In 2018, a Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) employee reported two Black men to the police after the staff had denied the men access to the store's bathroom. In the midst of the fallout, Starbucks announced that it would be making its bathrooms available to all in an effort to combat racial discrimination. Now, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says that the chain may have to reverse that change due to safety concerns.
"We have to harden our stores and provide safety for our people," Schultz said at the New York Times DealBook D.C. policy forum. "I don't know if we can keep our bathrooms open."
When the open-access policy was first introduced in 2018, Schultz had said that the change was meant to stop any Starbucks visitor from feeling "as if we are not giving access to you to the bathroom because you are 'less than'."
Schultz spent much of his time speaking about the increasing difficulties faced by Starbucks workers. In regards to the bathroom issue, Schultz said that growing mental health problems throughout the country are making it more difficult for Starbucks employees to manage the stores, and added that changes need to be made to limit the number of non-customers in Starbucks locations.
Along with difficulties on the job, Schultz also spoke about the social and economic issues affecting Starbucks workers, and the changes affecting corporate responsibility today.
"There is a cultural and political change in regards to... the crisis of capitalism, the needs and requirements of the employee in a company today, the fact that,.. in many ways, the government has left people behind," Schultz said, "The role and responsibility of business is greater than ever before to provide our people with the proper wage, proper benefits, and a pathway to economic mobility."
Shultz said that workers of today don't feel like they have access to the same economic mobility as Americans of the past. He added that Black and other racial minority workers especially face an uphill battle when it comes to improving their financial circumstances.
Schultz also commented on the current labor movement happening at well over 130 of the coffee chain's 9,000 U.S. locations, saying it's "personal". In defense of his current anti-union stance, Schultz said that "we need to talk about" the supposed fact that the intended purpose of unions during the mid-1900s was to fight businesses that "abused their people".
"We're not in the coal mine business. We're not abusing our people. But the sweeping issue in the country is that businesses are not doing enough and the business is the enemy," Schultz said. "What's happening in America is much bigger than Starbucks. Starbucks, unfortunately, has been made a proxy of what is happening."
Shultz continued, "If a company as progressive as Starbucks, that has done so much,... can be threatened by a third party, that means that any company in America can."