I don't work at Starbucks, but I read with interest the company's full page ad in the NY TImes flaunting its progressive approach to employees & its health care plan. I wrote a positive post at my blog about the ad and the policy. But a former employee left a comment saying it was almost impossible to get the hrs. she needed to qualify.
I don't mean to dedicate this thread to the question of whether employees can or cannot qualify since it's already been covered pretty well pro & con here: http://www.starbucksunion.org/node/156?from=0&comments_per_page=10. What I'd like to know is has anyone seen any statistics about the number or percentage of employees that do qualify in any given quarter? That would be a sure fire way of knowing whether the ad's just rhetoric or truth.
I think an even more appropri
I think an even more appropriate question would be why does Starbucks feel the need to take out full page ads in the New York Times telling the world how good they treat their workforce.
Why not just treat the workers fairly and let that be the end of it?
Why does my health insurance have to part of their advertising campaign?
As someone who works for Starbucks I must say I am quite offended by those ads because not only are they misleading but Starbucks also is spending a great deal of money on these ads to be misleading.
I (and everyone I've had the
I (and everyone I've had the chance to work with) get treated more than fairly. I get plenty of hours to keep health insurance, and I have been for 8 months now. I've only been a shift for a month and a half, so I was making those hours as a barista. It's not hard to keep 20 hours a week, the people who don't either don't want the hours, don't speak up that they do, or suck at their job. I know I wasn't getting very good hours when I wasn't performing very well, then when I turned around I suddenly got a lot more hours. I'm sure this can't just be a thing in my area.
I've never had a problem keep
I've never had a problem keeping twenty hours a week and I've never seen anyone have a problem keeping twenty hours a week but do I believe its possible that bad managers do unfair things to their employees? Of course. Can they do it at Starbucks? Certainly. I know its hard for some of you to see something that isn't occuring right in front of your face but when you do that you are narrowing your vision to just what you want to see.
How many stores do we have in the US right now? 6 or 7 thousand right? Now imagine, each one of those stores has a store manager, and for each one of those different store managers you have a different personality, different attitude, different management style and so on. Same thing on the DM level, and RVP level and on up.
So how are you going to come on here and say that if its true in my store then it is true for all stores? That doesn't make any sense.
But the fact that these bad managers exist and that they do really bad things and get away with it even after you've called everyone there is to call indicates a problem.
There are less than 5,000 ret
There are less than 5,000 retail stores in the US. Those are the only stores that really matter in a "Starbucks Union". Yeah, there are bad managers, but how much do you think the employees REALLY do about it. They probably bitch amoungst themselves, their friends, their families, and then go to a union website. However, do they actually DO something about it. I highly doubt it. Why would they take the effort to do something when they can whine and bitch for someone else to. I bet if more employees would actually speak up when something isn't going right, there wouldn't be problems.
or we would end up with a web
or we would end up with a website for them to falsify complaints, and exagerate the issues... [hint: this one.]