Starbucks
I caught a portion of the congressional hearings with Howard Shultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, regarding NLRA violations.
Here's an interesting tidbit.
Bob Casey, Senator from Pennsylvania, asked Shultz if he agreed that surveilling employees (Starbucks was using headphones to monitor organizing activities) was acceptable behavior for a company. Shultz replied no, he didn't agree that it was. (Surveilling employees is a violation of the NLRA.)
After Casey ended his questioning and passed it over to the next senator, Shultz demanded to respond on his own. During this time, he implied surveilling his own employees in Buffalo, after saying he wasn't aware of any surveillance taking place. As far as I can tell, he admitted to violating the NLRA and neither Casey nor any other senator drew issue with this.
The employee in question, according to Shultz, was discovered to be a paid organizer - before being hired - for the union involved in organizing Buffalo Starbucks. Now perhaps they came to know this information by some other, totally innocuous method. But it seems unlikely, given Casey had mentioned the monitoring headphones were used in Buffalo.
Casey also mentioned the firm that Starbucks hired to consult and destroy the attempts for the employees in Buffalo and elsewhere to unionize. It's named Littler Mendelson. According to Casey their fees can go as high or higher than $600/hour (that's 40 minimum wage employees in New York state, or around 30 service/grocery union employees.)
What's interesting to me about this is that there is a law firm at all...with such a reputation...that it is called up by any major corporation any time they're concerned about union organizing. You would think such an organization would have long ago been targeted by hacking groups and labor activists, wouldn't you? How do you suppose the managing director and other associated management justify their sorry existence to themselves? Solidarity with their elite consumers? Or is it simply plain ignorance of the damage that they are doing to the future of this country, one job at a time?
Ah well - I suppose you don't care much about the future when you're so financially insulated from reality that you're willing to happily stomp on the most precarious and vulnerable of your nation's own citizens.
People like Erin A. Webber and Howard Shultz are the true traitors and terrorists in this nation, even above and beyond the misguided ultraright and neoliberal collaborators.