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    You might think Starbucks is a ‘progressive’ company. You’d be wrong | Hamilton Nolan

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    You might think Starbucks is a ‘progressive’ company. You’d be wrongHamilton NolanRarely in modern history have we seen a company that so exquisitely cultivates an image as a caring, progressive employer while actually acting like a bullying, union-busting gangster Corporate hypocrisy is as old as corporations themselves. But there are levels. It is important to recognize astounding achievements in business insincerity. So let us send a note of congratulations today to Starbucks: rarely in modern history have we witnessed a company that so exquisitely combines a cultivated image as a caring, progressive employer with the well-documented, large-scale behavior of a gangster who expects to rule employees through bullying and fear.The $100bn coffee-and-flavored-syrup chain meticulously refers to its employees as “partners”. What does it mean to be a partner to someone? Reasonable people might say that a partnership is a relationship in which you treat the other person as an equal, zealously uphold their basic rights, and deal with them in all cases as fully formed human beings deserving of respect. Luckily for Starbucks, they’ve had a great chance to exhibit these values over the past year, as thousands of employees at more than 230 of their stores across the country have voted to unionize. The historic union wave has offered the company an unprecedented opportunity to respect their “partners’” right to organize; to listen to their concerns and requests for change; and to bargain contracts with them in good faith, as partners, of course, should.To say that Starbucks has failed to live up to their progressive reputation would be far too polite. It’s more like the union is Scooby-Doo, and they have yanked off the company’s pleasant mask to reveal Tony Soprano lurking underneath.This week, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said that Starbucks had illegally withheld raises and other benefits from its unionized workers. This is one of the oldest pseudo-friendly union busting tactics in the book – a company in the midst of a union campaign will hand out goodies to its non-union employees and then shrug theatrically and say: “Gee, we’re not allowed to give these things to the union people!” (which, as the NLRB has affirmed, is a lie).And that giant, illegal ripoff is not even the worst part. The union, Starbucks Workers United, says that the company has fired more than 85 workers for organizing. The company has begun permanently closing stores that recently unionized or were in the process of doing so. The NLRB still has hundreds of charges of illegal labor practices against Starbucks that it has yet to rule on. There were so many GoFundMe campaigns floating around for fired Starbucks workers that the union finally had to set up a national Solidarity Fund to try to help them all. In the midst of all of this brash intimidation, Starbucks has complained that the NLRB has unfairly favored the union, which is akin to a bank robber complaining that the police are unfairly favoring the bank.What accounts for the hubris of a company that so boldly risks its own reputation to flout labor law and treat its “partners” like so many automatons who must be whipped back into submission? I’m no psychoanalyst, but I imagine that it flows from the same source as the hubris that made the billionaire Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz imagine that he could get elected president as an independent. It seems that none of Schultz’s sycophants were brave enough to tell him up front that he is, perhaps, the single worst presidential candidate you could ever imagine: Conservatives hate him because he pretends to be progressive; progressives hate him because he is, in fact, a cutthroat billionaire businessman who slathers himself in symbolic liberalism to ward off accurate criticism; and his own employees hate him because he treats their request for labor rights like an act of war.Schultz, who returned to Starbucks as CEO this year for the express purpose of fumbling the company’s response to unionization, seems to imagine himself as some sort of kindly Stewart Brand figure who will redeem capitalism, but acts in practice like just another irate union-buster – Andrew Carnegie with an espresso machine. (A monstrous bit of Democratic party trivia: Hillary Clinton reportedly considered Schultz as labor secretary in her presidential administration, something that the next reporter to interview Clinton should absolutely ask her about.)It may be that the very idea of a “progressive corporation” is, given the realities of American capitalism, an oxymoron. But anyone who has ever held a job understands what a good employer is. It is someone who treats workers as humans. When you get right down to it, the demands of the many Starbucks workers who have unionized are downright modest. They have asked the company to sign a pledge to simply allow workers to choose to organize “without fear of reprisal”. The company has not only refused to sign, but has dedicated itself to instilling fear of reprisal in the hearts of every single employee. That is not how a good boss treats his workers. That is not how a genuine progressive treats anyone. And it is certainly not how you would treat a “partner”.In Boston, recently, I stopped by a unionized Starbucks store where workers have been on strike for more than a month. Through scorching days and lonely nights, these young workers, who could have spent the time doing anything more fun, have maintained a 24/7 picket line. That is not something people do if they do not care – about their co-workers, about their rights, and about the company itself. Schultz, who sits in his $30m mansion and sends out messages exhorting his employees to show “collective courage”, has not been there. He should pay it a visit. I bet they could teach him a lot about what real progressive values look like.
    Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York
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      McDonald's spies on union activists – that's how scared they are of workers' rights | Indigo Olivier

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      On 24 February, Vice reported that McDonald’s has, for years, spied on activists and employees engaged in labor organizing and the Fight for $15 campaign. Internal McDonald’s corporate documents obtained by Vice confirmed that the company has been concerned with gathering “strategic intelligence” on workers involved in efforts to secure higher wages, better working conditions and a union. This includes using data collection software to monitor employees and their networks through social media and “a team of intelligence analysts in the Chicago and London offices”.
      This comes after years of reporting on similar efforts by Amazon to prevent the unionization of their own employees. Job postings for intelligence analysts to monitor and report on “labor organizing threats”; social media monitoring; interactive “heat mapping” tools to anticipate and pre-empt strikes or union drives; Pinkerton operatives; and, most recently, coordinated efforts with county officials to change the traffic lights outside Amazon’s facility in Bessemer, Alabama to prevent organizers from speaking to workers during shift changes – all have been deployed to secure the company’s bottom line.
      As Vice points out, surveillance against labor organizers is nothing new. What’s new is the use of technology to aid in these efforts, which may also be in violation of federal labor law.
      The surveillance and intimidation of workers is a feature, not a bug, and one that has come to define American capitalism at home and abroad. As Vox noted last June, “the creation of urban police forces was largely spurred by a desire to contain union activism and protest.” While police in southern cities are largely a vestigial outgrowth of slave patrols, in northern cities like Chicago, elite businessmen pushed for the development of municipal police forces to suppress labor organizing around demands like an eight-hour workday. The concept of policing as “public safety” came later.
      There is no evidence to suggest government involvement in the surveillance of workers at either Amazon or McDonald’s. Yet the failure on the part of past administrations to condemn these egregious labor violations – or condemn the yawning wealth gap between megacorporations and the underpaid workers whose labor they depend on – amount to tacit approval of business-as-usual by any means necessary.
      This Sunday, Biden broke this awful trend by releasing a surprisingly strong statement in support of unions. While he stopped short of calling out Amazon by name, his video address was directed at “workers in Alabama” and represents the strongest pro-union statement of any president in modern US history.
      “You should remember that the National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say that unions are allowed to exist, it said we should encourage unions,” Biden said. “There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda. Every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union. The law guarantees that choice.”
      Under an economic system that enriches CEOs by underpaying workers for the value of their time and pocketing the profits, there is a direct connection between the dystopian anti-labor tactics used by the likes of McDonald’s and Amazon and the $1.3tn transfer of wealth to the country’s 664 billionaires over the course of the pandemic. Bezos’s path to becoming the world’s first trillionaire is precisely because of his successful efforts at preventing unions from taking hold in his private empire.
      As Marx put it: capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
      Biden now has a choice to make: Amazon or unions. He can’t fight for both.
      On the campaign trail, Biden sent conflicting messages by cultivating the image of a blue-collar union man and simultaneously promising a room full of corporate donors that under his presidency “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change.”
      Biden adopted a $15 minimum wage as one of his few concessions to the left, in an effort to win over Bernie Sanders supporters, and later changed his tone by saying he didn’t believe the provision would last in the most recent Covid-19 stimulus package. The statement amounted to a shrugging off of one among a number of campaign promises that look less likely to be fulfilled by the day. Democrats are now dishonestly pointing the blame at a single and little-known Senate parliamentarian, though Kamala Harris could easily overrule the decision and lift nearly a million people out of poverty.
      We can and should give credit to Biden for his recent statement on unions while also recognizing that words alone are not enough. Biden has the power to immediately pass a federal $15 minimum wage, raise corporate taxes, call on the National Labor Relations Board to investigate companies like McDonald’s and Amazon which unlawfully spy on their employees, and take a trip to Bessemer to show support for the facility’s 5,800 workers.
      This is a David-versus-Goliath fight and the stakes are simply too high to stop short of executive action. Until he proves otherwise, we need to remember Biden’s message to corporate America: nothing will fundamentally change.
      Indigo Olivier is a 2020-2021 Leonard C Goodman investigative reporting fellow at In These Times magazine More