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
Thanks to York School Board for Rejecting Charter Takeover
York Daily Record - November 4, 2014, by Rev. Aaron Willford, Sandra Thompson and Clovis Gallon - Over the past few...
York Daily Record - November 4, 2014, by Rev. Aaron Willford, Sandra Thompson and Clovis Gallon - Over the past few months, something remarkable happened in York. Parents, teachers, students, neighbors and faith leaders united to send a clear message that the education of York's children is more important than the profit margin of an out-of-state charter operator.
On behalf of that community, we would like to thank the York City School Board for standing up for our students, making sure their education comes first, and rejecting a charter takeover of our schools.
When the school board met on Oct. 15, Chief Recovery Officer David Meckley pressured board members to vote on an incomplete, poorly researched charter plan that was rolled out less than a week before. With so little time to review the plan and so many unanswered questions about it, the community urged the board to cast a no vote.
Rejecting the charter plan was not an easy decision for the school board, but it was the right decision — and we applaud their courage. If the plan had been enacted, money that should support students in the classroom would have flowed to a for-profit management company instead. City school children would have been treated like guinea pigs in a radical experiment, and their parents would have lost any say in how their neighborhood schools are run.
Perhaps the school board was looking into a crystal ball when it cast that vote. Just a week later, a federal judge appointed a receiver for Mosaica Education Inc., one of the two charter companies initially in the running to take over York city's schools. The heavily indebted Mosaica was sued by its primary lender in September after defaulting on its debt.
AdvertisementImagine where York's students would be if a charter operator took over their schools and, right out of the gate, found itself under enormous financial pressure for "a series of bad business decisions," as lender Tatonka Capital Corp. claims in its lawsuit against Mosaica.
The case against Mosaica followed a string of troubling studies questioning charter school oversight and accountability in Pennsylvania. A spring report from Auditor General Eugene DePasquale found that a lack of state oversight of charters was creating problems — with some observers comparing the current charter environment to the "wild, wild west."
A blistering report from the Center for Popular Democracy this fall revealed more than $30 million in proven or alleged fraud, waste, or abuse in Pennsylvania's charter school system over the past 17 years.
Giving Meckley a blank check on charterization in York would have been a big mistake.
Fortunately, the school board recognized how fraught with risk this plan was and chose to maintain local control of all the city's schools.
Now, it is critical for the school board to work in partnership with York's educators to improve the city's schools and give every child a shot at success.
Educators and administrators are already implementing a road map to fiscal recovery that will strengthen educational programs. We are glad that the school board is giving this "internal option," as it is known, an opportunity to work before taking any action that will negatively impact our schools, our students, or our community.
York city schools, like many other districts across the commonwealth, face a funding crisis created by deep cuts in state funding for public schools. All Pennsylvania school children deserve better from Harrisburg. It is high time our elected leaders reverse those cuts and put our schools back on track.
Until that happens, York's children should not be treated any differently than other Pennsylvania students. They shouldn't be guinea pigs in a charter experiment. And they shouldn't be deprived of the opportunity to attend their neighborhood schools.
Our school board agrees, and now it is up to all of us to take responsibility for the future of our city's public schools and the students who learn there.
We have no doubt that the York community is strongly committed to making our schools the best they can be. Working together, we can achieve truly remarkable things.
Rev. Aaron Willford is a member of York Concerned Clergy. Sandra Thompson is president of the York NAACP. Clovis Gallon is a teacher and York Education Association member.
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Internal Emails Show ICE Agents Struggling to Substantiate Trump’s Lies About Immigrants
Internal Emails Show ICE Agents Struggling to Substantiate Trump’s Lies About Immigrants
As hundreds of undocumented immigrants were rounded up across the country last February in the first mass raids of the...
As hundreds of undocumented immigrants were rounded up across the country last February in the first mass raids of the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials went out of their way to portray the people they detained as hardened criminals, instructing field offices to highlight the worst cases for the media and attempting to distract attention from the dozens of individuals who were apprehended despite having no criminal background at all.
Read the full article here.
Jóvenes dreamers envían contundente mensaje a políticos demócratas de California
Jóvenes dreamers envían contundente mensaje a políticos demócratas de California
Un grupo de soñadores se dieron cita para pedir a líderes políticos que defiendan el Dream Act ante el gobierno. De no...
Un grupo de soñadores se dieron cita para pedir a líderes políticos que defiendan el Dream Act ante el gobierno. De no hacerlo, apoyarán y buscarán la ayuda de otros legisladores, afirmaron.
Mira el video aquí.
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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Why markets ignore Trump news
Why markets ignore Trump news
ALSO TODAY: FED UP IN WYOMING — Per release: “On the eve of the Federal Reserve’s annual economic symposium in Jackson...
ALSO TODAY: FED UP IN WYOMING — Per release: “On the eve of the Federal Reserve’s annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, researchers, scholars, and workers will join Fed Up for a panel discussion that will set the tone for this year’s theme: “Changing Market Structure and Implications for Monetary Policy.” Thursday, August 23 - 4:00 pm MDT. “Free Speech Area” directly in front of the Jackson Lake Lodge.
Read the full article here.
Luchando por los inmigrantes el 4 de Julio
Luchando por los inmigrantes el 4 de Julio
Al congregarnos el 4 de Julio para conmemorar nuestro primer paso hacia la libertad, debemos reconocer los valiosos...
Al congregarnos el 4 de Julio para conmemorar nuestro primer paso hacia la libertad, debemos reconocer los valiosos aportes de los inmigrantes a nuestra nación. Es la historia de nuestro país. Es una parte intrínseca de nuestro carácter nacional, de nuestra grandeza. Como nación, debemos invitar a todas las personas elegibles a dar su primer paso hacia la libertad y convertirse en ciudadanos.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Who’s truly rebuilding the Democratic Party? The activists.
Who’s truly rebuilding the Democratic Party? The activists.
In June 2010 I made a very bad tweet that I came to regret. (Hard to imagine, I know.) I yelled at the disability...
In June 2010 I made a very bad tweet that I came to regret. (Hard to imagine, I know.) I yelled at the disability rights group Adapt.
I’d come to DC to attend a conference of progressive leaders, “America’s Future Now.” And while I knew a lot about financial reform, I didn’t know enough about politics, activism, or the Democratic Party.
Read the full article here.
Toys 'R' Us and the Death of Retail
Toys 'R' Us and the Death of Retail
When Debbie Beard found out the company she'd worked at for 29 years, Toys R Us, was closing down, she was shocked--she...
When Debbie Beard found out the company she'd worked at for 29 years, Toys R Us, was closing down, she was shocked--she knew the company had been having financial difficulties for a while, but didn't realize it was that bad. The more she learned, though, about the way the company had been looted by private equity firms Bain Capital and KKR, the more she determined that no one else should have to go through this. Debbie and other Toys R Us workers are organizing to demand severance pay from the company, and beyond that, organizing to stop the kind of leveraged buyouts that saddle viable companies with unsustainable debt. She joins me along with Carrie Gleason of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy to explain what can be done.
Read the full article here.
Flake confronted by women on Kavanaugh, then calls for FBI investigation
Flake confronted by women on Kavanaugh, then calls for FBI investigation
Sen. Jeff Flake was confronted by two women on the nature of sexual assault allegations, and Donald Trump’s Supreme...
Sen. Jeff Flake was confronted by two women on the nature of sexual assault allegations, and Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Then Flake called for an FBI investigation into Kavanaugh before the vote. Joy Reid is joined by one of those women, Ana Maria Archila.
Read the full article here.
30 days ago
30 days ago