Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is set for a showdown with Senator Bernie Sanders and other lawmakers on Wednesday at a congressional hearing focused on allegations of union-busting at the coffee chain.
Sanders, who chairs the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, has been calling for months for Schultz to publicly respond to worker complaints, even threatening to subpoena Schultz after Starbucks tried to send a subordinate in his stead.
Sanders offered a taste of the hearing in its title: “No Company Is Above the Law: The Need to End Illegal Union Busting at Starbucks.” Schultz is scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Wednesday.
“Starbucks has become the most aggressive union-busting company in America,” the HELP committee wrote this week, decrying what Democrats on the panel called the company’s “scorched-earth approach” to labor relations.
Since the first Starbucks store voted to unionize in late 2022, nearly 300 Starbucks stores have taken that step, although none has yet negotiated a collective-bargaining contract and the company has closed some pro-union stores. Judges have ruled that Starbucks repeatedly broke labor laws, including by firing workers, interrogating them, threatening to rescind benefits if employees organized and threatening to call the police on a worker, according to a spokesperson from the National Labor Relations Board.
Earlier this month, a judge found that Starbucks engaged in “egregious and widespread misconduct demonstrating a general disregard for the employees’ fundamental rights,” ordering Schultz to personally read the employees a recitation of their rights under the law. The company has faced more than 500 complaints of unfair labor practices filed by workers and labor officials, according to the NLRB.
Schultz blames union for slowing talks
In prepared testimony released ahead of the Senate hearing, Schultz said that Starbucks has tried to negotiate with unionized stores but has been thwarted by unnamed pro-union individuals.
“We have been arranging more than 350 bargaining sessions,” Schultz said, noting that Starbucks officials have physically attended 85 sessions. “However, union representatives have improperly demanded multi-store negotiations, delayed or refused to attend meetings, and insisted on unlawful preconditions such as ‘virtual’ bargaining and participation by outside observers, among other things,” he said.
Schultz also highlights benefits Starbucks offers to employees, including paid sick leave, paid parental leave, some child care benefits, a paid-for online college degree and, added in the past year, a minimum wage of $15 an hour at company stores and the option for customers to tip on credit-card orders.
But Schultz omits that Starbucks rolled out credit-card tipping — a key demand of pro-union workers — only in stores that were not represented by a union. The NLRB filed a complaint this week alleging that Starbucks illegally withheld these benefits from union workers, as first reported by More Perfect Union. Previously, the labor board also charged that Starbucks broke the law when it raised pay and benefits for non-unionized stores only.
Schultz has served three terms as Starbucks’ CEO, most recently between April 2022 and March 20, 2023, which he ended two weeks ahead of schedule. According to Politico, when Schultz first bought out the coffee chain in 1987, he inherited a unionized workforce at the shop’s roasting plant and store — those workers had secured health care coverage for part-timers, a Starbucks benefit that Schultz often touts. After his takeover, Schultz pushed for major concessions from the workers and was instrumental in the move to de-certify the union, Politico reported.
When the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Schultz last year if he could ever accept a union at Starbucks, the CEO answered quickly, “No.”
CBS News‘ Nikole Killion contributed reporting.