A Starbucks store in Seattle.
The company's hometown has successfully unionized and guess what?
They voted unanimously to unionize,
which is great news considering the company has decided to bring back
Howard Schultz in an effort to squash these unionization efforts.
Now before we get to Schultz and his history of union busting,
let's give you the positive news the scoop, if you will.
Workers voted 9 to 0 to form a union at the broadway and Denny store,
becoming the seventh location to unionize with SEIU affiliated workers united.
As of Tuesday over 140 Starbucks in 27 states
have petition to hold union elections.
So this is something that's spreading not just amongst Starbucks stores, but
we're seeing this in other businesses as well.
And I really think it's important to not just cover these types of stories and
help put out some positive reinforcement for the workers.
But it's momentum that you want to support,
because if you can't get your local government or
God forbid Congress to do anything to improve your working conditions.
Your living conditions and all of that,
the workers can take matters into their own hands.
And in this case we're talking about Starbucks workers doing just that.
The accomplishment, by the way, is especially notable because of the fact
that jobs in the food and service industry have been.
Those are difficult jobs to unionize historically speaking, they've experienced
high rates of turnover because of low pay because of poor working conditions.
In fact, just 1.2% of employees in food services and drinking places
are members of unions according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Also in the past, maybe these were very transient jobs.
People only stayed in for a few years, but things have changed increasingly.
They are becoming people's sources of income and livelihood.
And that's according to Sydney Durkin, a shift supervisor at this
particular Starbucks location broadway and Denny's store.
People in these positions are saying, okay, this is what I'm doing.
This has to be better than it currently is.
And Sydney Durkin gives a specific example.
So we hear about the call for a $15 an hour minimum wage,
which at this point is not enough.
Even a $20 an hour minimum wage in some parts of the country is not enough.
But what about a place like Seattle where the cost of living is astronomical.
She says I have a management position, I make $25 an hour.
That should be enough, but in the city of Seattle, it just simply is not.
So per the Seattle times, the newly unionized workers are expected to bargain
for all sorts of improvements ranging from their working conditions to their pay.
They do of course wanna pay increase.
They also wanna allow customers to leave tips on credit card orders.
They want more consistent staffing.
That has been a huge problem during the pandemic, where there are shortages
of workers, probably because they're not being compensated fairly.
They don't workers don't feel like it's worth it to to take these certain jobs or
they're intentionally understaffed.
And so they wanna fix all of those problems, and they wanna ensure that
the company offers affordable healthcare that isn't based on hours worked.
So, they've just voted to unionize, but
the battle lies ahead where they will engage in the negotiations.
And of course, you're gonna have someone like Howard Schultz get involved and
try to squash those efforts.
Before we get to that though, I wanna hear from you was, this is an issue so near and
dear to your heart.
I love hearing what you have to say about it.
>> Yeah, it's really heartening stuff because again,
these workers are some of the most vulnerable in our economy.
You talked about the high turnover, and they have nothing helping them.
The only thing that you can have is a bulwark against the likes of Starbucks,
which is a mega corporation.
This isn't just some like, huge business, this is a mega corporation, right?
And so the only way you can protect yourself is in a union, and
it's really cool to see and in the larger arc of
the story that's happening around the country amongst workers.
This is again, and you mentioned it at the top of the segment.
This is the best news that we have going, right.
We see that politically nothing gets done in the government
when it comes to issues that affect poor and working people.
The only thing that gets stuff done is organizing and unions.
And so to see Starbucks and to see this thing spread like wildfire across
the country from every single region.
It'd be one thing if this was something concentrate and say the northeast or
even some place like New York City.
Which is an extremely unionized place, unionized to a degree that I don't
think people would really understand like every single elevator operator.
Every single electrician, every single plumber,
every single person that makes the city go, is basically in a union.
So if it was concentrated in somewhere like New York City,
maybe that's just New York thing.
But the fact that it's spread all across every single region of the country,
small city, big city, small town.
That's the best part of all of this because again, we know that Joe Byron and
his cronies in the government will do nothing to help us.
We have to organize on our own.
And that's the only thing that capital will respond to.
>> That's exactly right.
And we're keeping an eye on the efforts to unionize investing in Alabama.
They're allowed to vote again because of the fact that Amazon was, yeah, exactly.
They engaged in illegal activity that
prevented them from being able to vote fairly.
So we'll see how that all plays out there, still engaging in union busting
activity over at best in Alabama's Amazon warehouse.
But I bring up Bessemer Alabama because when you think of efforts to unionize,
you don't really think about Alabama, right?
But you've got workers in Alabama who are fired up, who want to change their working
conditions, they want better pay, they want better treatment.
