Starbucks Falls Short After Pledging Better Labor Practices
Starbucks Falls Short After Pledging Better Labor Practices
But Starbucks has fallen short on these promises, according to interviews with five current or recent workers at...
But Starbucks has fallen short on these promises, according to interviews with five current or recent workers at several locations across the country. Most complained that they often receive their schedules one week or less in advance, and that the schedules vary substantially every few weeks. Two said their stores still practiced clopenings.
The complaints were documented more widely in a report released on Wednesday by the Center for Popular Democracy, a nonprofit that works with community groups, which gathered responses from some 200 self-identified baristas in the United States through the website Coworker.org.
“We’re the first to admit we have work to do,” said Jaime Riley, a company spokeswoman. “But we feel like we’ve made good progress, and that doesn’t align with what we’re seeing.” Ms. Riley maintained that all baristas now receive their schedules at least 10 days in advance.
Starbucks, whose chief executive, Howard Schultz, has long presented the brand as involving its customers and employees in something more meaningful than a basic economic transaction, has drawn fire for its workplace practices. But its struggles to address the concerns of its employees also open a window into a much larger problem.
In the last two years, the combination of a tight labor market and legal changes — from a rising minimum wage to fair-scheduling legislation that would discourage practices like clopenings — has raised labor costs for employers of low-skill workers in many parts of the country.
To help companies navigate this new landscape, a number of academics and labor advocates have urged a so-called good-jobs or high road approach, in which companies pay workers higher wages and grant them more stable hours, then recover the costs through higher productivity and lower turnover.
Even in service sectors where stores compete aggressively on price, “bad jobs are not a cost-driven necessity but a choice,” concluded Zeynep Ton, who teaches at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “Investment in employees allows for excellent operational execution, which boosts sales and profits.”
And yet, as Professor Ton is careful to point out, it is easy to underestimate the radical nature of the change required for a company to reinvent itself as a good-jobs employer, even when the jobs it provides are not necessarily so bad.
The example of Starbucks illustrates the point. Some of the company’s actions reflect an impulse to treat its workers as more than mere cogs in a giant coffee-serving machine.
Starbucks allows part-timers who work a minimum of 20 hours a week to buy into its health insurance plan after 90 days. In April, it pledged to paythe full cost of tuition for them and full-time workers who pursued an online degree at Arizona State University. And workers promoted to shift supervisor — about one for every four to eight baristas — typically earn a few dollars an hour more than minimum wage.
On the question of scheduling, the company, like many large retail and food service operations, uses state-of-the-art software that forecasts store traffic and helps managers set staff levels accordingly, while trying to honor workers’ preferences regarding hours and availability.
Charles DeWitt is vice president of business development at Kronos, one of the leading scheduling software makers, which has worked with Starbucks. He said that using the software to schedule workers three weeks in advance typically was not much less accurate than using it to schedule workers one week in advance. “The single best predictor of tomorrow is store demand a year ago, though other factors can come into play,” Mr. DeWitt said. “If it’s Monday, then you want to look at Monday this week a year ago.”
(Mr. DeWitt and others involved with such software concede that there are exceptions, like stores that are growing or declining rapidly, and that predictions often get substantially better very close to the target date.)
But there has long been a central obstacle to change: the incentives of store managers, who are encouraged by company policies to err on the side of understaffing. This makes it more difficult to build continuity into workers’ schedules from week to week. It often turns peak hours into an exhausting frenzy that crimps morale and drives workers away.
“The mood lately has not been not superpositive; they’ve been cutting labor pretty drastically,” said Matthew Haskins, a shift supervisor at a Starbucks in Seattle. “There are many days when we find ourselves incredibly — not even a skeletal staff, just short-staffed.”
Mr. Haskins said that his store’s manager received an allotment of labor hours from her supervisor, and that the manager frequently exceeded it. But in the last month or so, she announced that she would make an effort to stay within the allotment. “From what I understand, probably someone higher up said ‘You need to stick to that,’” Mr. Haskins said. “I know it’s got her stressed out, too.”
