Starbucks falls short after pledging better labor practices
Last year, Starbucks vowed to provide employees with more consistent schedules and post their schedules at least 10 days in advance. The company said it would stop asking workers to endure the sleep-depriving ritual known as a “clopening,” which requires them to shut a store at night and help open it the next morning.
But Starbucks has fallen short on these promises, according to interviews with five current or recent workers across the country. Most complained that they often receive their schedules one week or less in advance, and that 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 selfidentified baristas in the United States through 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.” Riley maintained that all baristas now receive their schedules at least 10 days in advance.
Starbucks, whose CEO, Howard Schultz, has 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 past 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.
To help in this new landscape, a number of academics and labor advocates have urged companies to offer higher wages and 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 costdriven necessity but a choice,” concluded Zeynep Ton, who teaches at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “Investment in employees allows for excellent operational execution, which boosts sales and profits.”
And yet, as 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.
Starbucks, for example, allows those who work at least 20 hours a week to buy into its health insurance plan after 90 days. It has pledged to pay all tuition for them and full-time workers who pursued an online degree at Arizona State University.
Like many large retail and food service operations, Starbucks uses software that forecasts traffic and helps managers staff accordingly, while trying to honor workers’ preferences.
But there has long been a central obstacle: Store managers are encouraged to err on the side of understaffing. This makes it more difficult to build continuity into schedules from week to week. It often turns peak hours into an exhausting frenzy that crimps morale and drives workers away.