The barista who fought Starbucks
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 June 2023
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lexie Rizzo took on Starbucks. Now she’s out of a job. Today, a look at the U.S. labor laws that are supposed to protect workers who are organizing unions.
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People describe Lexi Rizzo as a “coffee person.” She loves drinking coffee, talking about coffee. And she loved her job at Starbucks. She worked there for nearly eight years, until she got fired in March.
Rizzo believes she was fired for being a union organizer. Rizzo joined the unionization efforts in 2021, when her Starbucks became one of the first three stores in the country to successfully unionize.
In the past year, judges have ruled that Starbucks violated U.S. labor laws more than 130 times across six states, among the most of any private employer nationwide. The rulings found that Starbucks retaliated against union supporters by surveilling them at work, firing them and promising them improved pay and benefits if they rejected the organizing campaign. Starbucks founder and ex-CEO Howard Schulz has denied any wrongdoing – and remains confident that his company does not need a union for his employees to be happy.
Greg Jaffe reports on Rizzo’s case and examines the U.S. labor laws that are supposed to protect workers who are organizing unions.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So this story starts with Lexi Briso. She's 25 years old and lives in Buffalo, New York. |
| 0:07.0 | That's Greg Jaffy. He's a national reporter at the post. |
| 0:13.0 | And this past March, she walks into her job at Starbucks. |
| 0:18.0 | She's been going to work for months, worried that this is the day that she's going to get fired. |
| 0:25.0 | I knew anything I did imperfectly would get me fired. |
| 0:28.0 | Just trying to be the best at my job. Like if they need me and they can't fire me. |
| 0:33.0 | So Lexi had been working for Starbucks for nearly eight years. |
| 0:37.0 | And back in August of 2021, she decided to organize her stores, part of a growing movement there in Buffalo. |
| 0:44.0 | And she was instrumental in helping her store unionize and become one of the first, one of the first two in America to unionize. |
| 0:52.0 | And that brought a lot of attention to her and it brought a lot of attention to her store. |
| 0:59.0 | On that day and late March, Lexi was right. That ended up being the day that she was fired. |
| 1:04.0 | And right after she walks out of the store, one of her colleagues holds up a phone on iPhone and asks her, |
| 1:11.0 | if she has anything that she wants to say to Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks. |
| 1:16.0 | And so at that point, Lexi just unloads a lot of her anger and frustration. |
| 1:20.0 | I have given every ounce of everything that I have to this company. There is no one that has worked with me that will not tell you that I do not love and care for this place. |
| 1:29.0 | And my partner is my customers. My heart is broken. |
| 1:34.0 | I don't know how you sleep at night. I don't know how you forget yourself in the near. |
| 1:38.0 | You have hundreds of thousands of people giving everything that they have so that you can make another dollar. |
| 1:43.0 | And then you treat us like we're dirt. It's disgusting. |
| 1:48.0 | I thought Lexi could really be a sort of a glowing example, a post-war child for everything that Howard Schultz wanted Starbucks to be. |
| 1:58.0 | She's a person who loves her job, who's found meaning in her job, and who's used it as a ladder to the middle class to a piece of the American dream. |
| 2:10.0 | And so I thought Starbucks should be just immensely proud of her. And instead what happens is she gets fired. |
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