Ithaca Starbucks workers and supporters protest in front of the East Seneca Street location. Photo Credit: Starbucks Workers United Twitter
Earlier this month, employees at the three Ithaca Starbucks locations voted to unionize, citing what they described as workplace abuse and intolerance by managers. The Cornell Daily Sun’s reporting of this was very one-sided in support of the union activists, many of whom were students. While the Sun’s article, titled “Ithaca First City to Achieve Union Across Starbucks, Negotiations to Follow,” featured various pro-union activists, it offered no perspective from Starbucks or one of the workers who voted against creating a union.
Regardless of a campus newspaper’s far-Left biases, this unionization effort highlights the hypocrisy of Woke ESG companies such as Starbucks, which purport to be pro-worker and have taken very liberal stances in the public discourse in recent years.
Throughout Starbucks’ history, the organization and its CEO Howard Schultz have taken stances against President Trump’s border wall, executive order banning unvetted immigrants from high risk countries, and Trump’s candidacy itself.
During the 2016 presidential election, Schultz endorsed Hillary Clinton, who is now being investigated by Special Counsel Jonathan Durham for her campaign’s role in spying on Trump and creating the Russia Hoax, saying “I think it’s obvious that Hillary Clinton needs to be the next President.”
“On the other side [Trump], we’ve seen such a vitriolic display of bigotry and hate and divisiveness, and that is not the leadership we need for the future of the country.”
Most recently, Starbucks signed the “Human Rights Campaign” letter condemning legislation that they allege “promotes discrimination” after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a parents’ rights bill into law preventing LGBT propoganda from being taught to children in kindergarten to third grade.
Ironically, despite Starbucks’ continued support for what it describes as the “LGBTQIA2+ community” Starbucks is being attacked by the Ithaca union activists as being not Woke enough.
According to the Daily Sun, one of the union activists accused a Starbucks manager of misgendering her and threatening the employee’s trans healthcare benefits as retaliation during the time Starbucks employees were advocating for a union. Apparently, talk of ESG and support for “LGBTQIA2A+ inclusion” as defined by Starbucks are cast to the wayside once profits are at stake.
Of course, that acknowledgement is not an endorsement of the authoritarian Left’s weaponization of gender issues to impose quasi-fascism on everyone in society. The Left’s gender enforcement regime, and many on the Right’s tacit acceptance of it, has already led society too far down a path of censorship and ruin. In England, a woman was arrested for “misgendering” someone. In New York City, employers can be fined for not using one’s “preferred pronouns”. Twitter recently suspended the Babylon Bee for publishing a satirical article about Rachel Levine, who was born male and identifies as female. The publication was accused of violating Twitter’s “hateful conduct” policies for calling Levine “Man of the Year”.
What is the natural extension of this? Biological men like Lia Thomas are competing in women’s sports and destroying the female competition. A biological male MMA fighter broke the skull of his female opponent in a brutal fight. Even people who identify as being transgender, such as Caitlyn Jenner, have outright condemned biological men competing in women’s sports.
Aside from these social issues, Starbucks faces a list of steep demands from their Ithaca union organizers. While I am inclined to support unions for police, firefighters, coal workers, construction workers, and so on, the demands from some in the newly formed Starbucks union seem unfeasible.
For example, one activist told the Daily Sun that “I shouldn’t have to lose my job for having to leave for the summer.”
What?! Starbucks in Ithaca is not a seasonal store, it is open year-round. Patrons in the community that are not Cornell students – and even many that are – will be here in the summer and expect to have access to their coffee shop. In almost any full time job, under almost any circumstance, you would not be able to take off for two months for the summer. How is a business supposed to run under those circumstances? It would be impossible.
This holds true for full time jobs, never mind part time jobs. If you are a college student working at Starbucks, your expectation should not be that you get to keep the job if you can not show up for work over the summer. I understand wanting to go home – if you want to go home, go home! Apply for a new job when you come back.
Another criticism one of the activists had was that Starbucks did not provide employees with adequate access to mental health care.
There is a “need for easier access to mental health care beyond the 20 sessions per year offered by Starbucks’ current program,” one union organizer told the Sun.
20 therapy sessions per year is a lot – that equals roughly one appointment every two and a half weeks. How much more coverage is the company supposed to pay for?
That is far more appointments than a Cornell student would be able to attend going through Cornell Health’s mental health care services, according to consistent reporting and feedback.
As one Cornell student recalled, “I remember I tried to get an appointment with a psychiatrist in June, but I was told the first appointment available was in October.”
At that rate, Cornell only permits its students – many of whom are enrolled in Cornell’s Student Health Plan – to attend mental health counseling 2-3 times per year.
Of course, this is a reflection of Cornell Health’s broader incompetence and understaffing, however, the point that Starbucks’ healthcare is compartivley generous stands.
This begs the question – how much is too much? Of course, unions provide a great service when it comes to ensuring safe working conditions, fair pay, etc, but are Starbucks baristas – many of whom are college students – entitled to be retained by Starbucks as an employee despite leaving for three months?
This is a microcosm of the many contradictions in American life. People who are inclined to support unions – including many workers themselves – shy away from organizing because with union membership comes the imposition of radical political causes and demands. These causes and demands that many union activists and bosses advocate for are sometimes in direct opposition to the actual workers’ interests. This was best evidenced recently by President Biden’s ending of the Keystone XL Pipeline, and the subsequent criticism he received from AFL-CIO Union President Richard Trumka, whose group endorsed Biden for president in 2020.
Surely, many of the workers did not support that endorsement. However, they were forced into it and they paid a clear price: Biden’s executive order ending the Keystone XL Pipeline killed 11,000 construction jobs.
There is an inherent tension between the good that unions can accomplish for blue-collar workers and the Left wing political forces that dominate them. Unions have clearly been ineffective over the last decades at promoting real financial prosperity for members, as entire industries have collapsed due to outsourcing and many administrations’ policies toward China. They are, however, effective at cooperating with the corporate elite to enforce Left wing cultural policies with regard to gender, sexuality, and so-called racial equity programs.
So what are we to make of this? I say have at it! Let the Starbucks Ithaca unions make unreasonable demands to Starbucks, which has decidedly placed itself on the far-Left and anti-freedom side of every issue over the past years. It smeared conservatives and Trump supporters as being bigots, opposed national sovereignty and national security with regard to the border and and proper vetting, respectivley, and even said that Trump and his supporters “called the conscience of our country into question”. Starbucks regularly pushes anti-racism and Critical Race Theory based “diversity” training on employees, and financially incentivizes executives to meet racial quotas instead of hiring the most qualified candidates regardless of race, systemically disadvantaging whites.
Starbucks has not been an ally to the nation as a whole, and it certainly has not been an ally to conservatives. They do not deserve an ally in us now.