Benton Stokes, who managed two separate Starbucks stores in Murfreesboro, Tenn., between 2005 and 2008, described a similar dynamic.
“We were given a certain number of labor hours, and we were supposed to schedule only that number in a given week,” Mr. Stokes said. “If I had to exceed my labor budget — and I was careful not to — I would have had to have a conversation” with the district manager. “If there were a couple of conversations, it would be a write-up,” he added.
The understaffing ethos sometimes manifests itself in company policies. For example, Starbucks stores are not required to have assistant managers, and many do without them.
Ciara Moran, who recently quit a job as a barista at a high-volume Starbucks in New Haven, Conn., complained of a “severe understaffing problem” that she blamed on high turnover and inadequate training. She partly attributed this to the store’s lack of an assistant manager. “We had issues that we’d try to take to her” — the store manager — “but she had so much on her plate we let it go,” Ms. Moran said. “Problems would escalate and become a big thing.”
In other cases, the scheduling and staffing problems at Starbucks appear to arise from the way individual managers handle their tight labor budgets.
Some of the baristas said that clopenings were virtually unheard-of at their stores, but LaTranese Sapp, a Starbucks barista in Lawrenceville, Ga., said clopenings occurred at her store because the manager trusted only a handful of workers to close, limiting scheduling options.
Ms. Riley, the Starbucks spokeswoman, said the store’s scheduling software required at least eight hours between shifts, but that workers could close and open consecutively if the shifts were more than eight hours apart.
There are alternatives to help avoid such results, according to Professor Ton’s research. One of the most promising is to create a mini work force of floating relief employees who call a central headquarters each morning, as the QuikTrip chain of convenience stores common in parts of the Midwest and South has done. Because store operations are standardized, relief employees can step in seamlessly.
“If a worker gets sick, what happens is you’ve lost a quarter of your work force,” Professor Ton said of companies with small stores that lack such contingency plans. “Now everybody else has to scramble to get things done.”
(Starbucks employees are often responsible for finding their own replacements when they are sick. “A lot of times when I’m really sick, it’s less work to work the shift than to call around everywhere,” said Kyle Weisse, an Atlanta barista.)
Starbucks, which vowed to improve workers’ quality of life after The New York Times published an account of a barista’s erratic schedule in 2014, is far from the only chain that has faltered in the effort to adjust from low road to high road.
In many cases, the imperative to minimize labor costs has been so deeply ingrained that it becomes difficult to sway managers, even when higher executives see the potential benefits.
Marshall L. Fisher, an expert on retailing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, recalled working on a consulting assignment for a large retailer and identifying a few hundred stores where the company could benefit by adding labor. Executives signed onto the change, but managers essentially refused to execute it.
“The managers were afraid to use their hours,” he said. “They were so used to being judged on ‘Did they stay within a budget?’”
In many cases companies end up going out of business rather than adapt. Economists Daniel Aaronson, Eric French and Isaac Sorkin studied the response to large increases of the minimum wage in states like California, Illinois and Oregon in the 2000s. In most states, employment barely budged two years after the higher wage kicked in. But that masked dozens of suddenly uncompetitive stores that went under, and a roughly equal number of new stores that opened.
The fact that the defunct stores were replaced by new ones suggests that, in principle, they could have evolved. But they simply were not capable of pulling it off.
Source: New York Times
As the federal government fails the people of Puerto Rico, local governments and states must step up
As the federal government fails the people of Puerto Rico, local governments and states must step up
Given the likelihood that even more Puerto Ricans will resettle on the mainland the Center for Popular Democracy and...
Given the likelihood that even more Puerto Ricans will resettle on the mainland the Center for Popular Democracy and Local Progress have published a policy guide, the first of its kind, offering a roadmap for cities and states to address the immediate needs of their new constituents.
