Coming Soon: The Truth About Starbucks

Put down that grande non-fat caramel macchiato or whatever Starbucks concoction you're drinking.  Turns out the coffee giant has a history of being anti-barista, anti-union, and thus anti-Employee Free Choice Act.

In fact, Starbucks' nasty labor practices make the company look an awful lot like Wal-Mart.  The National Labor Relations Board has repeatedly found Starbucks guilty of illegally terminating, harassing, intimidating, and discriminating against employees attempting to unionize.  Starbucks has settled five labor disputes in the last few years in New York, Minnesota, and Michigan, spending millions on legal fees to avoid exposing their anti-worker ways.  And Starbucks has led the charge on a so-called Employee Free Choice Act "compromise," which would require 70 percent of workers to sign union authorization cards instead of the much more manageable 50 percent initially proposed by this legislation.

We've known for a while where Starbucks billionaire CEO Howard Schultz stands on unions.  After all, it was Schultz who once said that if workers "had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union."  While Starbucks pretends to be pro-barista, claiming to offer workers decent wages and health insurance, these "progressive" policies are less substantive than the company's frothy milk-based beverages.  The reality is, as Liza Featherstone has noted, Starbucks insures a lower percentage of its workers than Wal-Mart.