Wrestling with Starbucks: Conscience, Capital, Cappuccino

Chapter 7: When Worker Met Partner

140 When Worker Met Partner 7 For a year, I kept five lovely little cards on my desk. Each was the size of a standard business card and bore an illustration, awash in gentle color and New Age sensibility , representing a trait that epitomizes the ideal Starbucks partner. “Welcoming,” says one drawn in mock-child style, a picture of a multiracial group of partners wearing green aprons and smiles and surrounded by the word welcome in many languages. “Offer everyone a sense of belonging.” “Involved,” says another. “Connect with one another, with the company, with your community.” “Knowledgeable,” says a third. “Love what you do. Share it with others.” Starbucks managers and partners are encouraged to give each other these cards as tokens of recognition and thanks for upholding company ideals beyond the call of duty. The cards may be hokey; but their messages and, even more important, their existence are meant to serve as an antidote to workplaces that are increasingly transitory and impersonal. It’s the kind of symbolism that would probably make your average union leader puke. And that’s a problem because, by lavishing even generic personal attention on workers, the company is meeting a need that unions all but neglect. Unions, it seems, have a great future behind them, rooted in the anthems of the 1930s but tone-deaf to the cultural changes that are shaping new generations of workers. The consequences extend beyond the rise or fall of unions. Without institutions to aggregate the concerns of workers, we lose one of the few tools proven to blunt economic disparity. Moreover, workers lose a singular avenue to participation in decisions that govern the global economy. Individuals may migrate from job to job and country to country in search of a better future, but such opportunities do not lead to improved safety standards or health care for the vast majority of workers, whose options are limited by geography, oppression, or inadequate skills. Employment these days often seems more like speed dating than marriage: a brief, intense exchange while the clock ticks; then on to the next table or computer station. What sociologist Richard Sennett calls “short term task labor” has become the prevailing model, requiring a high threshold for uncertainty, a talent for flexibility, and a tolerance for constant change. But all this moving around—employees changing, venues changing—wreaks havoc on relationships. Sennett suggests that the new workplace yields “low institutional loyalty, diminishment of informal trust among workers, and weakening of institutional knowledge.” How can companies expect loyalty from workers they are able to fire at any time for any reason? How can customers expect consistency, much less community, if the staff is constantly changing? How can employees build relationships with each other when they are part time and transitory? How can they ever gain a degree of ownership over their jobs or any power to confront unfair or unsafe working conditions when they are here today and gone tomorrow? The ascendant power of brand may be metaphorical, but the descendant power of workers is real. It brought labor to the Seattle protests and, for a moment at least, into alignment with the up-andcoming global justice movement. In the global economy, workers, like coffee, are a surplus commodity, with only specialty workers able to command premiums above the undervalued employment floor. And as unions lose their power to influence the price of labor and governments lose the will to regulate corporations, people who must earn a living are once again in the position of having to negotiate personally with their employers without any real power to do so. To some informal extent, personal negotiation may always be the norm at the local level, where motivational cards can be dispensed, immediate supervisors confronted, and the day-to-day abrasions of the work W H E N W O R K E R M E T PA R T N E R 141 environment negotiated. But in a world where corporate headquarters set the rules of compensation and culture, it can be hard for the individual employee to have any voice or control over the template of wages and working conditions that define employment. Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the United States, with 1.4 million workers, has become a model for how to squeeze the most out of workers from one end of the supply chain to the other, from the...