Crushed: The myth of the caring corporation | Will Bunch Newsletter

“To put this into perspective,” a user calling himself The Shire wrote on Twitter, “this would be like if the Phillies were in the NLCS and the Eagles were 6-0.” What do Philadelphians do with themselves, in other words, when their sports fantasies start to become reality? The bittersweet truth is that even if all your sports teams keep winning, November’s elections will surely bring that more accustomed feeling: heartbreak.

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At age 69, with a net worth somewhere between $3 billion and $4 billion and an array of homes in Hawaii and the Hamptons, and a new $40 million penthouse in Manhattan’s West Village, Starbucks coffee trailblazer Howard Schultz never needed to work another day in his life — and that was the plan, for a while.

So when he made the somewhat surprising announcement in March that he was coming back as interim CEO of the brand that’s spread over-caffeinated American capitalism around the globe, Schultz made sure everybody knew it wasn’t about the Benjamins.

“There are two words that I have often used to describe my relationship with Starbucks,” Schultz wrote on his first day back as new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss. “The first word is Love.” He quickly added that the second word is “responsibility ... The world today needs Starbucks to be the best version of ourselves …an ever improving, ever evolving version.”

So apparently that old pop standard is right, that you always hurt the ones you love. Because in little more than a half a year, Schultz’s much-ballyhooed comeback featuring a coast-to-coast “listening tour” — aimed at understanding louder employee grievances in the (almost) post-COVID age, as baristas in a growing number of stores vote to unionize — has devolved into what labor leaders claim is a red wedding of revenge.

In recent weeks, Starbucks employee activists have logged more than 35 formal complaints with federal labor regulators that management is harassing and firing workers involved in the union drive, and withholding raises or other benefits at the stores than have voted to organize. In Kansas City and the chain’s hometown of Seattle, Starbucks management abruptly closed two outlets that were hotbeds of union activity. In Ann Arbor, workers at one location struck for a second time when a 26-year-old union organizer was fired. Said the woman, Sasha Anisimova: “If anything, they’ve unleashed a beast with my store.”

Starbucks denies any unlawful retaliation, even as the firm defends its philosophical stance against unions — an attitude that begins at very top with Schultz. “I’ve never met a businessman like him,” a labor organizer named Richard Bensinger told the Washington Post’s Greg Jaffe, in a recent, remarkable profile of Schultz. “He hates unions more than he loves money.”

That’s because the very notion that his struggling-to-stay-in-the-middle-class workers would need any other advocate for their wellbeing other than the benevolent father that is the Starbucks corporation is shattering to the worldview that allowed Schultz to build up not just the coffee brand but also his own fantastic wealth. In the Post profile, Jaffe portrays Schultz as befuddled by so many workers’ inability to see what the love of compassionate capitalism can do for them. Schultz bluntly described labor unions as “an adversary that’s threatening the very essence of what [we] believe to be true.”

Schultz isn’t alone in what’s shaping up as an autumn of discontent for America’s billionaire class, with several struggling to convert the largest fortunes ever known to humankind into that crazy little thing called love. The richest of them all, the Penn-educated electric-car-and-space mogul Elon Musk, has been all over the map in 2022 — with the idea that if you can’t win Twitter with the brilliance of your tweets (backing a Putin-flavored peace plan for Ukraine, or solidarity with Kanye West despite his antisemitic meltdown), then just buy it. Next on the list, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is — when he’s not burning billions on his own space missions — in solidarity with Schultz in grasping to understand why so much of his workforce seems to be in open revolt even after he gave many employees a raise.

But 2022′s public agony for the Starbucks entrepreneur truly stands out, because arguably no global brand has invested more than Starbucks in the myth of the socially responsible corporation — able to make the world a better place for everyone, including its workers as well as its customers, while making billions of dollars for its investors and its top executives at the same time.

Schultz made the case for his vision at a 2017 New York Times conference where he said Starbucks has a responsibility “to achieve the fragile balance between profit, social impact, and a moral obligation” to do everything possible “to enhance the lives of our employees and the communities we serve” — while making the healthy profits they’d need to pull that off, of course.

And no doubt the company undertook a number of laudable — and highly publicized — initiatives in that direction, such as leadership in offering health benefits to part-time employees (and to domestic partners, in 1988, when few others were doing so) or an opportunity to get a free online college education.

