Fair Treatment, Fair Trade Hard to Find at Starbucks

opinion by Judy Smith

I used to love Starbucks. I used to go there everyday for my mid-morning latte. And remember Mocha Mondays? When Mocha's were a buck? It made Mondays not so bad. But this was before Starbucks went public, before it became the mega-monster devouring small cafes left and right. Do they even do Mocha Mondays anymore? I wouldn't know. I never go there. I stopped going there right after one of the clerks in Seattle's Pioneer Square Starbucks wouldn't let me use the restroom without first buying a coffee. I stood in line waiting to pay for a coffee, so I could pee in peace, cursing all the lattes I had bought at Starbucks years before. But you can't avoid Starbucks now; it's practically as entrenched as taxes and death in Seattle. A quick look at the yellow pages and you'll find Starbucks accounts for a good third of the coffeehouses in Seattle. Considering also that Starbucks has bought out Seattle's Best Coffee and Torrefazione Italia, Starbucks now owns more than half the cafes in Seattle and is still growing.

Starbucks is as well known for its phenomenal growth as it is for its rich, bitter coffee. It has 5,742 stores nationally, and with 1,700 stores internationally, Starbucks is conquering coffee rich cultures in South America and Europe and converting tea drinkers in Asia with alarming ease. Its stock has split four times.

My main gripe with Starbucks is its homogenizing nature. They've taken the unique cafe experience and mass-produced it. They've captured the essence of the cafe but not the soul. The soul can still be found at local coffee houses.

Being a barista used to be (and still is in the indie coffeehouses) an art form. It takes skill to make a decent cup of espresso. But Starbucks cafes are automated, push button affairs, no real skill involved. Starbucks has become like McDonalds, unabashedly. Its CEO and president Orin Smith noted in 2001, "There is no close second; there is no Burger King." Tully's is a long way behind.

I have an aversion to any chain cafe now after having witnessed what happened to my beloved Starbucks. I go out of my way to avoid Starbucks where once I went out of my way to find one.

No Union for Starbucks

Like McDonalds, none of US Starbucks retail stores are unionized. Starbucks won't even let its roasters unionize. Starbucks has actively fought the one union that got a toehold in its Kent Roasting Plant. The engineers at the Starbucks Kent roasting plant have had a contract for two years under the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE), but of the 22 members at the start of the contract, only 3 members are left as of this writing.

"Most organizations are neutral," says Ed Weaver, business manager of IUOE. "But Starbucks seems to be aggressively anti-union.... all a union is about [is] equal rights for workers - to be treated right, to get a fair wage." He goes on to say that Paul Allen was fine about IUOE organizing the engineers at the football stadium and Fred Hutch took a neutral stand with regards to its employees organizing, but not Starbucks.

The battle to organize the Kent plant was a long drawn out affair. IUOE says Starbucks hired a union-busting firm from Washington DC to keep the union out, but still the union prevailed with a 14 to 8 vote amongst its engineers. As the contract was being negotiated, says one former union employee, Starbucks would give everything the union requested to its non-union employees, like folks on the production line, and refuse to give the same benefits to the union because they were in "negotiations." IUOE says currently Starbucks is bringing in contract workers to do the work of the union members who left. It says these contract employees come from Texas and their travel and living costs are paid for while they're here. The union says it believes Starbucks isn't adding any employees until it empties out what is left of the union and a decertification vote can be won. The former employee, who asked that his name not be used, says that the union supporters have pretty much gone underground, although the addition of some Seattle's Best Coffee engineers might help the union. "The members asked for the union," says the former employee, "for a reason. And those reasons don't go away. They resurface."

According to Fortune magazine, Starbucks was rated one of the top 100 companies to work for in 2003. However, it wasn't such a good place to work on September 11, 2001. The Battery Park Starbucks is located near ground zero in New York City. Morale could not have been very high among the workers there who for some reason decided to charge ambulance workers $130 for cases of bottled water for victims of the bombing. The emergency crew workers paid out of their own pockets. Later when word of what transpired got back to Starbucks corporate headquarters, management was shocked by the conduct of the store. They returned the money and dispensed free coffee. Starbucks also opened their pocketbook to victims of 9/11. Starbucks executives called the situation an anomaly, but after experiencing the restroom-access problem in the Pioneer Square Starbucks, I'm not so sure. (For more details on the 9/11 bottled-water debacle, check the archives of the Seattle P.I. for columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr.'s article of September 25, 2001, "Starbucks dropped the ball in New York.")

