When Starbucks management came for Sean Andrews, it didn’t surprise him, exactly. Tensions were already running high in the Denver coffee shop where he worked. A few days prior, Andrews’ fellow baristas had walked off the job in a six-hour strike. They were demonstrating for their unionization effort and against what they saw as a sustained pattern of anti-labor tactics by Starbucks.
Workers knew the strike was an escalation and expected retaliation. Even so, Andrews was unprepared when the Denver Starbucks district manager pulled him aside before a shift and asked him to take a call. The woman on the other end would eventually identify herself as a “corporate investigator” who looks into losses in stores.
After some innocuous questions about company policy, she began quizzing him about leftover food, according to a recording of the interaction obtained by the Guardian. Did his co-workers ever take any for themselves? Did he?