Those employee perks were wrapped in a broader ethos of corporate do-gooding — pushing Fair Trade coffee brands from underdeveloped nations, or promising to achieve carbon-neutral green coffee — in the hopes that good vibes made a $6 latte taste better. For Schultz, the myth was so intoxicating that he even flirted with running for president, when he wasn’t proposing to help end racism with messages on coffee cups.

The truth is that corporate responsibility at Starbucks was always shrouded in contradiction — it’s a world leader in plastics pollution, for one example, and has failed badly in its promises to fix that. The Starbucks workforce has reached a breaking point in the post-pandemic era. On his current listening tour, Schultz has dug deep for empathy as he listens to employees talk of their struggles to make ends meet, their difficulties in dealing with customers in an increasingly broken society, or just day-to-day problems with lack of staffing or broken equipment.

But any newfound compassion dissolves at the idea that workers need a union to fight for better wages, perks and working conditions. For Schultz, the reason he so vehemently opposes what he calls “a third party” intervening in the Starbucks way of doing business is obvious, because the rising desire for unionization bursts the bubble of the compassionate corporation, and how can Schultz enjoy his time on his $130 million yacht without that fantasy?

The fact that Schultz’s personal pain over this big reveal is now playing out, according to activists, in a harsh campaign of reprisals and firings, should finally demolish the worst myths of corporate responsibility, revealing that so much of it was marketing gloss to prop up an unsustainable system. Compassion will never win out — at Starbucks or anywhere else in corporate America — if it means giving up even a smidgeon of control.

Question: Do you ever get the sense that Democrats are inexplicably bad at conveying to the public that the economy almost always performs better under Dem admins than Republican admins? — Via Merrie (@MeriQueenOfCats) on Twitter

Answer: Merrie (or should I say, Your Majesty?), I’ve been seeing this my entire adult life, certainly since the Bill Clinton era. But I do think that 2022′s very mixed environment — a record-setting job market, but also historically high inflation — is a very tough place for President Biden and his fellow Democrats to woo voters. It’s easy for the GOP to play on your emotions and attack high prices at the gas station or the supermarket without offering any actual solutions. But it’s hard for Democrats to brag about a good job market — a very real thing that I’ve watched benefit the under-30 generation in my own family — because it turns off the millions of voters who don’t have new jobs but are paying higher prices. It’s a shame because the Dems are doing things to help folks — Monday alone saw the launch of the student-debt cancellation app, and the White House-created arrival of lower-cost hearing aids — yet the GOP is stealing the midterms with violent, emotional lizard-brain appeals to voter fear. It feels like watching a slow-motion train wreck.

There’s a lot going on with these 2022 midterm elections — from whether Republicans really want to count all the votes going forward, to the Democrats’ crusade to preserve abortion rights — so it’s not surprising that one of the more alarming trends is happening somewhat under the radar. While it’s no secret that conservatives are unhappy with the current state of K-12 education in America — with their many complaints about alleged liberal indoctrination and the role of teachers’ unions — it’s becoming shocking how many fairly prominent Republicans are now asking, how many of our kids even need world-class schooling, anyway?

A hat-tip to education-reform guru Jennifer Berkshire for spotlighting this quote from the underdog GOP candidate for governor in Illinois, Darren Bailey, who said this in a recent interview: “The state should be paying less money. The state should be pulling back, letting the local school boards determine how they want to educate their children, offering school choice. […] What is good for New Trier is not good for Clay County, Illinois. Most, many of our children are, some of our children are going to go to the military. They’re going to go right into the workforce. There’s welders, pipe fitters, linemen. So that’s what public education needs to be.”

No, that is absolutely not what it needs to be. In a nation already reeling from climate denial, a public embrace of conspiracy theories like QAnon, and a decline in civic knowledge and engagement, less learning for those kids that some Republican decides are on “the McDonald’s track,” as a GOP lawyer here in Pennsylvania framed it recently, is a sure way to speed the end of democracy — which many conservatives seem to want. And 2022 candidates like our own Doug Mastriano want to translate this into bad policy. It’s incumbent upon Democrats, or anyone who cares about critical thinking, to fight this idea, from the school boards to the statehouse.