Quite amusing to see where Jones (Starbucks Communications Officer) worked previously—but definitely not surprising.

https://thehill.com/business/3883061-heres-why-bernie-sanders-is-going-after-starbucks-ceo-howard-schultz/amp/

The showdown between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Starbucks chief Howard Schultz will come to a head next week.

That’s when the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee will vote on whether to subpoena Schultz’s testimony and authorize an investigation into the company’s labor law violations.

The Wednesday vote comes on the heels of a major legal decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Starbucks was affecting its workers’ organizing efforts through “egregious and widespread misconduct” that violated their legal rights.

“While Howard Schultz is a multi-billionaire who runs a very profitable multi-national corporation, he must understand that he and his company are not above the law,” Sanders, who chairs the HELP committee, said in a statement announcing the March 8 subpoena vote.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Schultz has given us no choice, but to subpoena him. A multi-billion dollar corporation like Starbucks cannot continue to break federal labor law with impunity. The time has come to hold Starbucks and Mr. Schultz accountable,” Sanders wrote.

The HELP committee has 11 Democrats and 10 Republicans. An aide for Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine — a Democrat on the committee — told The Hill they were “not sure” that the vote would fall along party lines.

A Starbucks spokesman said last week that, “this is a disappointing development, but we will continue our dialogue with Chairman Sanders’s staff and are optimistic that we’ll come to an appropriate resolution. Our response to the Chairman’s initial request still stands.”

In lieu of Schultz, the company said it would offer AJ Jones II, executive vice president and chief communications officer for Starbucks, to testify before the committee.

Jones was the policy director for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the former House Democratic whip.

Why Sanders wants Schultz to testify

More than 280 Starbucks stores have voted to unionize since the December 2021 Buffalo vote, according to Starbucks Workers United. In that time, Starbucks has fired nearly 200 union organizers.

The NLRB has filed more than 75 complaints against Starbucks alleging unlawful intimidation and retaliation against union organizers.

But it’s not just the company’s labor practices that are of interest to Sanders.

It’s also the role in shaping them and enforcing them played by Schultz himself — a CEO who was once reported to be former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s pick to serve as Labor secretary if she had won the 2016 presidential election.

Sanders called attention to the personal nature of Schultz’s role in Starbucks labor policy in a Thursday letter to the company, referring to the NLRB decision that Starbucks had committed “hundreds” of labor violations.

The senator cited a November 2021 meeting in Buffalo led by Schultz, who had not yet returned as the company’s CEO following a 2018 retirement, with all area Starbucks workers.

“These workers were forced to attend this meeting while every Buffalo-area store was closed to listen to Mr. Schultz one month prior to union elections that were held in the area. This meeting makes clear the enormous power and influence Mr. Schultz has over labor policy at Starbucks,” Sanders wrote.

Starbucks is under fire for labor violations

In perhaps the most significant ruling to date, NLRB administrative law judge Michael Rosas on Wednesday found that Starbucks engaged in numerous labor law violations during its union-busting campaign in Buffalo, displaying “egregious and widespread misconduct demonstrating a general disregard for the employees’ fundamental rights.”

Rosas ordered Starbucks to rehire and give back pay to seven Buffalo-area workers who were fired amid organizing efforts. As part of the ruling, Starbucks would have to post a notice in its stores promising that the company won’t surveil or threaten workers aiming to form a union.

Rosas ordered also Schultz to personally read the notice to the Buffalo Starbucks workers.

Starbucks union organizers described the company’s counter-organizing efforts as a form of “psychological warfare.”

Starbucks’s pressure on employees caused physical symptoms

“It was incredibly intense,” Jaz Brisack, an organizer who worked for Starbucks from 2020 to 2022 and now works for the Workers United union in New York, told The Hill in an interview.

“The anti-union campaign is designed as psychological warfare. It’s designed to make people feel like they’re unhinged or insane for trying to do this and trying to stand up,” Brisack said.

“There’s a lot of anxiety in captive-audience meetings and one-on-ones in going into that kind of power dynamic with the boss,” she said.

Brisack mentioned a colleague who was “literally getting notifications on her Apple Watch that her heart rate was dangerously high and that she needed to not be in that kind of stressful situation, which is exactly what the campaign is designed to do.”

Tyler Hoffman, a former shift supervisor and organizer at Starbucks in Richmond, Va., told The Hill in an interview that managers had accused him of getting paid to organize.

“It got so bad, the distrust of me that I was receiving an extra paycheck, it got to the point where I had to show them bank statements to prove that I wasn’t being paid. I was like, ‘I only have $30 in my account and I live in a 400-square-foot apartment with my partner.’ If I was getting two paychecks, this just wouldn’t be the case,” he said.