Read the full article here.
New Program Arms Immigrants Facing Deportation with Legal Aid
WNYC - November 20, 2013, by John Hockenberry - Fifty years ago, in a case called Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme...
WNYC - November 20, 2013, by John Hockenberry - Fifty years ago, in a case called Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court mandated that those accused of a crime must be provided a lawyer, regardless of their ability to pay. With that decision the public defense system was born.
While Gideon has changed the equation for many indigent defendants, the law doesn't apply to all cases—just those in criminal court. Immigrants facing detention or deportation have no right to a court-appointed attorney and are left to advocate for themselves. In New York, at least 60 percent of detained immigrants lack access to counsel during their immigration proceedings.
But the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project is looking change that.
With funding from the New York City Council and Cardozo Law School in Manhattan, the Project—the first of its kind in the country—provides indigent immigrants representation in detention and deportation proceedings, regardless of whether they can pay.
The Project is the result of a task force of attorneys, activists and experts, chaired by Judge Robert Katzman, chief judge of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
According to the task force, immigrants facing deportation in New York courts that have the help of an attorney are 500 percent more likely to win their case than those who lack counsel. Judge Katzmann says he hopes the Immigrant Family Unity Project will allow more immigrants access to justice, while helping immigrant families to stay together.
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Por fin la Fed toma en cuenta disparidades
Hace un año, la Reserva Federal, la institución económica más importante del país mantuvo la posición de que no había...
Hace un año, la Reserva Federal, la institución económica más importante del país mantuvo la posición de que no había nada qué podría hacer sobre las disparidades económicas entre grupos étnicos. Recientemente, la Fed cambió por completo su posición. Durante la última audiencia Humphrey Hawkins Janet Yellen, Presidenta de la Fed, cambió su narrativa al reconocer las disparidades en el desempleo e ingresos de comunidades afroamericanas y latinas en comparación a las comunidades blancas. Esta fue la primera vez que la Presidenta Yellen incluyó estas estadísticas en su informe al Congreso.
A primera vista esto puede no parecer gran cosa, pero lo es. La Fed nunca antes ha abordado las disparidades raciales en el desempleo. Antes estas estadísticas no eran ni siquiera parte del informe o de la conversation. En la audiencia Humphrey Hawkins del año pasado Janet Yellen dijo que no había nada que pudiera hacer para cerrar las brechas raciales en el desempleo e ingresos.
Al incluir esas estadísticas Yellen está mostrando que por primera vez las disparidades raciales se tomarán en cuenta cuando la Fed tome decisiones sobre cómo manejar la economía. Esto realmente es un gran cambio. De acuerdo con el Wall Street Journal, hay “un reconocimiento creciente dentro de la Fed de que las disparidades raciales en la economía son cada vez más pronunciadas y que hay un papel para la política monetaria a la hora de disminuir esas brechas.”
Este gran cambio no se vino a dar solo, fue resultado en gran parte de críticas de activistas de la coalición Fed Up y miembros del Congreso. La coalición Fed Up es formada por miembros de la clase obrera a través de el país que unieron sus voces para elevar el tema de la desigualdad económica en comunidades de bajos ingresos y comunidades de color. El público asume que la Fed no se puede modificar, pero los activistas de la coalición Fed Up están demostrando que si es posible. Este cambio en la política y la práctica de la Fed no hubiera sido posible sin la presión constante del pueblo exigiendo ser escuchado y exigiendo que sus condiciones económicas no sean ignoradas. Este es un ejemplo tangible de que en verdad la unión hace la fuerza.
Yo he estado involucrado en la campaña FED Up desde el inicio porque nuestra comunidades, comunidades de color y de bajos ingresos, necesitan un mejor estándar de vida con más y mejores oportunidades de empleo. A través de nuestros esfuerzos la conversación por fin nos incluye.
