Starbucks and the Progressive Agenda

by Randy Shaw, 2009-10-20

The words “Starbucks” and “progressive” rarely appear together. For most of the political left, the Starbucks Coffee Company is a villain that drives independent cafes out of business, mistreats workers, and profits from hijacking progressive values and transforming them into corporate profits. Yet Starbucks has long offered generous health benefits to domestic partners, pays wages equal if not often greater than independent cafes, has dramatically boosted incomes for organic coffee farmers abroad, and provides ample career opportunities for people of color. For many neighborhoods, Starbucks is also the only option for quality coffee. Longtime progressive activist Kim Fellner decided to assess Starbuck’s mixed record in her extremely thought-provoking book, Wrestling with Starbucks. Much of what Fellner uncovers will surprise readers, with her most provocative questions going beyond Starbucks to address some of the Left’s inconsistent attitudes toward large corporations.

It may seem odd that longtime labor activist Kim Fellner, currently with the AFL-CIO’s affiliate, Working America, would write a book offering a fair assessment of Starbucks. But Fellner’s progressive background is what makes the book worth reading, as it gives her the credibility to trust her reporting.

Myths About Starbucks

Fellner was inspired to write this book by her witnessing anti-globalization activists commit vandalism against Starbucks during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. She could not understand why the company was targeted when it had not played the negative role in the global economy of other multinational corporations. (Starbucks had 2498 stores in 1999, dramatically increasing to 12,440 by 2006).

Kraft, Proctor & Gamble and Nestle (think Maxwell House, Yuban, Folgers) are the true coffee giants, yet rarely is there a protest against these companies for their lack of commitment to fair trade or organic coffee, or their unfairness to third-world growers. Starbucks appears to have been targeted because, unlike these companies, it has a formal mission statement that promotes the company as focusing on “uncompromising principles,” rather than simply profit maximization.

So Fellner went off on an investigative mission to discover the contradictions both within Starbucks, as well as its progressive critics. This led her to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, many key company executives, domestic and overseas critics of Starbucks, and even to both work a shift in a Starbucks and to spend a day from opening to closing observing the sociology of a Starbucks store.

What she learned is that contrary to popular mythology, Starbucks has not been the death knell for independent cafes. In fact, Starbucks’ growth has coincided with a massive increase in independent, locally owned coffee stores.

Does this mean that the arrival of a Starbucks has never killed a local café? No. But as Fellner details, many of these local coffee establishments are poorly run, and/or serve weak or inconsistent coffee, and are not committed to organic or fair trade coffee.

Fellner attended a convention of independent coffee businesses and learned that the vast majority of proprietors were not interested in selling fair trade or organic coffee; they just want to run successful businesses. And these businesses typically did not offer health benefits for employees, paid lower wages than Starbucks, and employees were overwhelmingly white.

Yet under the prevailing progressive ethos, small business is good and chain stores are bad, regardless of their respective labor conditions or commitment to social and environmental justice.

Starbucks Realities

As hard as she tries to show the positives of Starbucks, Fellner ultimately runs into the larger than life ego of Howard Schultz.

Schultz did not found Starbucks, but it was his strategy of making the company’s cafes’ a “third place” for developing a sense of community between home and work that built the Starbucks empire. The man has a genius for tapping into the consumer desires of Americans.

But like many who achieve great business success, Schultz steadfastly believes that whatever he does is the “right” thing to do.

Schultz’s family background instilled in him a commitment to provide health benefits to Starbucks employees. But it did not inspire him to pay them a living wage, to forego flagrantly resisting efforts at unionization, or to even ensure that his fulltime workers earn enough to continue their climb up the company’s career ladder.

According to Fellner, what the latter fact means is that a Starbucks barista working 35 hours per week at $8.00 per hour plus tips earns a paltry $17,000 annually. And she found that wage increases after six months amounted to as little as five cents an hour.

True, Starbucks employees earn more than comparable employees in independent cafes, and more than those in major competing corporations like Dunkin Donuts. But Schultz’s failure to pay its employees enough for them to afford decent housing the major cities where the chain is omnipresent says far more about his values than his providing health insurance to 40% of employees.

Further, while early in the book Fellner interviews young African-Americans who feel that Starbucks has given them a ladder to the future, even some of those whose stories she tells quit the company between the time Fellner interviewed them and her completion of the book. So the idea that Starbucks offers a career path for inner-city non-college educated youth is somewhat illusory, further undermining Schultz’s image of the business he has created.

Fellner gives an extremely perceptive analysis of the IWW’s attempt to organize in a New York City Starbucks in 2004 that confirms Schultz’s strong anti-union animus. Starbucks has played a major opposition role in 2009 against the proposed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), yet the relative youth of its workforce, their largely transitory status, the small number of workers per store, and the low wages in their industry (unlike Wal-Mart, whose retail clerks make dramatically less than union workers performing the same job) makes the company a very difficult organizing target.

Progressives and Large Corporations/Chains

Despite its many shortcomings, Fellner convincingly shows that Starbucks has been unfairly lumped in with the far greater corporate wrongdoers like Wal-Mart, Nike, or Chevron. And it is not like Gallo Wine, which I note in Beyond the Fields aroused such visceral anger that progressives still do not purchase its products more than thirty years after the end of the legendary United Farm Workers of America boycott.

To the contrary, Starbucks provides a homey environment often otherwise lacking in commercial districts (visit a Dunkin Donuts and compare). And its wages benefits, working conditions, quality of coffee, and use of fair trade and organic beans are far better than its corporate coffee competitors.

Ultimately, what drives progressives mad about Starbucks is both its size and its co-opting of the once exclusively counter-culture café scene. We do not want to imagine the beatniks of 1950’s North Beach debating and reading poetry in a Starbucks, yet we are now forced to confront Bob Dylan and other 1960’s artists selling their music through Starbucks outlets.

And frankly, some progressives may not like the idea that a large corporation has made cappuccinos, lattes and espressos available to the masses in shopping malls and airports. This is the case even though most Starbucks patrons likely backed Obama in the 2008 election, and the company has clearly given African-American neighborhoods access to better coffee.

So Fellner’s book is about Starbucks, but it is also about how progressives view large corporations that seek to appropriate and expand key signposts of a once fringe counter-culture. If your book group is looking to provoke lengthy group discussion sessions about coffee and how we all live our lives, Fellner’s Wresting with Starbucks clearly does the trick.

Randy Shaw is the author of Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century