Starbucks Strike

[FREAK]

No they wouldn't...not how business works. If they can get away with paying 50 cents an hour, they will do it in a heartbeat. Employees are viewed as a liability not an asset by employers in many cases. That's why unions still need to exist.

no one would work for 50c an hour and they couldn’t keep their lights on, that’s not in their best interest as a business.

I’ll tell you what, I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years and keep not buying Starbucks. We can agree to disageee on this one.

 

[BuzzH]

Com on man, Really!? Where I’m from you started working on farms for $6-$7/hr when you were 15 years old working 5x as hard as these Starbucks barestas bucking bails of hay all day. We worked these jobs and didn’t expect to earn a livable wage. It covered gas and gave us some money to start saving for college, car payments, etc. the problem that we’re living through is parents don’t raise their kids to have a work ethic and everyone thinks they’re entitled to more and they’re above these jobs. Look at the student debt crisis. Now people think the government needs to bail kids out for their poor decisions. It’s poor work ethic, poor parenting and an entitled society. That’s why these places can’t stay running. If you have to pay a highscooler 20$/ hr to pour a coffee then everything else need to go up. It’s a capatialistic society driven by supply and demand. I’ll gladly make my own coffee and flip my own damn burger.

Funny...I worked summers haying, cleaning cow shit out of the milking barn, wrenching broke down farm equipment 7 days a week for $300 a month.

Sounds like you were an entitled over paid employee from my perspective. Not sure how those farms you worked for made it having to shell out those kind of wages...

No wonder Starbucks is $3 a cup with insanely high wages like those you were knocking down.

 

[FREAK]

Funny...I worked summers haying, cleaning cow shit out of the milking barn, wrenching broke down farm equipment 7 days a week for $300 a month.

Sounds like you were an entitled over paid employee from my perspective. Not sure how those farms you worked for made it having to shell out those kind of wages...

No wonder Starbucks is $3 a cup with insanely high wages like those you were knocking down.

I probably am entitled, my gradparents were a hell of a lot tougher than me. That’s my point.

 

[Movi]

I probably am entitled, my gradparents were a hell of a lot tougher than me. That’s my point.

Bowtech for sure!

 

[JLS]

Bowtech for sure!

 

[jt13]

I'm a member of a relatively small labor union. I would be worked harder, longer, be treated worse, and be paid less money if we did not have a union. As someone who values my time, work/life balance, and supporting my family- I'm pro union. Hard to imagine there's folks that aren't unless you own the company or business.

 

[BearFoot]

I'm a member of a relatively small labor union. I would be worked harder, longer, be treated worse, and be paid less money if we did not have a union. As someone who values my time, work/life balance, and supporting my family- I'm pro union. Hard to imagine there's folks that aren't unless you own the company or business.

I'm that guy. Dad was a Teamster, Unions would not have me.
Started my own business. I love to work! Harder, longer, I go for it! Someone treated me bad, I'd quit. Another job, better shows up. Really never worked, a day in my life, I enjoy showing up, to do the work. When truly appreciated, the money flows. Opportunities are abundant.

 

[BearFoot]

After delivering news papers, door to door, and making little. My first "real" job paid $1.80 an hour. Busted butt and the boss gave me a 10 cent raise! Went to work for a similar place starting at $2.15! Worked my way up to $3.36. Gas at the time was 28-36 cent a gallon. Rent $110 a month for one bed apartment, Making over a hundred bucks a week, Life was good!

Somewhere along the line, I figured big money was in real estate or business. Before internet. Took some time, discipline, and education in areas that matter. Invested, took a risk, in business, later real estate, then internet business. lost some, but won more.
Every day, in every way, life gets better and better.

 

[Nick87]

Employees are viewed as a liability not an asset by employers in many cases.

For the majority yes, there's some owners that are the latter but that's few and far between.

 

[Nameless Range]

As someone who values my time, work/life balance, and supporting my family- I'm pro union. Hard to imagine there's folks that aren't unless you own the company or business.

