Attendees of Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner have started testing positive for COVID-19, after the comedic headliner Trevor Noah joked that they were attending ‘the nation’s most distinguished superspreader event.’
Most notably, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl tested positive Monday night, Politico first reported, after being seated next to Kim Kardashian at the dinner and briefly interacting with President Joe Biden.
Starbucks noted that it faced higher employment costs during this year’s second quarter. The company’s $1 billion investment in employee wages and benefits will now lift U.S. workers’ pay to at least $15 per hour by this summer.
On Tuesday, after a series of meetings with workers around the country, Schultz unveiled $200 million in additional investments in worker pay and training. That includes raises for employees who have been at the company for at least two years as well as a near doubling in training time — from 23 hours to 40 hours — for new baristas and shift supervisors. Starbucks is also reintroducing a coffee mastery program for employees and considering other benefits like increased sick time.
Starbucks Workers United, the group behind the unionization effort said it filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against Starbucks on Tuesday. The group said the company is violating labor law for threatening to exclude unionized stores from receiving the new benefits.
‘These benefits, including ones we’ve demanded since the beginning of our campaign, are a response to our organizing efforts and we should celebrate the hard work that partners who stood up to Howard Schultz’s bullying put in to make this happen,’ the group said Tuesday in a statement.
Schultz opposes unionization. But he noted that employees are under ‘tremendous strain’ due to strong customer demand and pandemic-related changes in the business, including a surge in mobile and drive-thru orders. Stores are built to serve hot drinks, for example, but 80 percent of U.S. orders are now cold drinks.
‘These young people have completely valid concerns given today’s uncertainty and economic instability. They look around and they see the burgeoning labor movement as a possible remedy to what they are feeling,’ Schultz said. ‘But compare any union contract in our sector to the constantly expanding list of wages and benefits we have provided our people for decades, and the union contract will not even come close to what Starbucks offers.’
Schultz said the new investments will improve employee recruiting and retention. Starbucks also plans additional changes it will outline at an investor meeting in September, including adding credit and debit card tipping in its stores and accelerating the rollout of new ovens and espresso machines.
‘If we want to exceed the expectations of our customers, we have to exceed the expectations of our people,’ Schultz said.
Twitter users, some of them employed at Starbucks, said the growing number of stores incentivizing to unionize pushed Schultz to increase perks and pay but that his actions are also attempting to break the unification.
‘Congratulations to all the hard work of partners organizing at Starbucks–our campaign has pressured @HowardSchultz & Starbucks to announce many of the benefits that we’ve been pushing for since day one and we’ve proposed at the bargaining table in Buffalo,’ @SBWorkerUnited tweeted.
‘Starbucks didn’t give these because management thought it was a good idea—workers had to fight tooth and nail, filing union petitions and winning union elections in the face of unrelenting captive audience meetings and retaliation from the company,’ New York Democrat Socialist member Honda Wang shared. ‘The union won these changes.’
Another user – @BuckeyeTodd1977 – said that the company’s wage hike ‘kills the argument that companies won’t give unless it’s bargained for, [so] what’s the new argument?’
An account of a Starbucks employee and union organizer who goes by Mads (@madsUNIONYES) said: ‘For myself and many other Starbucks partners, @HowardSchultz’s wage increase announcement only to proves that there is POWER in a union.’
‘There is POWER in worker solidarity. And last but not least- they’ve had the means and ability to do this all along BUT THEY CHOSE NOT TO,’ she added.