‘Pure propaganda’: inside Starbucks’ anti-union tactics

theguardian.com:

When Starbucks management came for Sean Andrews, it didn’t surprise him, exactly. Tensions were already running high in the Denver coffee shop where he worked. A few days prior, Andrews’ fellow baristas had walked off the job in a six-hour strike. They were demonstrating for their unionization effort and against what they saw as a sustained pattern of anti-labor tactics by Starbucks.

Workers knew the strike was an escalation and expected retaliation. Even so, Andrews was unprepared when the Denver Starbucks district manager pulled him aside before a shift, forced him to turn off his phone and asked him to take a call. The woman on the other end would eventually identify herself as a “corporate investigator” who looks into losses in stores.

After some innocuous questions about company policy, she began quizzing him about leftover food, according to a recording of the interaction obtained by the Guardian. Did his coworkers ever take any for themselves? Did he?

After sticking to the company line at first, an audibly exasperated Andrews turned blunt. In the back of the store, there’s a box for leftover food that goes to a local food pantry. If a piece of food was about to turn bad, or if a store item was expired and set to be thrown away, he or his coworkers would at times grab something on their way out, “like every [barista] who works for Starbucks,” he said.

Cost of living has ballooned in Denver in recent years, with housing prices growing by 21% in the past year alone.The starting hourly salary for baristas is $16.37, according to a job posting from March (experienced employees can make more than $21 an hour).

One of Andrews’ coworkers was functionally homeless at the time, a fact that he shot back at the company