From the ethical consumer website
'Starbucks (Or ‘America’s Favourite Drug Dealer’ as the ‘Starbucks Gossip’ website calls it). Despite providing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with Starbucks coffee kiosks(1)...Despite what the US National Lawyers Guild called its “relentless and illegal anti-union campaign” and “retaliatory firing” of union organisers(2)...Despite six settlements in three years for complaints to the US National Labor Relations Board of violating workers’ rights(3)...Despite providing its US staff with worse health care coverage than Wal-Mart and recently doubling health insurance costs(4)...Despite refusing for six years to give in to pressure from campaigners to ban the genetically engineered artificial ‘recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone’ from its dairy supply chain(5)...Despite criticism for what the World Cancer Research Fund called the “alarming” sale of iced coffee containing over a quarter of a woman’s daily calorie requirement(6)...Despite what Oxfam claimed was obstruction by lobbying against Ethiopia’s trademark applications for its traditional coffee varieties to boost income for some of the world’s poorest coffee growers(7)...Despite increasing CEO Howard Schultz’s income by 25% in 2009, a year in which the company slashed costs by $580 million, partly by reducing its work force by 19%(8)...Despite a US court ordering the company to pay more than $100 million into the accounts of its low wage staff in California after ruling that it had improperly required the workers to share tips with their bosses(9)...Despite petitioning a US Federal Judge to allow the past sexual history of a 16 year old former employee to be revealed in court after she went public over the company’s alleged “failure to act” in a case of aggravated sexual harassment, before settling out of court(10)... Starbucks somehow manages to maintain an image amongst a considerable number of consumers that it is simply a scaled up version of a bohemian Seattle coffee shop selling fairly-traded artisan coffees.
And despite all of the above it took allegations in the Sun in 2008 that the company was wasting 23.4m litres of water every day (enough to fill the ubiquitous Olympic pool “every 83 minutes”)(11) due to running a tap in-store non-stop, to dent the brand’s reputation in the UK.
Since then, with a multi-million pound advertising campaign stressing the company’s ethical credentials, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that the company had gone entirely Fairtrade. For the record, Starbucks is now the largest purchaser of Fairtrade certified coffee in the world and since the end of 2009 all of its espresso-based drinks (ie. the vast majority) in the UK and Ireland are 100% Fairtrade.
In the US, where consumers are far less attuned to the Fairtrade message, it’s another story. In the early 2000s the US Organic Consumers’ Association (OCA) was encouraging a boycott until the company stocked Fairtrade coffee in all its stores, improved working conditions for its coffee plantation workers and stopped “loading up its coffee drinks with bovine-growth-hormone-tainted milk”.(12) By 2006 the OCA was no longer calling for a boycott, instead calling on consumers to force Starbucks to stick to its offer of brewing a Fairtrade coffee in any of its stores on request.13 The OCA continues to criticise Starbucks for dragging its feet on Fairtrade on the American side of the Atlantic.(14)
The figure for the proportion of Fairtrade in the company’s overall coffee sourcing since its UK Fairtrade announcement was unavailable at the time of writing. In 2009, prior to the announcement, it was a little over 10%.(15)
Starbucks also has its own internal ‘ethical sourcing scheme’. The scheme, which it calls CAFE certification, was launched in 2004 and has measurable standards for: how much of the price Starbucks pays reaches the farmer; some minimal workers’ rights; and environmental criteria. It earns a ‘Worst’ in our updated Supply Chain Management category. In 2009, when it last reported, Starbucks had still only applied CAFE to 81% of its coffee purchases, and with a target of 100% by 2015 we’re unimpressed by its ambition to implement these weak standards.
Of course coffee isn’t the only thing the biggest coffee shop chain in the world buys. With a turnover around £6.8bn it could be a significant force in pushing up standards. Instead, its ‘Social Responsibility Standards,’ applied to all the goods and services it sources, is rudimentary, offering even weaker protection of workers than its CAFE standards.
Starbucks rates better in our Environmental Reporting category narrowly missing getting a best rating because no independent verification of its report was evidenced.
