On April 4, the first day of Howard Schultz’s third go-round as chief executive officer of Starbucks Corp., he set the tone with an espresso tasting. Dozens of baristas gathered in rows at the company’s headquarters in Seattle, while many more joined from across the country via livestream. First, the assembled took a collective slurp of coffee. “Full-bodied, bold—to me, that’s representative of who we are,” said Michelle Burns, the executive who oversees coffee sourcing. Next, an employee named Fen Tapley led the crowd in an impromptu protest against Florida’s new “Don’t Say Gay” law: “Gay! Gay! Gay!” they chanted. Then it was time to introduce Schultz. “He’s chosen to return and to come back and to put on the green apron alongside all of us,” Tapley said. The baristas gave the CEO a standing ovation. “You’re going to make me cry,” Schultz said.
Schultz has always linked Starbucks closely to his own sense of right and wrong, and this speech was no different. As a screen behind him displayed photos of smiling employees, he emphasized his determination that the company provide better jobs than his blue-collar dad ever had. This would be a new beginning, he vowed, but also a return to form. He listed the employee perks he’d established that set Starbucks apart from its peers, including stock grants and free tuition for online courses at Arizona State University. “It’s a return to the celebration of coffee, something that, for whatever reason, has kind of been dissipated over the last few years,” he said. “It’s a return to kindness.” Then he turned to the remarkable trend of the past several months: Starbucks employees (the company calls them “partners”) unionizing at a rate that would have been unimaginable a year ago.
Yes, he acknowledged, Starbucks had erred by privileging stock buybacks over investing in the business, and turnover was high. He’d recently learned that most baristas had been with the company for less than a year. But collective bargaining, he suggested, wasn’t the answer. “We can’t ignore what is happening in the country as it relates to companies throughout the country being assaulted, in many ways, by the threat of unionization,” he told the baristas. After declaring that he wasn’t anti-union, just pro-Starbucks, he added: “We didn’t get here by having a union.”