Pero el hecho de que la Presidenta Yellen haya reconocido y mencionado la desigualdad económica entre grupos étnicos no es suficiente. Si es un buen primer paso, pero no la meta. Comunidades de color y de bajos ingresos por todo el país necesita más que palabras, necesitan acción!
Durante la audiencia Janet Yellen habló de programas de empleo diseñadas para minorías, y eso es importante, pero no dio el sentido de que estos programas podrían implementarse a una escala que tendría un impacto significativo sobre las disparidades económicas para millones de afroamericanos y latinos.
La mejor y más importante forma en que Janet Yellen puede cumplir con su compromiso de cerrar las disparidades económicas entre grupos étnicos es simple, implementar políticas monetarias que mantengan el mercado de trabajo lo más abierto posible. Esto le dará una oportunidad a comunidades afroamericanas y latinas de tener más puestos de trabajo y mejores salarios.
Es el resultado de años de lucha por la campaña Fed Up que la Fed se ha comprometido a abordar las disparidades raciales en el desempleo e ingresos. Ahora nos toca a todos nosotros asegurarnos que Janet Yellen se haga responsable de mantener los mercados laborales abiertos para darnos la oportunidad de conseguir más puestos de trabajo y salarios con los cuáles podríamos mantener a nuestras familias!
(Amador Rivas es miembro de Se Hace Camino Nueva York, socio del Centro para la Democracia Popular)
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Commentary: I need the economy to give me a fair chance
Commentary: I need the economy to give me a fair chance
I'VE ALWAYS enjoyed talking with people, and, as long as I can remember, I wanted to work in the hotel industry. It's...
I'VE ALWAYS enjoyed talking with people, and, as long as I can remember, I wanted to work in the hotel industry. It's been my dream to work with guests at the front desk to make sure they have the best experience possible.
As an African-American woman, I knew that lucky breaks weren't going to be handed to me, so I did everything I could to achieve my dreams. I went to school and got my bachelor's degree in hospitality and hotel management in 2000 from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
However, apart from a brief internship after college at the Best Western and a year at the Hilton working at the switchboard, which was almost a decade ago, I haven't been able to find work in my chosen field - a field in which I have a degree.
I've heard people say the recession is over because the unemployment rate is about 5 percent. But I can tell you that things are still really bad in the black community. Currently, unemployment for blacks is about 9 percent.
I've always been politically active and serve as the judge of elections in my voting district. So when I heard about a campaign that calls on the Federal Reserve to ensure that everybody gets decent paying work, including black folks, I was eager to join.
When I got my degree 16 years ago, the economy was in decent shape. Armed with my degree, the internship experience and good recommendations, I didn't expect to have any problems getting a job in a hotel. I applied to two dozen jobs and, after being turned down at all of them, I had to take other kinds of jobs in food service or customer service.
Finally, after many years, I got my switchboard job at the Hilton. Even though I was getting only $10 an hour, I was excited to finally be working at a hotel and thought I would just stay there and work my way up. But the recession hit in 2008, and I was laid off a year later.
That's when things became really tough. The recession hit African-American women, even college-educated ones like me, particularly hard. I've worked on and off since 2008, but finding good work has become almost impossible. At one point, I was traveling two hours each way to get to my job at a state-run liquor store.
I eventually had to quit when I suffered severe medical issues. I was diagnosed with a neurological condition and uterine fibroids, all within a matter of months. A couple of years ago, I was able to work again and joined a job skills program. The program placed me at a job where I work part-time - only 20 hours a week - as a cashier and food server at a university dining hall.
The unemployment rate apparently counts people like me as employed, even though I don't work enough hours to pay my bills. I'm overqualified and underpaid (I earn $11.25 an hour), but since I'm working - even though I'm still on Medicaid and food stamps - I'm used as evidence to say the recession is over.
Involuntary part-time unemployment is a more accurate figure to look at. It's over 15 percent for blacks! That's a whole lot of people who aren't making ends meet, but are still being counted as working.
