Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has agreed to testify before the Senate labor committee after committee chair Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) threatened to subpoena the executive to appear in a hearing on the company’s rampant union busting later this month.
Sanders announced the company’s decision on Tuesday after weeks of demurring from the company, thanking members in the committee for being prepared to vote to subpoena Schultz, which was expected to happen on Wednesday.
“I’m happy to announce that Howard Schultz, the CEO and founder of Starbucks, has finally agreed to testify before the Senate HELP Committee,” Sanders said. “Let’s be clear. In America, workers have the constitutional right to organize unions and engage in collective bargaining to improve their wages and working conditions. Unfortunately Starbucks, under Mr. Schultz’s leadership, has done everything possible to prevent that from happening.”
The senator added that the company was recently found by a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) judge to have broken labor laws hundreds of times in Buffalo, New York, where the union movement kicked off in 2021.
These violations are on top of the fact that the company has not yet signed a single first contract with any of the nearly 290 stores that have unionized so far, and that the NLRB has found over 1,300 violations of labor laws from the company over the course of Starbucks Workers United’s union campaign.
“The [Health, Education, Labor and Pensions] Committee intends to make clear that in America we must not have a two-tiered justice system in which billionaires and large corporations can break the law with impunity, while working class people are held accountable for their actions,” said Sanders. “I look forward to hearing from Mr. Schultz as to when he intends to end his illegal anti-union activities and begin signing fair first contracts with his unions.”
“Starbucks’s strategy is quite clear: it is to stall, stall and stall. They understand that it is cheaper to break the law than to follow it,” Sanders added during a press conference on Tuesday.
The union has celebrated the news. “We look forward to Howard Schultz testifying in front of the US Senate. As the architect of Starbucks’ unprecedented anti-union campaign, it is high time for him to be held accountable for his actions,” Starbucks Workers United wrote on Twitter. “Howard Schultz needs to learn that even billionaires aren’t above the law.”
The hearing, which is slated to be about Starbucks’s union busting, is scheduled for Wednesday, March 29. Last week, Sanders scheduled a vote to subpoena Schultz if he didn’t agree to appear before the committee after the company had avoided the request for weeks.
The company responded, offering to send a lower-level executive to the committee, but Sanders rebuffed that request, saying that Schultz is central to the company’s union-busting campaign and that the billionaire must personally answer to his and his company’s actions.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy