Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has declared war on unions, but employees aren’t backing down. Plus, inflation is rising at an alarming rate, but the earnings reports from corporations tell us that price gouging is a major factor. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz has declared war on unions, but employees, well, they’re not backing down. I love that. You know, I thought back, do you remember when Hillary Clinton was going to make him secretary of labor?
Yeah.
Did I just imagine that or have I? I’ve.
Nope. That was, uh.
Okay. So, so tell me his position. What’s he doing? How outrageous has Mr. Schultz gone?
Well much like Amazon, Starbucks has had this big effort to unionize their stores across the country and we’re starting to see successes pop up all over the place. So Schultz was recently asked, are you going to sit down in good faith and negotiate with these unions? You know, negotiate with the people to form the unions. And he flat out says, no.
Yeah.
No, I am not.
Well, he’s, his, his argument is really a little ridiculous. He said, we’re a family here. We’re a family. This is the Starbucks family. These people working here, we, we’re just one big family that gets along. And if you allow, if you allow these union types to come in here, they’re gonna distort the process to where there’s gonna be a customer experience that’s bad. They’re, our employees are gonna actually be unhappy in the long run. And his position is no, we will not negotiate. Where does this go for Starbucks? I mean, there’s plenty of great coffee shops around the country.
Right.
I mean, this started up in what, Seattle, right?
Yeah.
Well, there’s like a thousand more that could do the same thing.
Yeah. Or, or you can, you know, make it at home too, if you choose.
Yeah.
So Starbucks is really kind of pushing the limits on what they need to do here. If there’s one thing we can find, it’s a cup of coffee in this country.
Yeah.
But he, he also, you know, he runs the risk of running a foul of the national labor relations board or the national labor relations act, I should say, by openly stating that he is not going to negotiate in good faith. Right there, that’s a violation. You know, you get a good lawyer on that, you can hit him with that pretty easily. So you have that big red flag for him. But most importantly, the workers say we’re still gonna do it.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we have seen just the last year or two, this massive push for more unions here in the United States, something that we’ve talked about’s been necessary for 20 years, but we haven’t seen it like this in this generation.
Well, this gen, you bring up something, it’s kinda like the Starbucks cool. You know, is that aura of the Starbucks cool. We’re gonna take our computer in there, we’re gonna drink latte and we’re gonna just chat. It’s, it’s kind of like Starbucks cool kind of feel. It’s, it’s rapidly losing that Starbucks cool kind of feel. And I thought it was really important that, that his position is permanent. Permanently we will not negotiate with unions. We’ll see.
Inflation is rising at an alarming rate, but the earnings report from the corporations tell us that price gouging is a major factor. Wow. How about Tyson? Let’s lead off with that. It’s the Tyson story, right? Again, how many Tyson stories do we have to tell over the years? The Tyson story is $500 million is what they have gouged just in the last six months.
Yeah. That, that really tells the whole story. That number, that $500 million, because that is exactly what they say in their earnings are report. Now, they admitted their prices had increased, you know, for them by 1.5 billion. So they admit in their earnings report, so we increased our prices by 2 billion. So you’re talking about a 25% increase above what your costs were.
Yeah. This isn’t us making it, it’s right there in the report.
Yeah.
I mean, anybody reading the report, well, do the numbers.
So they are, they’re basically admitting that yeah.
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