On Wednesday, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was questioned by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, dubbed HELP, about the company’s anti-union campaign and violations of federal labor law during his reign.
Schultz’s testimony was a watershed moment for the labor movement. For me, though, it was personal.
On a cold winter evening on the 34th floor of the Willis Tower in Chicago, I paced anxiously around a conference room. It was almost a year after the first Starbucks store in Buffalo, New York, voted to unionize. Sitting in the room with me were two Starbucks corporate attorneys, our store manager, a regional manager, an anti-union barista, one of my fellow pro-union co-workers and our union organizer.
