Starbucks’ new interim CEO Howard Schultz said Monday that the coffee chain will suspend its share buyback program to “invest more profits in our people and our stores.”
The pivot of the strategy comes just three weeks after Starbucks announced that Schultz, which bought the company in 1987 and ran it for more than three decades, would be assuming the main role of the company until he found a permanent general manager. Since that announcement, analysts and experts have speculated that Schultz was taking over to help the company fight a growing workers’ rights campaign that has seen six of its stores. voting to unionize since Decemberwith at least 140 more in 27 states petitioning for union elections.
- Workers at Starbucks ’first unionized company in the country are leaving their jobs due to COVID problems
- Starbucks workers vote in favor of a union, the first for the coffee chain
Two weeks ago, baristas and others Seattle Starbucks employees voted in favor of unionizing, the first such vote in the city where Starbucks originated. Starbucks owns 9,000 company-owned stores in the United States
Schultz’s blog post on Monday was full of references to “partners,” what the company calls employees.
“My first job is to spend a lot of time with partners,” Schultz wrote. “To raise your voice.”
In his pre-company stage, Schultz successfully fought attempts to syndicate Starbucks stores and roasting plants in the United States. Starbucks had to reinstate fired workers or pay to resolve violations of labor law many times under Schultz’s leadership in the early 2000s.
The National Labor Relations Board found last year that Starbucks retaliated illegally against two Philadelphia bartenders trying to unionize. Starbucks monitored employees’ social media, illegally spied on their conversations and eventually fired them, the board said. He ordered Starbucks to stop interfering with workers’ right to organize and offer reinstatement to both workers.
No “representative” required.
More recently, the NLRB filed a lawsuit against Starbucks alleging that district and store administrators in Phoenix spied on and threatened workers who supported unionization. The lawsuit alleges that Starbucks suspended one union supporter and fired another.
In a November letter to employees, published just before the first union vote in three stores in Buffalo, New York, Schultz said he tried to create the kind of company his blue-collar father never went to. have the opportunity to work.
He recalled the trauma of his low-income family after his father suffered a work injury and said that is why Starbucks has benefits such as health care, free college tuition, parental leave and employee action grants.
“No partner has ever needed a representative to look for things we all have as partners at Starbucks,” Schultz wrote. “And I’m sad and worried that someone thinks this is necessary now.”
Schultz is holding a town hall meeting with employees on Monday.
Late last year, Starbucks announced that it was committed to a $ 20 billion share buyback and dividend repurchase program to return profits to investors. It is unclear how much of this figure would have been used to repurchase shares.
Starbucks announced on March 16 that Schultz was intervene to replace Kevin Johnson, CEO retiring.
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