The billionaire Starbucks CEO and his ‘Venti’ union fight
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2022
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This spring, Howard Schultz returned as Starbucks CEO to stop a rapidly growing unionizing effort. Today, what happens when an anti-union leader comes up against one of the fastest growing union efforts in the country.
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With more than 225 stores voting to unionize since last fall, the Starbucks unionization effort has been seen as a beacon of hope for the labor movement. But despite his track record of providing workers with substantial benefits, Starbucks's founder and current CEO, Howard Schultz, sees the movement as a personal threat to his life's work. Reporter Greg Jaffe spent time with Schultz to try to understand his beliefs on unionizing, and what the future of the labor movement could be now that it has such a powerful adversary in Schultz.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Well, good morning. |
| 0:05.2 | It is great as always, I've said this many times already, to see so many people in the |
| 0:09.6 | building. |
| 0:12.8 | This is a critically important moment and day for the company. |
| 0:17.9 | That's Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbucks. |
| 0:22.6 | And he's talking to an auditorium full of executives at the company's headquarters in Seattle. |
| 0:28.3 | What are we fighting for right now? |
| 0:31.9 | We fighting for the stock price? |
| 0:34.6 | God forbid. |
| 0:36.6 | We fighting for comps for the stores? |
| 0:39.6 | No. |
| 0:42.1 | Let me tell you what we're fighting for. |
| 0:44.8 | We're fighting for goodness. |
| 0:48.2 | We're fighting for love. |
| 0:50.4 | Schultz is visibly emotional. |
| 0:53.5 | He's taking deep breaths, long pauses, choking back tears as he drives home his point. |
| 1:01.0 | I've known what it has taken to build this place. |
| 1:05.0 | I know what it's at. |
| 1:06.0 | What is at stake right now? |
| 1:11.6 | And we have to show up in a different way. |
| 1:18.4 | Howard Schultz gave this speech just months after he came back to be Starbucks's CEO. |
| 1:24.2 | He had stepped down from the company years ago to do other things like run for president. |
... |
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