Inside the historic billionaire roast
Inside the historic billionaire roast
It was a really big deal (and a bit awakard, too)
Welcome to a late Sunday evening edition of Progress Report.
As I wrote last week, I was at the Senate roast of Howard Schultz, which I think was important as a news event but also a message to both a new generation of activists fed up with forced inequality and wealthy executives used to getting everything they want.
I’ll take you behind the scenes of that event in tonight’s newsletter, and when we’re done, you should go check out the big new edition of SWORD, where we run down in great detail specifically how Ron DeSantis’s Florida Republicans are making life hell for people in the state right now.
On Tuesday or Wednesday, we’ll have a big story here at Progress Report about a pervasive and under-the-radar assault on democracy that’s been happening unchecked for the past few years.
“Oh, there’s the manager that fired me.”
After 18 months of marches, store walkouts, and secret barista organizing sweeps across various cities, upwards of 60 or 70 members of Starbucks Workers United descended on the Capitol on Wednesday to watch several Senators grill Howard Schultz, the coffee monolith’s billionaire founder and three-time CEO.
The marching battalion of baristas and organizers chanted and sang as they cut through the sidewalk and closed in on the Dirksen Senate building, presenting something between a picket line and pep rally. Having covered the Starbucks union drive since its inception, and now watching the scene unfold on just a few hours of sleep, the approaching mass of workers, each uniformed in a black union t-shirt, could well have been an advancing mirage.
It was only 18 months ago that a handful of baristas began discussing how to improve the working conditions at their Starbucks cafe in Buffalo, NY; now they were entering the seat of American power to watch Schultz, the founder and face of the company and 209th richest man in the United States, get reprimanded by some of the nation’s most powerful lawmakers.
The workers were jubilant as they filed into the Senate building and shuffled through a security check just shy of TSA standards, and the excitement continued to percolate for a few more minutes as they figured out how and where they should wait outside the hearing room. Eventually, many of them wound up standing against the wall to the left, directly across the narrow hallways from a line of Starbucks corporate employees. Mostly a decade or so older than the workers, they all wore t-shirts that said “We Belong Together,” but it hardly appeared as if they were there to make peace with the union members (and not just because many of them wore blazers over their tees, like uncertain hipster college students circa 2006).
This was war for Howard Schultz, so of course he brought a little army.
There was little to no acknowledgement between the two sides, as if the velvet rope that separated them for maybe six feet continued all the way down the hall and blocked them from seeing one another. Standing with some of the Starbucks workers and union leaders that I’ve gotten to know over the past 18 months, I wondered aloud what kind of person would be willing to fly across the country, wear an embarrassing and cynical t-shirt, and provide backup to a multi-billionaire former CEO who just spent a year showing how little he valued the people that worked for him? (Schultz resigned two weeks ago, probably to avoid the hearing, but he’d already committed and wasn’t going to be let free.)
The union members mostly shrugged. They’d already come face-to-face with some of the employees, including the one who’d fired Gianna Reeve, a popular member from Buffalo. Reeve was unphased by the manager’s presence and could only laugh when they’d explicitly avoided eye contact. “I’ll see them a few weeks at my hearing,” Reeve said, already getting psyched for a long-awaited turn with the NLRB’s judges.
The manager’s presence made more sense as I considered the situation. When workers in Buffalo began organizing, Starbucks sent a small army of executives and various tiers of managers to the city it had otherwise ignored for years. The unionizing stores were flooded with what they’d termed “support managers,” who were paid large bonuses to address the many issues that had suddenly become apparent in those three specific cafes. Pulled from other stores and regions across the country, they were all willing to be ruthless in exchange for an edge in the scramble up coffee career mountain. Working as a store manager isn’t all that much more lucrative than being a barista or shift supervisor, and they were prohibited from either joining this union or organizing their own in order to ask for better wages.
When the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, creating a schism between workers and low-level managers, who had been sympathic to union organizers, had been a key priority of the conservative senators and the ultra-wealthy captains of industry for whom they worked. The law was intended to fracture the working and middle classes that had begun to seize power in the years following the passage of the NLRA, and it nearly 80 years later, its success was self-evident.
That law, along with a half-century’s worth of other anti-labor statutes and decisions, had laid the groundwork for the sort of brazen union-busting that was going on at Starbucks, which could only really suffer reputational damage on Wednesday.
Still, this was a hearing with no recent precedent, made possible by Sanders’ chairmanship of the Senate HELP committee and Biden’s adamantly pro-labor NLRB, which has been as aggressive as budget and bureaucracy will allow it to be in going after union-busters and pushing larger remedies. It’s proof that policy is personnel, and something progressives must continue to vigorously pursue.
Schultz came back to Starbucks for the third time in April 2022, pushing out then-CEO Kevin Johnson to front an even more ruthless response to the unionization wave that had begun snowball after the first wins in Buffalo and then the firings of the Memphis 7 (which I exposed quickly here). He pushed other executives out as well, including the company’s president for North America, after she’d been forced to decamp to Buffalo and sweep the carpet at one of the unionizing stores, as well as its general legal counsel. Don’t cry too hard for them: Johnson got a $60 million golden parachute after Schultz kicked him out, while the lawyer got $8 million.