Starbucks and Fair Trade

Goodwill can be purchased. And Starbucks is more than willing to do so when pressed. Consumer pressure convinced Starbucks to carry Fair Trade coffee about two years ago in the midst of a world-wide coffee producers' catastrophe. A flood of new, cheap Vietnamese coffee hit the global market, sending a stable Central American, African and Southeast Asia coffee market into a tailspin. Vietnam until this time had not farmed coffee. Prices plummeted forcing traditional coffee workers off farms they'd worked for generations. Families were starving. Oxfam stepped in and assisted in the establishment of Fair Trade coffee. Fair Trade assures farmers a stable price for their specialty coffee, as well as encouraging environmentally-sound farming practices, and helping to move to organic farming if farmers want to.

It's been in Starbucks' interest to support the specialty coffee growing farmer. In fact it's the mega-corporations: Proctor & Gamble, Sara Lee, Nestle and Kraft that buy 60 percent of the world's coffee, the cheapest they can find to produce their well-known canned brands like Folgers, Maxwell House, Hills Brothers and Sanka. The US government is also at fault here. The price of coffee was controlled by the International Coffee Agreement until 1989 when the US--the largest purchaser of coffee--backed out of the agreement, dissolving what market controls there were on coffee and opening it up to overproduction at the expense of small farmers.

Saving the world one cup at a time

While Fair Trade coffee is not without its critics, it is currently the best option for saving the small coffee farmer as well as preserving environmental balance. Not only does Fair Trade certification guarantee the farmer a stable, livable price for coffee it also assists farmers in moving toward and protecting sustainable coffee growing practices. Coffee grows in forest shade but is labor intensive to harvest that way. Cutting down forests makes the coffee more readily accessible but also makes it necessary to use pesticides and chemical fertilizers. The forest also offers economic alternatives for the farmers. And as any second-grader will tell you, forests breathe for the planet and maintain the earth's ecological balance. Quite a lot is riding on that morning cup of coffee.

Despite all the benefits of Fair Trade coffee, according to an article in Evergreen Monthly, January 2004, Starbucks has quietly stopped promoting it. There are no longer brochures about Fair Trade on Starbucks counters and it is rarely served as a "coffee of the day." Fair Trade coffee is listed on their website but is not given any special prominence. Digging deeper on the website, one learns that Starbucks has partnered with Oxfam to purchase some of its coffee from one of the largest Fair Trade Cooperatives in Central America. You'd think they'd want people to know about this.

Starbucks claims that it never pays less than $1.20 a pound for its specialty coffees anyway. Fair Trade coffee guarantees farmers $1.26 a pound. The problem with Starbucks' claim, say activists, is that there is no transparency, and a chunk of the price per pound often goes to middle men, so it's hard to know how socially responsible Starbucks is being.

Ronnie Cummings, the executive director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), says "Starbucks shows no interest in acting in good faith."

His group surveyed Starbucks coffeshops around the country and found that a good two-thirds of them were not serving Fair Trade coffee on the date originally promised. Additionally Cummings notes they use the cheapest milk on the market, milk from cows given growth hormones to stimulate production. Cummings wants to see Starbucks use and promote organic milk, but Starbucks tells him people don't ask for it. "They would if they put on their sign boards 'Milk filled with bovine growth hormone,'" says Cummings.

Starbucks claims they'll brew a cup of Fair Trade coffee in a French press anytime anyone asks. But as Cummings notes, that is often impractical when the clerks behind the counter are rushed and there's a line of customers. "It's absurd," he says.

I recently gave up my moratorium on Starbucks and tried ordering a cup of Fair Trade coffee only to be told they didn't have the four-cup French press on their computerized cash register and an eight-cup French press Fair Trade coffee would cost $3.95. That seems a bit steep for a cup of coffee, even a socially responsible one. Cummings says thousands of independent coffeehouses brew up Fair Trade coffee everyday, but Starbucks can make more money staying with business as usual.

"They're not making even a token effort to go beyond greenwashing."