Michelle Eisen, a barista at the Buffalo, N.Y., Elmwood Starbucks location, helps out the local Starbucks Workers United, employees of a local Starbucks, as they gather at a local union hall to cast votes to unionize or not, Feb. 16, 2022, in Mesa, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Starbucks claims it’s a model employer

Starbucks argued in a February letter to Sanders that the company “has been and continues to be a model employer,” citing its offering of health care, mental health care, tuition reimbursement, company equity and retirement accounts, among other benefits.

According to jobs website Indeed.com, coffee-preparers at Starbucks make $16.59 per hour in New York, where a statewide minimum wage of $15 per hour was enacted as part of the state’s 2016 budget.

Indeed puts the average hourly wage at $11.68 in Arkansas and at $10.94 in Mississippi.

The company also defended its record on labor issues, saying it “has been extensively engaged in good faith bargaining at more than 200 locations where the results of a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election have been certified.”

Starbucks has said unions are a threat to its business

The company has officially told the government that unions present a major threat to its business model.

“If a significant portion of our employees were to become unionized, our labor costs could increase and our business could be negatively affected by other requirements and expectations that could increase our costs, change our employee culture, decrease our flexibility and disrupt our business,” Starbucks wrote in its 2021 year-end filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Our business could be adversely impacted by increases in labor costs, including wages and benefits, which, in a retail business such as ours, are two of our most significant costs,” the company said.

Starbucks added, “our responses to any union organizing efforts could negatively impact how our brand is perceived and have adverse effects on our business, including on our financial results.”

Democrats are boosting union power

President Biden’s administration has prioritized beefing up the NLRB to boost organizing efforts.

On his first day in office, Biden fired anti-labor Trump appointee Peter Robb from the top NLRB post, drawing outrage from business groups and praise from unions.

The NLRB now has a pro-union majority board and is led by Jennifer Abruzzo, a former labor leader at the Communications Workers of America who is seeking to ban captive audience meetings and other union-busting tactics Starbucks has been accused of using.

If Schultz is made to appear, it could be another win for the U.S. labor movement, which has withered in recent decades but has seen a resurgence in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic as the cost of living has risen and the unemployment rate has fallen to a 54-year low.

The number of American workers on strike increased by 52 percent in 2022, with more than 120,000 workers going on strike and 26 major work stoppages in effect that year.

The Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations tracks more detailed data on strikes and puts the number higher.

Democrats secured $25 million in new funding for the NLRB in the most recent omnibus spending bill, the board’s first funding bump in nearly a decade. The NLRB said that it needed more money to handle a 53 percent increase in union election petitions in 2022.

"I do not believe that that the United States should be providing funds that end up being used to extend & expand settlements…that debate is going to be joined. It is already beginning," Democratic Senator @PeterWelch tells me on my @MSNBC show tonight:pic.twitter.com/OwMTdx7JyA

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) March 6, 2023

New bipartisan gang just dropped?

Klobuchar, Moran, Murphy, Marshall, Warren Introduce Bipartisan Legislation to Lift Trade Embargo on Cuba pic.twitter.com/MybXW5qlvM

— Nathaniel Reed (@ReedReports) March 6, 2023

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64867467

Turkey’s often divided opposition parties have come together to choose a single candidate to face President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in May’s election.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu leads the main secular opposition party, the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP).

Polls suggest a tight race in a country highly polarised after two decades of Mr Erdogan’s authoritarian rule.

Economic crisis and errors during last month’s earthquake may make him more vulnerable than in previous elections.

A huge crowd of supporters cheered Mr Kilicdaroglu, a former civil servant, as he was chosen by an opposition alliance known as the Table of Six.

Their agreement had been thrown into doubt when one of the six parties involved, the nationalist Good Party of Meral Aksener, complained he lacked popular appeal.

Ms Aksener favoured the mayors of either Istanbul or Ankara but a compromise was eventually agreed that would see both men appointed vice presidents.

“Our table is the table of peace,” said Mr Kilicdaroglu, a soft-spoken 74 year old. “Our only goal is to take the country to days of prosperity, peace and joy.”

He offers a radically different vision in both substance and style to President Erdogan’s fiery, charismatic approach and promised his supporters that he would govern Turkey through consensus and consultation.

He also said he would return the country to a parliamentary system. Mr Erdogan oversaw a transition to a presidential system in 2018, gaining sweeping powers.