I know and am related to folks that aren’t anti-union, but found that being in the unions wasn’t for them. I’ve been a member of two unions in my life, and not all unions are created equal - nor are employers. Some are configured in such a way that really doesn't benefit those who perform at a higher level than their peers. They almost sort of incentivize a regression to the mean for the benefit of all of those in the union. That’s fine but won’t be for everyone. An example of a specific component of a CBA that lends itself to this is when hiring preference between candidates for new jobs or advancement in an organization is near-solely based on longevity. Longevity-alone is a bad way to decide who gets a job.

I appreciate the power of collective bargaining and my life has benefitted from it for the better. Seeing both sides, (management and workers), from people close to me in my life has given me a lot to think about. I do wonder if the gross and increasing disparity in the distribution of wealth in our country will make unions more and more necessary, even though they seem to be struggling nationwide. It’s easy to focus on the frictions unions can have associated with them and not see that large swaths of Americans are getting bent over by plutocrats.

 

[BuzzH]

no one would work for 50c an hour and they couldn’t keep their lights on, that’s not in their best interest as a business.

I’ll tell you what, I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years and keep not buying Starbucks. We can agree to disageee on this one.

Starbucks gross profits for 2021 were 20 billion...tell me again how they can't afford to pay their employees $20/hour.

What a joke.

Starbucks Gross Profit 2010-2023 | SBUX

Starbucks annual/quarterly gross profit history and growth rate from 2010 to 2023. Gross profit can be defined as the profit a company makes after deducting the variable costs directly associated with making and selling its products or providing its services. <ul...

www.macrotrends.net

 

[RobertD]

Lots of fast food type places are going to have to adjust their entire business models IMO both in the wake of inflation and as an already needed change to practices surrounding employee compensation.

Setting aside the union issue, which I'm pretty neutral on, I have wondered lately if the model a lot of these places employ (dirt cheap food provided by a blend of robots and dirt cheap paid workers) isn't just dead and most haven't realized it yet.

There's a comment floating around about employers seeing employees as liabilities instead of assets. This complaint gets overstated some, and is definitely an attitude that can create biases in the minds of those most allegiant to the worker and the union, BUT... it's still mostly true and especially so in fast food, I would guess.

My paternal grandfather was not a union man. In fact, he was management - retired military, rose to a regional management position with a company that built frames for mobile homes. One of the neat things about his management style, though, that drove his success and ability to manage 100s of workers across various plants was his insistence on investing in employees as assets and choosing to improve the workforce he had instead of seek to replace/augment it.

He was big on internal advancement and pay raises and felt they built a better workforce than outside hiring could. I don't know if he was always correct in that assessment but he seems to have been good at what he did. The crux of his argument, by the way, was basically "you get what you pay for."

99% of fast food places are in decline because their institutional values suck. They pour their money into marketing shit products served in the cheapest way possible and it has turned into a race to the bottom. And they don't invest in their people, so there's no one with any incentive to improve the presentation of the product at the point of purchase.

You know who doesn't have this problem? Chick-fil-a. Because they realized a few years back that the cheap-at-all-cost model is broken and is a recipe for poor quality. They invest in their people, too. Did you know you can't manage a CFA franchise unless you've worked for a certain number of years in the kitchen or behind the register?

That's the same thing from earlier. Invest in your people, and you get a workforce that's motivated to do good work for their employer. Starbucks will have to figure something out I guess but that's on them.

 

[FREAK]

Starbucks gross profits for 2021 were 20 billion...tell me again how they can't afford to pay their employees $20/hour.

What a joke.

Starbucks Gross Profit 2010-2023 | SBUX

Starbucks annual/quarterly gross profit history and growth rate from 2010 to 2023. Gross profit can be defined as the profit a company makes after deducting the variable costs directly associated with making and selling its products or providing its services. <ul...

www.macrotrends.net

People were saying the same stuff in the early 2000’s about Kmart, sears, JC Pennie’s, etc., etc. Look at those companies now.

 

[Nick87]

Sm

They invest in their people, too. Did you know you can't manage a CFA franchise unless you've worked for a certain number of years in the kitchen or behind the register?

