Yves here. There’s a lot competition for the title of “Nastiest CEO”. And just by weight of numbers, Amazon has a strong claim. Starbucks has only 400,000 employees while Amazon has just over 1.5 million, and one would think at least half work in its warehouses. As bad as working for Starbucks can be, it does not seem to result anywhere near as often to physical exhaustion and joint damage.
But current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been low profile. Jeff Bezos still remains a billionaire to scorn even though he is no longer in the saddle at Amazon. So Howard Schultz as founder and still head honcho of Starbucks is arguably a prime target. But has the well-deserved criticism of Starbucks’ union busting reached the mainstream? And on top of that, customers who have antipathy for Starbucks the company or Starbucks the coffee may find themselves bereft of alternatives, say in an airport. Reader sanity checks appreciated.
By Sonali Kolhatkar, an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization. Produced by Economy for All<, a project of the Independent Media Institute