On April 7, Madison Hall, a barista and union organizer at the Starbucks store on Long Beach's bustling 2nd Street commercial strip, was invited to a session the next day to "meet with and co-create with upper-level management," Hall says.
The time and location of the meeting had been kept secret until then. Hall, 25, who has worked at Starbucks since June 2020, figured that it was part of a grand tour that Howard Schultz, who had just been named to his third stint as the company's CEO, had begun with Starbucks employees around the country.
It's reasonable to say that this session, at a conference facility near Long Beach Airport, didn't go the way Starbucks brass expected.