Smart.

 

[406dn]

Agreed, but it also goes deeper than that. I witnessed 2 employees take a credit card that an elderly customer forgot and use it to but snacks on their brake. Store manager fired them. Two days later, they were back.

Really, two days? I'd need proof of that.

As some one who has actually gotten people their jobs back, it takes far longer than that to overturn a termination. Just going thru the grievance process takes much longer than that. Selecting and scheduling an arbitrator takes much longer than that. Awaiting the arbitrator's decision takes over a month generally.

So I'll file this in the file of BS.

An addendum: Every termination case has different circumstances, but if a company can prove the employee(s) behaved dishonestly, that is a very difficult case for a union to prevail.

 

[Redmt]

I won't take a stand for or against unions. Personally I wouldn't want to work for a company that needed a union contact to treat it's employees fairly. The employees ARE the company. Without employees you have no company.

 

[duckhunt]

As non-union Management with a facility that has a union, I've seen the good and bad. For the most part when the union gets a CBA the pay rate increase extends to the non union employees as well.

Things i like :
Democracy at the union level. All the employees get to have input on pay increases and where to apply them. One year the pay increase went all to retirement, the next year towards take home pay and health coverage.

The Fact that pay negotiations are "One and Done" You don't have individuals asking for pay raises all throughout the year.

A structured system for dealing with grievances, and performance issues.

A contract where we can have a clear budget for payroll for the next 2 years.

Things I don't like:

Union Dues. I think unions can be just as greedy as any corporation.

Survivor Spouse payout rates. The actuary that figured that must be on a commission.

Retirement vesting. If many of these folks had their money they had paid in, in a S&P 500 index fund, they would have a lot better cash flow in retirement.

The Management vs Union Mindset.


If folks want to complain about CEO pay, I'd love to share an article i just came across.

Union Leaders Earn More than Most CEOs​

By AUSTIN YACK
May 15, 2017 9:06 PM

Last week, AFL-CIO, the largest trade union organization in the U.S., released the results from its annual Executive Paywatch report: CEOs at S&P 500 companies earned on average $13.1 million in 2016, and “this greed of corporate CEOs” has caused a “CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 347 to 1.”
ISAAC SCHORR
“It’s shameful that CEOs can make tens of millions of dollars,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said, “and still destroy the livelihoods of the hard-working people who make their companies profitable.”
But the AFL-CIO report neglected to include the average salary for all CEOs in the U.S. in 2016, which, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was $194,350. These same union leaders who criticize the salaries of CEOs earned on average $252,370 in 2016 — nearly $60,000 more than their private-sector counterparts.

The Center for Union Facts, the union watchdog that unveiled the average presidential salary from nearly 200 unions, found that some union leaders are earning lucrative salaries north of $700,000.
“Timothy Canoll, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, earned more than $775,000 last year,” wrote Luka Ladan, the Center for Union Facts’s communications director, in a column for the East Bay Times. “International Brotherhood of Boilermakers President Newton Jones came close at $756,973, while Laborers’ International Union President Terence O’Sullivan made nearly $718,000 in total compensation.”

Even AFL-CIO’s president Richard Trumka made nearly $300,000 in 2016, as he championed the narrative that corporations are attempting to “rig the economy in their favor and line their CEOs’ pockets at the expense of the workers who make their businesses run.”


AUSTIN YACK — Austin Yack is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute and a University of California, Santa Barbara alumnus. @austinyack

Very interesting information. As a union member I am very interested in digging deeper into this.

 

[shb]

 

[WoodMoose]

just another symptom of the tumultuous times we live in right now.

in my opinion, it isn't the "times we live in",,, union vs company antics have gone on (in some cases with extreme violence) since the 1800s,,, and they have never liked folks not supporting the union "strikes",,,

 

[WoodMoose]

Or someone else putting out a house fire? Or someone else programming a computer? Or someone else managing wildlife?

I don't equate an entry level job at starbucks (or any other "fast food joint") with firemen, computer programmer, or wildlife manager,,,

guess I'm a butthead?