And despite all of the above it took allegations in the Sun in 2008 that the company was wasting 23.4m litres of water every day (enough to fill the ubiquitous Olympic pool “every 83 minutes”)(11) due to running a tap in-store non-stop, to dent the brand’s reputation in the UK.
Since then, with a multi-million pound advertising campaign stressing the company’s ethical credentials, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that the company had gone entirely Fairtrade. For the record, Starbucks is now the largest purchaser of Fairtrade certified coffee in the world and since the end of 2009 all of its espresso-based drinks (ie. the vast majority) in the UK and Ireland are 100% Fairtrade.
In the US, where consumers are far less attuned to the Fairtrade message, it’s another story. In the early 2000s the US Organic Consumers’ Association (OCA) was encouraging a boycott until the company stocked Fairtrade coffee in all its stores, improved working conditions for its coffee plantation workers and stopped “loading up its coffee drinks with bovine-growth-hormone-tainted milk”.(12) By 2006 the OCA was no longer calling for a boycott, instead calling on consumers to force Starbucks to stick to its offer of brewing a Fairtrade coffee in any of its stores on request.13 The OCA continues to criticise Starbucks for dragging its feet on Fairtrade on the American side of the Atlantic.(14)
The figure for the proportion of Fairtrade in the company’s overall coffee sourcing since its UK Fairtrade announcement was unavailable at the time of writing. In 2009, prior to the announcement, it was a little over 10%.(15)
Starbucks also has its own internal ‘ethical sourcing scheme’. The scheme, which it calls CAFE certification, was launched in 2004 and has measurable standards for: how much of the price Starbucks pays reaches the farmer; some minimal workers’ rights; and environmental criteria. It earns a ‘Worst’ in our updated Supply Chain Management category. In 2009, when it last reported, Starbucks had still only applied CAFE to 81% of its coffee purchases, and with a target of 100% by 2015 we’re unimpressed by its ambition to implement these weak standards.
Of course coffee isn’t the only thing the biggest coffee shop chain in the world buys. With a turnover around £6.8bn it could be a significant force in pushing up standards. Instead, its ‘Social Responsibility Standards,’ applied to all the goods and services it sources, is rudimentary, offering even weaker protection of workers than its CAFE standards.
Starbucks rates better in our Environmental Reporting category narrowly missing getting a best rating because no independent verification of its report was evidenced.
Church of Life After Shopping reverend jailed for exorcising Starbucks cash till
The Reverend Billy’s Church of Life After Shopping – a radical gospel choir lead by an anti-consumerist preacher – certainly puts the fear of God into Starbucks. Starbucks supposedly circulated a memo to US managers titled “What should I do if Reverend Billy is in my store?” after the Church targeted it with ‘retail interventions’.
The coffee shop behemoth took umbrage at the Reverend’s impromptu in-store sermons. And in 2004 the subversive preacher was prosecuted after he exorcised a Starbucks cash register in an attempt to, as he put it, “reverse its flow” and send its “sinful cash back to the coffee families in Guatemala and sourthern Mexico”.(21)
Offered a $100 fine if he pleaded guilty to “obstructing a lawful business” the Rev Billy opted for a baptism of fire (and media attention for the cause) with three days in the notoriously violent LA County Correctional Facility. According to the Reverend, perplexed gang members interviewed him about his crime, at first suspecting the ‘blond-Elvis’ performance-activist was a cop. But when he explained to them his protest against corporate greed and the poverty of Latin American coffee farmers he was assigned a gang bodyguard to protect him from other inmates and the nickname ‘Starbuck’. “I wasn’t telling them something they didn’t know,” according to the Rev. Billy, who speculated that some of the gang members probably had relatives working in those very coffee bean fields.(22)
Reverend Billy is apparently banned by the company from every Starbucks in the world, as well as being subject to a court ruling specifying a 250 yard exclusion zone from every Starbucks in California – which, anti-corporate activists www.starbuckscoffee.org.uk note is “a land mass the size of the Island of Hawaii, and effectively eliminates passage through Los Angeles International Airport”.(21)'
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