Former Starbucks Corp. CEO Howard Schultz kept his cool and stayed on message on Wednesday amid pointed questioning during a Senate committee hearing about the coffee giant’s alleged labor law violations. Even as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, described Starbucks as waging “the most aggressive and illegal union busting campaign in the modern history of our country,” Schultz continued to project an image of confident self-made entrepreneur.
That is, except for one exchange — a heated back and forth with Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, that seemed to hit a nerve with Schultz.
Countless times during the hearing, including in his prepared testimony, Schultz recalled his father, who after injuring himself in 1960, when he slipped on a sheet of ice, was fired from his job as a delivery driver. Schultz said the experience “fractured our family and it deeply scarred me.” That Schultz has tried to build Starbucks into the kind of company that his father never got the chance to work for has become one of his standard lines and part of the company’s lore.
