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Unions hurt my fee-fees

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Even taking him at face value, Schultz is saying that he does not want to treat workers well unless he can have a feudal relationship with them:

But friends and longtime colleagues say Mr. Schultz’s opposition to the union isn’t primarily about the bottom line. It’s emotional. A union clashes with his image of Starbucks as a model employer. “It’s a sore for him, I guarantee you,” said Willard Hay, a former senior vice president at the company. (Mr. Schultz declined to comment for this article.)

The stakes extend far beyond Starbucks. The union campaign has helped give rise to labor organizing at a variety of other companies, including Apple, Trader Joe’s and REI. If the union manages to wring significant concessions from Starbucks, it could accelerate organizing elsewhere and help change the relationship between management and labor across the country.

[…]

At Starbucks, Mr. Schultz’s resistance to a union appears to be a matter of self-image, according to those who know him: He prefers to see himself as a generous boss, not a boss who is forced to treat employees generously.

When Mr. Schultz acquired Starbucks from two Seattle businessmen in 1987, the company’s six stores were already unionized, along with employees at its local coffee roasting plant. After workers voted to dissolve their union over the next few years, Mr. Schultz saw it as personal vindication.

“If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union,” Mr. Schultz wrote in his first memoir. (Union officials said Mr. Schultz made his opposition clear and accused him of playing a role in ushering out the union.)

This particular line of bullshit will be familiar to anyone who has heard ostensibly pro-labor tenured faculty arguing against unionization on campus.

It’s also quite the coincidence that Howard Schultz — who treats employees relatively well solely out of the goodness of his pure heart — decided to increase wages and benefits for his non-union employees only after unionization efforts got traction. What are the odds?

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