People need to know that the Federal Reserve has incredible power over the economy and people's lives. It might seem very abstract, but it's not. If the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates low, the economy will continue to grow and people like me will be able to find full-time jobs or better paying work. If it raises rates because it claims the economy is doing well, it will be tougher for everyone to find jobs.
I'm going to Jackson Hole, Wyo., next week to join a protest against the Federal Reserve, which holds a symposium there every year. We want the president of the Philadelphia Fed, Patrick Harker, and the rest of the Fed, to see what regular folks go through beyond the numbers in the headlines.
Every week, I still go online to look for jobs at large hotel chains. I know that one of these days I will work at a hotel again. I just need the economy to give me a fair chance.
Salwa Shabazz lives in Philadelphia and is a member of the Fed Up campaign, an initiative of the Center for Popular Democracy.
By Salwa Shabazz
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Charter Financing: Study Finds Too Little Accountability in California
San Jose Mercury News - April 9, 2014, by Raymond Blanchard - Every parent wishes their children will reach their...
San Jose Mercury News - April 9, 2014, by Raymond Blanchard - Every parent wishes their children will reach their highest potential to live the life they choose. We do everything in our power to make this wish a reality, and we know an extraordinary education is essential.
Fulfilling this wish is difficult, particularly in the Bay Area. When California, the eighth largest economy in the world, ranks 49th among the states in school spending, we know it's difficult for our schools to provide the best education possible.
That's why I enrolled my children in Gilroy Prep Charter School, a Navigator school that achieved the highest API score -- 978 -- in California for a first-year charter school in 2011-12. I also served on the Navigator Board for three years but recently resigned due to transparency and accountability concerns with the Charter Management Organization (CMO), a service some charters use to manage their finances.
Now I find that my concerns were not an aberration. A recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy (linked with this article at mercurynews.com/opinion) found mismanagement of funds, fraud and abuse to the tune of $80 billion, or $160,000 per child, across all California charter schools, and our state could lose another $100 million in 2015 to charter school fraud. That's enough money to pay full tuition and board for every student in California at a University of California school for four years.
The report found that charter schools in California undergo little monitoring of finances, and the districts that oversee charter schools do not have the resources to provide sufficient oversight. Over my three years on the Navigator board, the local districts only attended seven board meetings.
Charter schools were created to bridge the achievement gap by granting increased freedom to administrators, teachers and parents to innovate without being subject to most California education laws. I support charter schools and think many of them provide an excellent education: 60 percent of Santa Clara County charter schools outperform the districts in which they reside. As a former entrepreneur and venture investor, I am all for freedom, innovation, competition and choice.
But the charter school financial model is at risk of failing.
Charter Management Organizations use public money with little public accountability and transparency, and that's starting to cause material financial problems. Not all charter schools have a CMO and run very well on their own, and some CMO-run charter schools are clearly better than others.
In 2014, charter schools authorized by the Santa Clara County Board of Education received $42 million in public revenue, excluding the millions of dollars in philanthropic investments. Some CMOs charge the schools they manage up to 25 percent of school revenue, while our local district charges about 6 percent per school.
In Santa Clara County, 73 percent of charter schools spent $1,287 less per student than their district school peers in 2012-2013. That's worth a musical instrument, computer, books, iPad and field trip per child. Where does the money go? It's not clear, and that's a problem.
To avoid financial risks, charter schools should be held to the same types of regulations as other public schools and the boards that oversee them. All public schools should be given the same freedoms charter schools have to innovate.
My wish is that all public schools be excellent educational institutions and stewards of our tax money. However, we must improve transparency and accountability. I think this is a wish we can all agree on.
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The Government Should Guarantee Everyone a Good Job
Progressives have begun to dream more boldly. We have graduated from a public option to single payer. From lower...
