said during her interview with Yahoo Finance, which was filmed in that borough. "I represent a community that has the largest concentration of worker cooperatives in ... one of the largest concentrations in the world."

One worker cooperative in the Bronx, an employee-owned home care agency called Cooperative Home Care Associates, describes itself as the largest worker cooperative in the U.S., employing roughly 2,000 Black and Latinx workers.

"Now these are alternative ways of doing business," Ocasio-Cortez told Yahoo Finance. "Free markets are not the same thing as capitalism."

AOC has pointed to her own online store — which sells merchandise like "Tax the Rich" T-shirts — as a different way of doing business. When former White House press secretary Sean Spicer accused her of "using capitalism to push socialism" in a tweet, she tweeted back the same definition of capitalism that she used with Yahoo Finance.

VIDEO: AOC: Capitalism 'is the absolute pursuit of profit' at all costs 

"Not sure if you know this Sean, but transactions aren't capitalism," she wrote. "...but fwiw, our shop is unionized, doesn't operate for profit, & funds projects like free tutoring, food programs, & local organizing."

Speaking to Yahoo Finance, Ocasio-Cortez described American billionaires as the epitome of capitalism.

"What we're also discussing is the ability for a very small group of actual capitalists, and that is, people who have so much money that their money makes money, and they don't have to work," she said. "They can control industry, they can control our energy sources, they can control our labor ...They can essentially have power over the many. And to me, that is not a redeemable system."

Erin Fuchs is deputy managing editor at Yahoo Finance.