On Wednesday, National Legal and Policy Center presented a “Protecting Shareholders and Respecting Rights of ALL Employees” proposal at Starbucks Corporation‘s annual shareholder meeting. The measure requested the company to study the human rights risks to all employees, and the devaluation risks to shareholder assets, from the company’s response to labor organizing efforts. An affiliate of SEIU has aggressively tried to add to its membership numbers with Starbucks employees in recent years, using its usual ethically questionable tactics.
Starbucks’s board of directors opposed our proposal, as explained on page 92 of the company’s proxy statement. NLPC’s response to the Starbucks board’s opposition statement was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February.
Speaking at the meeting as sponsor of the proposal was Paul Chesser, director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project. His three-minute remarks can be heard here, and a transcript follows:
Good morning.
In 2021 and 2022, as the seriously mismanaged Starbucks nosedived with regard to financial performance and stock price, the giant labor union SEIU spotted the weakness and pounced on the Company like a lion on a wounded antelope.
Deploying Big Labor’s familiar harassment and astroturfing tactics, the union drove wedges and instigated malcontent on a store-by-store basis, starting in Buffalo, New York and spreading to other locations.
They had to do it this way, because if SEIU’s Starbucks affiliate tried to do it on a company-wide scale, they never would have amassed enough support to be authorized for collective bargaining rights.
But the goal for Big Labor is to accumulate dues-paying members, rather than have concern for mistreated workers.
One of unions’ main tactics are what they call “salting.”
“Salting” means labor organizers infiltrate company stores as employees, in many instances paid by the union, to woo co-workers and start stirring anti-Starbucks sentiment among baristas.
Independent research determined that as much as $2.5 million dollars was spent by SEIU’s Starbucks subsidiary to “salt” at stores.
With overall union membership dwindling down to 10 percent of U.S. workers last year from 20 percent in the 1980s, Big Labor is desperate.
That’s why they pay big bucks to “salt” vulnerable companies like Starbucks.
One of these “salts” testified before Congress in 2022 about her alleged grievances with Starbucks, but failed to disclose that she was paid $50,000 by the union, as required under the law.
A congresswoman said after learning of the deception, that “it once again shows the dishonest lengths that union operatives are willing to go to tilt the playing field in their favor.”
While a union can get authorized at a Starbucks location with a simple majority vote of employees, once it’s authorized, it’s extremely difficult to decertify it.
That’s the case for a multitude of Starbucks employees who don’t want the union, but they can’t get rid of it.
Two of them are Ariana Cortes and Logan Karam, who each have majority support from co-workers at their respective New York stores to decertify their union, but the National Labor Relations Board won’t let them hold a vote.
Only 525 of 17,000 Starbucks stores are unionized as of December 2024.
This does not represent the will of the Company’s workers and it violates their individual rights.
The Company must do more to support them, and our proposal addresses that.
Please vote FOR proposal Number 6.
Read NLPC’s shareholder proposal for Starbucks here.
Read NLPC’s report filed at the SEC in support of its proposal here.
Listen to Paul Chesser’s remarks at the Starbucks annual meeting here.
