STARBUCKS Angels in Domestic Public Image, Nightmarish International Labor

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by Kyle Aaron Reese2 views·Updated Dec 18, 2021
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  1. This is Starbucks public image, champions, Nightmare and Truth.
  2. When I began this project,
  3. I was going to look at the wonderful things
  4. that Starbucks is doing for its employees stateside,
  5. particularly in the vein of transgender
  6. healthcare coverage and tuition reimbursement.
  7. In contrast this to their foreign business practices,
  8. wherein the company boasts a robust coffee buying standard.
  9. But they have been found to buy coffee from farms with
  10. atrocious labor conditions that exhibit many indicators of slave labor.
  11. However, in my research,
  12. I found that while the company does indeed
  13. offer these fantastic benefits for trans people,
  14. it does not reflect deeper company culture.
  15. There's been a plethora of transgender employees who have come
  16. forward repeatedly to express that they have been mistreated,
  17. and many Trans customers who have been mistreated or outright refused service.
  18. The employees who carried out these discriminatory actions, um,
  19. where they were refusing service,
  20. were backed up and represented by the company's lawyers when they were sued.
  21. This is a disturbing pattern of a schism between what
  22. the company is claiming in the way of corporate responsibility,
  23. social responsibility and their actual follow through.
  24. Yeah,
  25. okay,
  26. Starbucks very clearly
  27. employees, some expert public relations people.
  28. Their website is full of heartwarming stories of
  29. all sorts and transgender issues are no exception.
  30. In 2013, Starbucks became one of,
  31. if not the first major corporation to offer insurance benefits,
  32. which cover gender affirming surgery.
  33. In 2015, the company released a story on their web page featuring several trends.
  34. Employees speaking of quote unquote
  35. unconditional acceptance in their workplaces.
  36. Most notably, the company set off an initiative called Hashtag What's Your Name?
  37. Which centered a tear jerking commercial in which a
  38. transgender teenager who was tortured at school and and
  39. in their home and family life by constantly be
  40. called this name that didn't match who they are?
  41. Um,
  42. they wrote their name on a cup at Starbucks.
  43. This is super commonplace amongst Trans people who have discovered
  44. this as a way to feel out their name.
  45. The commercial was incredibly effective at
  46. capturing complete joy of this teenager
  47. as they heard their name out loud for the first time.
  48. I was certainly moved as this scene was intimately familiar to me.
  49. Transgender Healthcare coverage was greatly expanded in 2018 to
  50. cover more nuanced procedures such as facial feminization,
  51. surgery and extensive hormone replacement therapy,
  52. including estrogen and puberty blockers to Children of employees.
  53. I'm sorry this won't play.
  54. Aside from their domestic workplace culture and practices,
  55. Starbucks claims similarly robust coffee buying ethics.
  56. Called their cafe business Practices,
  57. their Cafe Practices program has four pillars,
  58. which includes economic transparency, social responsibility,
  59. environmental leadership and quality
  60. They're focused on social responsibility is
  61. pretty extensive on Reid's coffee farmers,
  62. who coffee farmers need to protect the rights of people working on
  63. their farms and must have measures in place that promote safe,
  64. fair and humane work environment.
  65. This includes criteria around wages and benefits, hiring practices,
  66. hours of work, use of protective equipment, access to medical care and education.
  67. Permanent and temporary or seasonal.
  68. Workers must be paid at least the nationally originally established minimum wage
  69. on a regular basis. There is a zero tolerance for any form of child labor.
  70. This all looks great on paper,
  71. okay,
  72. and they have
  73. this. This video that's not playing
  74. is a partnership with international
  75. organization that works on
  76. with coffee farmers who
  77. improve these working traditions.
  78. Yeah,
  79. reality in practice,
  80. as soon as hashtag what's your name was launched,
  81. several transgender Starbucks employees came forward publicly with
  82. horror stories of being trans at the workplace.
  83. They said that the company would not allow them to change their
  84. names in the company's employee system or even their name badges,
  85. effectively forcing them to disclose their gender identity.
  86. Where their names did not match their outward appearance.
  87. For example, as a hypothetical,
  88. a very binary transmit transgender man might have the name tag that read Lucy.
  89. This puts the employee in harm's way.
  90. There have also been reports of Trans people being refused service,
  91. And there was even a lawsuit against Starbucks
  92. when a transgender would be customer was refused.
  93. Starbucks was refused service at multiple Starbucks locations in Minnesota.
  94. In 2017,
  95. this man shared that.
  96. He was Trans upon paying for his order because the
  97. name on his credit card did not match his appearance.
  98. The employees slammed the window on him and another employee served him.
  99. This went on several times over the next couple of months as he
  100. was targeted by the same employee that slammed the window on him.
  101. This might not have been so bad if it were just one employee
  102. and it was taken care of by the company and the manager.
  103. But Starbucks provided an attorney to protect those bigoted employees,
  104. thus being complicit and even supportive in those discriminatory actions.
  105. 2019 to Brazilian coffee farmers that routinely sold coffee to
  106. Starbucks were found to have been utilizing slave labor.
  107. These farmers were forced to work many hours a day in
  108. destitute conditions for much less than any kind of minimum wage.
  109. They were not compensated well enough to get by.
  110. The company has also been accused many times of
  111. doing business with farms that use child labor.
  112. Most recently in 2020.
  113. Just last year,
  114. a United Kingdom news outlet reported that Children as young as eight
  115. years old were being forced to collect coffee beans in Guatemala.
  116. The company's reaction to each of these accusations
  117. was of course to claim that they had
  118. no idea that this was happening and to
  119. quote unquote launch investigations into each occurrence.
  120. But there has been no tangible change in the practices, Um,
  121. and it doesn't look like anything has changed at all.
  122. In conclusion,
  123. Starbucks has some great policies and programs for both their
  124. transgender employees and ensuring that the company's sources coffee ethically.
  125. They have launched campaigns for both issues,
  126. partnering with important organizations on on both of
  127. these issues and reaching millions of people worldwide,
  128. Um,
  129. perhaps even affecting some widespread social
  130. change or reporting that social change.
  131. However, in practice in their own business practices,
  132. Starbucks is woefully lacking.
  133. Many transgender employees and customers alike have been hurt by the company,
  134. and the company continues to use farms to source coffee,
  135. which engage in both slave and child labor.
  136. Whilst our work.
  137. While Starbucks looks great on paper,
  138. this is not representative of their actual
  139. role in socially responsible business practices.