After spending the better part of a decade pouring money into multiple failed attempts to unearth even the slightest hint of public interest in a Howard Schultz campaign for president, the mere suggestion that some Starbucks workers did not view his company — and thus him — as morally unimpeachable and sufficiently financially generous was evidently a devastating blow to the sort of ego that spends a decade trying and failing to run for president.
After presenting himself as the benevolent patriarch once during the early days of the first Buffalo campaign, only to be stung by the wide public mockery of his hackneyed comparison between working at Starbucks and surviving the Holocaust, Schultz sought vengeance. His official return unleashed a yearlong torrent of union-busting, including 200+ firings, dozens of store closures, verbal abuse, and bitter tirades, each of which seemed to be an expression of his own hurt and fury.
There is a legitimate cult of personality around Schultz in some segments of the company, and his return was treated by some as the arrival of a king who would heal the kingdom once again. The sycophantic stream of comments that accompany internal live streams on which he has appeared is unsettling, but also at least somewhat misleading; union members have regularly tried to submit pointed questions to these “town hall” meetings, but none of them have ever been selected to even flit across the screen amid all the hearts and thumbs up that accompany Schultz’s speeches.
There has been more pushback among corporate employees of late due to Schultz’s insistence that they return to the office three times a week, to the point that an open letter was recently sent by some white collar employees in protest of the shift. One told me that they wanted to include specific demands that Starbucks begin to negotiate in good faith with the union on a long-awaited first contract, but others were too nervous or disinterested in that struggle, so the reference was revised down to a request that the company respect national labor law.
The hearing made it clear that Schultz had little interest in showing deference to something as inconvenient as workers’ rights; his continued insistence that Starbucks did not break federal labor law, even when confronted with countless decisions made against the company by federal judges and 80+ complaints made by the NLRB. Maybe he really is just that divorced from reality, as his earnest bristling at “billionaire” being as a slight perjorative indicated that his political instincts have no improved since his last dalliance with a doomed presidential campaign. Screaming “I earned that money!” while being quizzed on why he’s continuously violating the rights of the people who do the hard work to run his stores — it was not all that savvy, but he made his point.
His temper flared in exchanges with committee chair Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was during those three hours one of the only people in the past 40 years who could shut him down with a cutting remark and the bang of a gavel. Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper had trouble fighting off his instincts to praise a wealthy businessman — class solidarity largely exists at the top — but Sen. Tina Smith, Tammy Baldwin, Bob Casey, and Ed Markey were withering in their criticism. They went after Schultz for refusing to negotiate with the union — a rare session the week prior has ended in zero progress, and because Starbucks can technically run out the clock until an injunction granted to the NLRB forces the company to give up their bunk excuse to avoid bargaining, prying an actual good-faith deal will be difficult.
Tempers flared again when Markey took aim at Schultz’s go-to autobiographical riff about growing up in public housing and seeing his father, who worked for some delivery company, get injured on the job and thrown out on the street by his employer. The legitimately traumatizing experience of watching it happen, Schultz insisted, made him determined to not be that kind of boss. Markey turned the anecdote on its head when he said “Your father felt helpless then, and that’s how these workers feel now.”
It made Schultz apoplectic, and led him to align even more with the Republicans who normally decry “woke” capital at places like Starbucks. It was amusing to see new Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin explicitly applaud business leaders; Rand Paul, who quoted Ayn Rand at the beginning of his statement, prostrated himself toward a billionaire “liberal” elite.
The Starbucks corporate employees split after Schultz’s testimony, as if to specifically avoid hearing from the workers and being forced to consider that they support and even participate in relentless harassment, firings, and serious downward turns of fortune.
Schultz left, too, I presume, likely frustrated and stewing over being called a billionaire. Still, that frustration would be his only actual punishment, and if there was any shame invovled, it was out the window by Friday, when Starbucks fired three more workers in Buffalo, including the first to bring up unionzing those stores.
Still, it was an unpleasant experience for Schultz, who blew up decades of trying to seem like one of the good guys and a different kind of CEO. That he was there only under threat of a subpoena was as big a deal as anything said — excluding perhaps Schultz’s accidental admission that he wasn’t actually barred by law from giving union workers the same raises as workers in non-union other stores. The Starbucks workers themselves will need further intervention by people with federal power to win a contract, given the size of the company, amount of money it can burn, and Schultz’s ongoing presence on the board despite resigning as CEO. But for employers with less wealthy CEOs and more to lose, it should be a serious signal that things are changing.
Wait, Before You Leave!
Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, delivers incisive analysis, and continues to grow its paid reporting team. .
None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So to make this sustainable, hire new writers, and expand, I need your help.
For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:
Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting
Financing new projects and paying new reporters
Access to upcoming chats
You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next edition of the newsletter!
to be fair, as long as 90% of the stock market is in the hands of the top 1% (which is the politicians' fault), if a CEO decides to put workers first, the board members (picked by said billionaires) will fire him for not maximizing their profit. Politicians need to MAKE LAWS that protect EVERY WORKER FOR FREE, instead of relying on workers organizing and PAYING unions and CEOs not trying to stop it. This is the perfect example of politicians not doing their job and scapegoating others.
“It’s proof that policy is personnel, and something progressives must continue to vigorously pursue.”
I wanted to read this as personal. Both words seem appropriate.