Progressives have begun to dream more boldly. We have graduated from a public option to single payer. From lower sentences to eliminating cash bail. From motor-voter to automatic-voter registration. From affordable to free college. And from a $15 minimum wage to guaranteed good jobs for all.
Read the full article here.
Seattle passes scaled-back tax on Amazon, big companies
On Monday, about 40 elected officials from across the United States, some representing local governments in the running...
On Monday, about 40 elected officials from across the United States, some representing local governments in the running to host Amazon’s second headquarters, published an open letter to Seattle in support of the head tax and expressing concern that Amazon opposed the measure. “By threatening Seattle over this tax, Amazon is sending a message to all of our cities: we play by our own rules,” the officials wrote.
Read the full article here.
Group of Lawmakers Says Fed Fails to Diversify Leadership
Group of Lawmakers Says Fed Fails to Diversify Leadership
A group of Democratic senators and House members complained Thursday that the Federal Reserve has failed to meet its...
A group of Democratic senators and House members complained Thursday that the Federal Reserve has failed to meet its obligation to build a diverse leadership that includes enough women and minorities, and it wants Chair Janet Yellen to remedy the issue.
The lawmakers said a more inclusive leadership that properly reflects gender, race, ethnicity, occupation and economic background is needed to ensure fairness in Fed policy.
The Democratic lawmakers — 11 senators and 116 in the House — expressed their concerns in a letter to Yellen. The Fed's leadership "remains overwhelmingly and disproportionately white and male," they wrote.
In its search for directors who oversee the Fed's 12 regional banks for terms next year, the Fed's board of governors should cast a wider net for African American, Latino and female candidates, as well as qualified people from labor, consumer and community organizations, the lawmakers told Yellen.
A Fed spokesman, David Skidmore, responded that the central bank is "committed to fostering diversity — by race, ethnicity, gender and professional background — within its leadership ranks."
"We have focused considerable attention in recent years on recruiting directors with diverse backgrounds and experiences," Skidmore said. "By law, we consider the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor and consumers. We also are aiming to increase ethnic and gender diversity."
The senators signing the letter include Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is challenging front-runner Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Warren and Sanders are the most outspoken Democratic critics on economic and financial issues.
The 116 House members, representing more than half the 188 Democrats in the House, are led by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
The letter cites data from the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group. The data indicates that 83 percent of the directors who supervise the Fed's regional banks are white and that nearly three-quarters of them are men. All the members of the Fed's committee that sets interest-rate policy are white, and 60 percent are men.
The Fed counters that the proportion of minority directors on the boards of its regional banks and their branches has risen from 16 percent in 2010 to 24 percent this year, and that the proportion of female directors has increased from 23 percent to 30 percent. Forty-six percent of the directors represent diversity in race and-or gender, the Fed said.
"We are striving to continue that progress," Skidmore said.
The data cited in the congressional letter do not include directors of the regional banks' branches, only the banks themselves.
On Thursday, Clinton's campaign said she shares the lawmakers' concerns. A spokesman, Jesse Ferguson, said Clinton thinks "the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole." She also believes there no longer should be three private-sector bankers sitting on each regional Fed bank board, Ferguson said.
That change would require new legislation.
Yellen, the first woman to lead the central bank in its 100-plus-year history, has stressed in her public statements the importance of overcoming economic inequality.
The five current Fed governors are white. Two, including Yellen, are women.
By MARCY GORDON
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Thomas DiNapoli urged to stop investments that hurt P.R.
Activist groups are asking state Controller Thomas DiNapoli to halt investments in two private equity firms they blame...
Activist groups are asking state Controller Thomas DiNapoli to halt investments in two private equity firms they blame for worsening the foreclosure crisis in Puerto Rico.
In a letter to DiNapoli, the anti-hedge fund group Hedge Clippers and other organizations say the state Common Retirement Fund should make no new investments in the Blackstone Group and TPG Capital.
Read the full article here.
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