THE MORNING RANT: Starbucks Should Not Have Alienated Conservatives as It Now Battles the NLRB and the Anti-Carbon Left

In a piece of mine last week about the financial troubles that Starbucks and Nike and are having - with declining revenue and collapsing stock prices - I discussed the likely impact on those woke companies from conservative consumers refusing to buy their products any longer. This soft boycott has denied those companies revenue that they now desperately need.

But I’m not done bashing Starbucks yet.

Starbucks is losing in its battles with labor unions and the National Labor Relations Board. In addition, its new CEO is under fire for being a climate sinner. If Starbucks were a normal, for-profit business that avoided politics and sought to enhance shareholder value, I might care. But because Starbucks is a wicked corporation that is not only abusive to its employees, but one that has sought to use its influence to advance the cultural-communist agenda, I don’t care. In fact, I’m cheering for its destruction, and if unionization is a weapon to destroy this cancerous corporation, then good for the union.

As I documented, the coffee purveyor has embraced an evil level of wokeness, including a stated intent to discriminate against white employees and job applicants, and also incentivizing its pregnant employees to terminate their pregnancies. And I didn’t even get around to mentioning Starbucks’ racially-divisive disaster with its “Race Together” campaign, which essentially challenged its baristas to make white customers confess to their white privilege, while also encouraging white baristas to apologize for their own privilege to non-white customers.

Then there is the famous Philadelphia loitering case, in which a Starbucks manager asked for police to remove non-paying loiterers trying to use the store’s facilities. Starbucks punished both the store manager and the District Manager, and effectively smeared them both as racists. But there is something even more despicable about Starbucks’ actions against this District Manager. She was also being punished in response to allegations that black Starbucks managers were being paid less than white managers. The District Manager’s scalp was offered up to the activists, but there was a problem with that – the persecuted District Manager had no input on setting salaries!

In a rare bit of justice, Starbucks was ordered to pay $25 million for its disgraceful, discriminatory actions.

“Jury awards $25.6 million to white Starbucks manager fired after the arrests of 2 Black men” [AP – 6/14/2023]

The company’s rationale for suspending the district manager, who was not responsible for the store where the arrests took place, was an allegation that Black store managers were being paid less than white managers, according to the lawsuit. Phillips said that argument made no sense since district managers had no input on employee salaries.

There’s a clear pattern here about Starbucks’ woke behavior. While the company is reliably far-left in its stated politics, it treats its front-line employees terribly. One might even think that Starbucks’ radical wokeness serves as cover for being abusive to its employees. But it’s been my observation that denizens of corporate C-Suites nowadays are genuinely hard-left in their politics, at least culturally, while simultaneously feeling contemptuous of their labor force, whom they perceive as being lower-status deplorables whose compensation reduces the bottom line.

Unsurprisingly, where there is bad management that mistreats employees, unionization starts to have appeal for the employees. In late 2021, a Starbucks in Buffalo, NY voted to unionize. The movement has grown since then. Less than two years later, “more than 360 of Starbucks’ roughly 9,000 company-owned locations have voted to unionize, according to National Labor Relations Board data.”

Starbucks executives retaliated by closing 23 unionized coffee houses.

A quarter-century ago I would have been allied with Starbucks in this battle against unionization, but that was before companies like Starbucks allied with radical leftists in declaring culture war on half of the country.

My principles also would have led me to strongly oppose the National Labor Relations Board dictating to Starbucks what stores it can operate, and how. But again, Starbucks declared war on me, so I don’t care. If Starbucks wants those of us who are “pro-business” conservatives to care about their battle against economic communists, maybe the company shouldn’t have embraced cultural communism. Let their good friends on the left save them from the NLRB.

“US orders Starbucks to reopen 2 New York stores company shut down after workers unionized” [NY Post – 9/16/2024]

Geoffrey Carter, an administrative law judge with the National Labor Relations Board, ruled on Friday that Starbucks “violated the National Labor Relations Act” by “permanently closing its two remaining stores in Ithaca … for antiunion reasons” while “failing and refusing to bargain with Workers United.” Starbucks must comply with the order by reopening the locations “within a reasonable period of time,” according to the judge.

Kurt Schlichter gets it. In response to the legacy argument that we conservatives should be upset that a federal agency is forcing Starbucks to re-open unionized coffeehouses that had been closed, Col. Schlichter wrote ”Starbucks always embraces liberal causes so I figured they should go talk to their Democrat friends in power because I’m not going to spend one iota of my political [energy] bailing them out of the mess they got themselves into even as they disrespect people like me.”

Corporations that engage in left-wing cultural activism need to understand this point. Those of us on the right who defend free markets and fight against socialism will not protect those corporations when they learn that their cultural communist friends are also economic communists.

After Kroger fired several Christian employees for refusing to use their bodies as billboards to promote the LGBTQ agenda, but then expected Congressional Republicans to protect Kroger from anti-business Democrats, Senator Tom Cotton succinctly conveyed this important message to Kroger’s woke CEO: “I’m sorry that’s happening to you. Best of luck.”

Meanwhile, Starbucks is excusing its new CEO, Brian Niccol, from all the green sacraments and restrictions that the ruling class is trying to impose on the rest of us. Mr. Niccol is going to be commuting by private jet several days per week from Southern California to Seattle. Some on the left are noticing and objecting.

“Starbucks CEO is under fire for plan to commute to office by private jet” [8/22/2024]

Incoming Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol will be expected to report to the company's Seattle headquarters three times a week, just like other employees. But while other workers will commute by car or public transportation, Niccol will travel nearly 1,000 miles from his home in Newport Beach, California, to Starbuck's Seattle offices, by corporate jet, according to his offer letter, which was made public in an SEC filing.

Again, if this were a normal, non-woke person working for a normal, non-political company, I would have his back. But take a look at this picture from a recent Wall Street Journal article about Mr. Niccol. Specifically, look at the rightmost book on the shelf behind him. It is titled “How To Avoid A Climate Disaster.”

Mr. Niccol reveals himself to be a believer in The Sustainable Organic Church of the Carbon Apocalypse, yet his actions show him to be a climate heretic. I would not care if he and Starbucks become targets of Just Stop Oil - in fact I’d laugh - and I encourage everyone on the left to boycott Starbucks for the climate sinning the company is engaging in with their hypocritical new CEO.

Starbucks needs our money, and they’ll need our support as the left goes after them, but they’ll get neither. Starbucks chose poorly when it declared culture war on conservatives.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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