ootball coach turned Republican politician Tommy Tuberville has an opportunity to stand up for working people and the law. Elected in 2020, Alabama’s ranking Senator serves on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. It is in that capacity that Sen. Tuberville will be faced with a vote which could shake up not just the monumental Starbucks organizing drive but labor relations more broadly.
According to a March 1st release from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate HELP Committee, “next week the committee will hold a vote on issuing a subpoena for Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to provide testimony about his company’s lack of compliance with federal labor law and to authorize a committee investigation into major corporations’ labor law violations.” The vote will be followed by “a hearing on defending the constitutional right of workers to organize a union and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.”
This move comes after repeated requests for Schultz to appear before the committee. Starbucks is pushing back, declaring he “is not the right witness for the hearing” with no indication they will change tact. Senator Sanders, however, responded with the reasons why Schultz is in fact the right witness for this hearing:
Howard Schultz is the founder of Starbucks, he is the CEO of Starbucks, he is the spokesperson of Starbucks, and he will continue to be on the Board of Directors at Starbucks well into the future. In numerous media interviews, Mr. Schultz has made it clear that he is the driving force of labor policy at Starbucks. For these reasons, the Senate HELP Committee invited Howard Schultz to testify, not a subordinate, because he is the man who engineered and continues to make labor decisions at Starbucks.
Starbucks has been repeatedly found to violate labor law in its vicious anti-union campaign, most recently by NLRB Administrative Law Judge Michael Rosas in a more than 200 page ruling issued this week on their “hundreds of unfair labor practices” in Buffalo, New York stores.
As previously reported by Haley Czarnek for The Valley Labor Report, Alabama workers have been directly impacted by the egregious union busting campaign by Starbucks:
Out of Alabama’s 85 Starbucks stores, two have held union elections. Although the workers ultimately won their elections, they faced retaliation both before and after the votes. At the Scottsboro Starbucks, two organizers were fired just before ballots went out, while others at both the Scottsboro store and the unionized Birmingham location faced hour cuts and schedule changes. The Birmingham Starbucks workers faced multiple terminations as well; one of those terminated organizers, former Shift Supervisor Kyle McGucken, was fired in October, immediately upon returning from paternity leave. McGucken had been organizing publicly for months, and was denied Weingarten rights when they requested a union representative be present for the meeting in which they were terminated.
Senator Tuberville has yet to call on Howard Schultz to appear before the HELP committee or condemn the rampant wave of labor law violations he’s overseen. Given his track record, it seems unlikely he will vote to issue a subpoena. Again, quoting from Czarnek:
This is not the first time that Tuberville has opposed congressional efforts to bring attention to employer abuse in his state. In February 2022, as Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sanders held a hearing on the abuse of workers and consumers by private equity, highlighting how the laws set by Congress unfairly advantaged Warrior Met through bankruptcy proceedings. At the hearing, Alabama coal miners testified about the impact these private equity abuses have had on their lives. As the miners approach[ed] two years on strike, the longest in Alabama history, Tuberville [had] not only failed to take any action to resolve the situation, but criticized his colleagues for holding a hearing on the matter, quoting from press releases put out by the bosses at Warrior Met.
The HELP committee, with this pending vote, has an opportunity to declare that “law and order” applies to wealthy corporate executives and flagrant violations of Federal labor law.
As of publishing, Senator Tommy Tuberville’s office has not responded to requests for comments.