The CHP was created by modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and is the country’s oldest political party, though it has been out of power centrally since the 1990s.

However, Mr Kilicdaroglu has broadened its appeal by embracing minority groups and has formed alliances with right-wing parties.

He has also shown himself willing to challenge Mr Erdogan, a leader who has become increasingly intolerant of criticism.

In February’s earthquake, in which more than 45,000 people were killed in south-eastern Turkey, Mr Kilicdaroglu led attacks on the government, which he said had allowed corruption and poor building standards.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/06/opinion/city-walkability-culture-wars-conspiracy-theories.html

What people who haven’t experienced a real urban lifestyle generally don’t get is how easy life is. Running errands is a snap; because you walk most places, you don’t worry about traffic jams or parking spaces.

You might think that the price of this convenience is coping with constant noise and teeming crowds of strangers. But while the main north-south thoroughfares — in my case Broadway, Amsterdam and Columbus — are fairly noisy and have a lot of both vehicle and foot traffic, the side streets are much quieter than you probably imagine.

What about crime? There’s a widespread perception that New York is a dangerous place. In his speech Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Donald Trump asserted that “killings are taking place at a number like nobody’s ever seen, right in Manhattan.” Yet the reality is that New York is one of the safest places in America. No doubt, New Yorkers themselves were greatly upset by a surge in the crime rate during the pandemic, but this surge may be ebbing, with murders in particular down to their lowest level since 2019.

And the safety proved in statistics is also the lived experience in many areas of the city where New Yorkers don’t act as if they’re terrified of crime. A couple of nights ago I walked home from an event at 12:30 a.m.; there were people out and about, and no sense of menace.

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Am I proselytizing? Well, yes. Most Americans — even those who have visited New York but seen little beyond the crowds in Times Square — have a distorted sense of what urban life can be like. But very few promoters of the 15-minute city would advocate imposing that lifestyle on the population at large. It’s more a matter of making it possible for people to live that way if they choose.
Which is where the culture wars and conspiracy theories come in.

Modern politics being what it is, alas, it’s also a concept that has been caught up in the culture wars and become the subject of wild conspiracy theories. And as usual the people who yell loudest about “freedom” are actually the ones who want to practice coercion, preventing other Americans from living in ways they disapprove of.

Before I get to the politics, a few words about what living in a 15-minute city, and New York in general, is actually like.

I’ve noted before that there’s an unwritten rule in American politics that it’s OK for politicians to disparage big cities and their residents in a way that would be considered unforgivable if anyone did the same for rural areas. Trump’s false claims about crime weren’t that unusual. There seems to be a widespread sense that only people living a car-centered lifestyle, or a pickup truck-centered lifestyle, are real Americans.

And this in turn feeds into conspiracy theorizing. Making walkable cities possible requires both loosening and tightening restrictions on urban development: Localities would have to allow more construction of multifamily housing and multistory buildings, while restricting car traffic in certain areas.

Remarkably, the right manages to view both looser and tighter regulation as leftist plots.

The big budget document currently popular among House Republicans takes time out to support local bans on multifamily housing, contending the bans help preserve our “beautiful suburbs.” (These days even dry fiscal documents sound like Trump speeches.)

As for traffic restrictions, at least some people on the right have managed to convince themselves that they’re a plot to lock people into their neighborhoods, not allowed to leave. Slightly less crazy commentators, like the pop philosopher Jordan Peterson, call traffic restrictions a plan by “tyrannical bureaucrats” to dictate where you’re allowed to drive.

For what it’s worth, there are in fact many places everyone agrees you shouldn’t be allowed to drive — for example, across planted farmland — because doing so would impose costs on other people. The costs you impose on others by driving into an urban area and thereby making congestion worse are every bit as real, but somehow placing limits on urban driving is tyranny.

But of course none of this is about rational argument.

Now, I don’t know how many Americans would choose the walkable-city lifestyle if it were widely available, but surely many more than are living it now. Unfortunately, urban planning — for cities are always planned, one way or another — is yet another casualty of the politics of grievance and paranoia.

From me: North Carolina is expanding Medicaid. Eli Lilly is cutting insulin prices.
In both cases, the quiet catalyst was actually the American Rescue Plan, the unfairly maligned law whose most obscure pieces are helping millions of people.https://t.co/92NwXMJpFN

— David Dayen (@ddayen) March 7, 2023

A Medcaid rebate cap lifted in the ARP meant that Lilly would have *paid Medicaid $150* for each vial of Humalog. Lilly cut the price to avoid that outcome.https://t.co/92NwXMJpFN

— David Dayen (@ddayen) March 7, 2023