And I love to see it.
Now, let's move on to howard Schultz.
So he's the former Starbucks CEO, and they're bringing them back.
They're bringing him back probably because of the fact that he has
a pretty lengthy record in union busting among Starbucks workers.
So here's what we know.
Okay, why are they bringing back again he's notorious for
vicious union busting earlier this year.
He actually tried to convince workers in Buffalo to avoid unionizing,
and he did that by invoking the holocaust.
That's the kind of guy he is, we have a video of that, let's watch.
hen people in Germany and in Poland were sent to the concentration camps and
one person for every six was given a blanket.
Most people, most people shared their blanket with five other people.
And so much of that story is threaded into what
we have tried to do at Starbucks is share a blanket.
>> My God, that was way worse than I expected it to be.
I had not seen that video.
>> [LAUGH] And we actually covered that on Barcia the one day and
I don't know about you, but
I can just feel the warm embrace of our corporate overlords.
They're just so warm and cozy and they just treated so well,
rub us on our belly, just keep us warm at night.
And yeah, he compared the scraps that they give their workers.
Mind you like Starbucks is extremely profitable.
We're talking about billions upon billions,
upon billions of profits every single year, right?
This isn't some company that's struggling pushing pennies together,
rubbing two pennies together.
No, they're extremely rich and he's like, well,
[LAUGH] we give our workers, friends benefits were sharing the wealth.
It's incredible the tone deafness of it all of a guy.
Again, a guy with how many jets richer than God coming down
from on high to explain to the pleads that they should be so
fortunate that he's sharing his blanket with them.
It's incredible.
>> He just compared Starbucks executives to Nazis?
Is that what he did?
>> [LAUGH] I don't think, you know.
>> I think because he's like that's what we're trying to do here.
We're trying to give you guys a blanket that you share with five other people.
That's how it came across to me.
I don't know.
>> Yeah.
>> No, he was saying that basically what Starbucks is giving them is
equivalent to that blanket, is keeping them from freezing to death
basically like I'm saving your life with this $9 an hour.
That's what he was explaining to workers in his company.
>> That was one of the worst, I can't believe that.
He said that like, [LAUGH] I can't believe he thought that would be persuasive by
the way, it wasn't persuasive.
The buffalo store employees voted to unionize.
So his union busting efforts, maybe he's off his a game.
But he's been at this since decades ago, since the 1960s.
So in 1986, he had attempted to bust unions.
And so Northwest labor press reports when Schultz joined Starbucks
management, it was a Seattle area gourmet coffee chain.
And shop and roasting plant workers were represented by UFCW local 1001.
Starbucks demanded concessions including medical benefit cuts,
and an end to just cause discipline.
Shultz encouraged, encouraged workers to vote out the union.
And unfortunately they did first in retail stores.
And then at the Seattle roasting plant, when Starbucks machine maintenance
workers in Washington voted to unionize back in 1999.
Schultz pummeled the plant with a five-year union busting campaign after
which workers decided not to vote to renew their contract.
So he's been successful in the past.
In 2004 when Starbucks workers in New York City attempted to unionize, Shultz
directed a union busting campaign in which let me give you the bullet points here.
Store managers forbade employees from discussing the union inside the store.
Anti union workers were transferred, two stores that had union activity.
Union supporters were fired in New York and
Minnie in Minneapolis, workers were banned from wearing pro union buttons.
I mean, just the typical stuff,
which a lot of that is now taking place in the amazon warehouse in Bessemer Alabama.
This is the kind of games they play to discourage people from voting to join
the union.
But I just feel like the militancy,
the labor militancy is a little different today.
I think people are super fed up, and it's a good thing.
I always wondered when is it gonna get to a point where people are so fed up,
that they're just not gonna let any of this propaganda seep into their heads.
And I think we're there.
I mean,
especially after workers saw just how little their value during the pandemic.
>> Yeah, and one of the tactics that they would typically deploy is get these
mental managers to go in and basically start propagandizing the employees.
Basically start cracking skulls essentially to
just stop the union efforts in the past.
But the reason why it couldn't work this time is because the people that
are working side by side with these workers.
Even these managers that are working side by side with them every single day.
They see the working conditions, they can't like you can't tell a lie.
You work here every day, you see that we're understaffed,
you see that we're overworked.
You see the amount of money this damn store is making every single day,
as compared to what my paycheck is at the end of the week, on the first and 15th.
I think that's why it's failing.
It's just like it's you can't justify this stuff.
Even the middle managers again, these are human beings,
they're working with these people every single day.
They can't tell them that what is, isn't when it's right there for them to see.