Starbucks - A controversy-flavoured shakerato

June was “Pride Month” in the United States and across the Western world, the month celebrating the pride of the LGBTQIA+ community, but for one American company something went wrong: a union called Starbucks Workers United (yes, that Starbucks) harshly criticised Howard Schultz's company (yes, that Howard Schultz) for forcing some of the chain's coffee shops not to display the rainbow flag. Starbucks denied any controversy, saying it had simply applied its own policies, in force for decades, and reaffirming its full support for the LGBTQIA+ community. The company's leadership pointed out that it had been among the first to give its employees' partners full health cover regardless of the type of union - in 1988, when corporate America was far less friendly towards the rainbow world. And more: since 2013 Starbucks has also provided supplementary health cover for those who want to transition from one gender to another. This was not enough, however, to stop the storm, and Starbucks found itself in the middle of controversy, once again.

Disclaimer: this is not an editorial about Pride Month: a few issues ago we already discussed the bill that codified same-sex marriage in Washington. It is a reflection on Starbucks. And I wrote the words “once again” a moment ago because in the United States the coffee chain is going through a considerable shift in perception, a symbol of a country that takes different directions at a speed that sometimes surprises even the most attentive business minds.

There is no need to explain what Starbucks is. The strengths of the world's most famous – and profitable – coffee chain, with more than 35,000 coffee shops and over 400,000 employees in 84 countries, are obvious: the relaxing atmosphere and comfortable armchairs, the fast wi-fi that always works, the 30 different coffee blends to choose from and the good-quality products. Over the decades it has appealed to a varied audience: queuing at Starbucks you find the middle class in the drive-throughs of Louisiana waiting for their Frappuccino in the car, and lawyers in Midtown Manhattan in New York impatient for the caffè latte they take back to the office. At Starbucks there are students, people who work on building sites and in offices, tourists and travellers. And not only that: for a long time the chain was a point of reference for a broadly progressive political world in the United States, metropolitan and cosmopolitan, open to the new and at ease with difference. It was for voters. And for politicians too. Or at least, it was until some time ago.

As the Democratic Party's centre of gravity has shifted further left – at least by American standards – many of its voters have moved in that direction too. And with them, their needs. This has led to an upheaval of the establishment as it had always been known, both in laws and in habits: more and more Americans are demanding rights they couldn't even have dreamed of twenty years ago: more holiday, better health cover, more reasonable hours, maternity and paternity leave, different working patterns and so on.

This part of the change, together with the election of Joe Biden, who has always proclaimed himself “the most pro-union president ever”, brings us to what has become the first thorn in the side of Starbucks and its long-standing chairman, Howard Schultz: the internal growth of union organisations. Since the end of 2021 there have been more than 93 complaints to the National Labor Relations Board – the federal agency that enforces labour law – relating to more than 300 open cases of misconduct against Starbucks. Of these, 16 have been decided against the company, which was forced, for example, to reinstate 23 workers it had fired for allegedly breaching their contracts. Others are still awaiting judgment. In March, Starbucks unions called a national strike at more than 100 coffee shops across 40 different cities, demanding new contractual guarantees: the strike was renamed “Founder's Day”, the name Starbucks invented years ago, when the trouble was far off, to honour Howard Schultz.

Little progress has been made: in October, the only meeting between the unions and the company's leadership ended within minutes after the workers' representatives decided to open the meeting up online, on Zoom, and the company's negotiators refused. But attacks on Schultz, once admired by America's centre-left, have become a daily occurrence, and not only from employees. Also from politicians who once held him in high regard. One example is what happened in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, in March, a few days after the national strike. Guest of honour: Schultz. Who knows what he must have thought, the man who in 1994 was publicly celebrated by Democratic president Bill Clinton, who in 2018 openly criticised Donald Trump and who in 2020 said he admired Joe Biden, as he found himself attacked for almost two hours by several progressive senators. First among them Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, who brought before the committee the accusations the unions level at Starbucks. He spoke of “widespread misconduct” and of “calculated and intentional efforts to stall” contract negotiations. He warned against possible violations of workers' rights and of respect for union organisations. He described Starbucks as a corporation that mocks the weakest. Schultz, often silent and always under oath, finally snapped and rejected all the accusations, recalling that he “came from nothing” and grew up in subsidised housing provided by the federal government. He accused Sanders and the Democrats of fuelling hostility towards people who, like him, built their wealth from nothing. And he pointed out that Starbucks pays an average of 17.50 dollars an hour, while the guaranteed minimum wage in the United States is $7.25.

That, however, was not enough. The attacks from the Democrats continued and are still continuing. But they did not and do not come from the Republicans, who as recently as five years ago would never have imagined defending the chairman of a coffee chain so loved by the country's progressive voters. And so the libertarian senator Rand Paul called the company “an extraordinary example” of made-in-USA entrepreneurship. While former presidential candidate Mitt Romney – who lost to Obama in 2012 – went even further: “It's really quite extraordinary that you are being attacked by people who have never had the opportunity to create a single job”.

The Senate committee hearing was a perfect picture of a political situation turned upside down and paradoxical. The ongoing union struggle, a symbol of changing times on this side of the ocean too. The episode of the rainbow disappearing from Starbucks coffee shops during Pride month, a sign that something in the company is not under control. And then there is what happened last month in a federal court in New Jersey, the latest thorn in the side for Schultz and his team: a jury ordered Starbucks to pay 25 million dollars to Shannon Phillips, a former regional manager who had sued the company for unfair dismissal. At Starbucks for more than ten years, Phillips lost her job after two African American men were arrested in a coffee shop in Philadelphia. She refused to fire the white employee who called the police; Starbucks sent her home; and on 14 June she won her lawsuit, in which she accused the company of discriminating against her because she was white.

A metaphor that perfectly captures the historical moment experienced by one of the few American companies that had managed to be loved on a bipartisan basis by the United States. And that continues to be criticised by a world its products now seem to struggle to represent.

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