Increasingly, those workers are trying to unionize. Most work in the country’s ever-expanding low-wage service economy. The vast majority of the country’s working class does not toil on the factory floor with a union to look out for their interests. His forced appearance before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee was an indication of the importance of the Starbucks union drive and the crisis facing the labor movement. Two days before Rizzo was fired, Howard Schultz, the company’s billionaire founder, was summoned to Washington to testify before the Senate. Starbucks founder Howard Schultz prepares to testify at a Senate committee hearing on unionization at Starbucks in late March in Washington. Her final misstep had occurred on March 1.Īccording to the document, she had been “1 minute late” to a 6 a.m. Rizzo hugged them and then glanced down at her separation paperwork. She tucked her balled-up green apron under her arm and strode into the cafe, where her co-workers were waiting and crying. “I wanna give you a hug,” she told Rizzo, wrapping her arms around her. “You care about the people in it, and that’s the heartbreaking … You’re a great employee to me, and I value everything. “You care about this store,” said the manager, who asked not to be named, fearing public backlash. Starbucks executives regularly refer to their hourly workers as “partners.” “I think my hardest part is that you’ve been a partner for so long,” she continued. The mistake triggered an investigation, the manager said. and the following morning slept through her alarm, leaving her 57 minutes late to a 5:30 a.m. 4, Rizzo had closed the store at 7:30 p.m. In the back of Rizzo’s Starbucks, away from the customers getting their late-morning caffeine fix, her manager was struggling to finish her sentences and maintain her composure. In April 2022, he returned to the company to try to rescue it. Starbucks founder Howard Schultz described the union as an “an adversary that’s threatening the very essence of what believe to be true.” Schultz believed that Starbucks’s previous CEO hadn’t listened to his employees and the company had lost its way. Was organizing large numbers of service workers even possible? Did unions have a place in the modern American economy? The Starbucks union drive was raising existential questions for the labor movement. Today, only 6 percent of private-sector workers nationwide belong to unions, the lowest rate in nearly a century. At issue was whether these workers would be able to organize and press their employers for higher wages, steadier hours and better benefits.
Now her fight had reached a critical moment with implications for service workers nationwide, the people at the core of America’s working class. She emerged from the pandemic and the labor shortage it spawned with a new sense of her worth and a determination to wrest back some power from her corporate bosses.
Like most of her co-workers, she had grown up in an era of historic inequality, raised by parents who struggled to pay their bills. Rizzo, a shift supervisor, had seen the union as a solution to so many of the problems that plagued her family and her country. (Lauren Petracca for The Washington Post) (Lauren Petracca for The Washington Post) Photos of fired Starbucks employees and union members are displayed at the Starbucks Workers United office in Buffalo. The Genesee Street Starbucks where Lexi Rizzo had worked.
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