GROUNDS FOR RECONSIDERATION

Howard Schultz sold himself as a benevolent, modern boss. Then Starbucks employees pushed for a union.

- Noah Lanard

IN NOVEMBER 2021, Victoria Conklin, a 23-year-old shift supervisor at a Starbucks near Buffalo, was talking to Rossann Williams, then the company's president of North American retail. Workers at three nearby stores had recently petitioned to become the chain's only unionized locations in the United States, but Conklin's hadn't. Williams wanted to keep it that way.

As the company wrapped up its anti-union campaign, Williams told Conklin that a "special guest" was coming in for a big event. "It's Howard Schultz," Conklin responded. "Don't act like it's Taylor Swift or something."

Almost four decades before, Schultz had joined Starbucks as an operations and marketing executive. In 1987, he bought the company for $3.8 million, serving as CEO as it grew into the world's largest coffee business. Starbucks is now worth more than $110 billion, with more employees than Iceland has people. Schultz stepped down, for the third and final time, in March. With a net worth of nearly $4 billion (including a superyacht worth at least $100 million), he's not the richest tycoon of his generation, but he is emblematic of its self-satisfied paternalism.

In running Starbucks, Schultz claims he set out to protect people like his blue-collar dad, who was "not respected and dignified and did not have any value.' The threat posed by a union, then, was as much psychic as economic: By organizing, his employees were rejecting the protector who Schultz's father never had and who Schultz thought he'd become by providing benefits like health care for part-time workers. Organizers' efforts undermined the good billionaire's faith in the frictionless existence he thought he'd built, buoyed by global adoration, immense wealth, and the gratitude of the workers who created it.