On Thursday, the Washington Post ran on the front page of the Style section a long profile of Daniel Gross, a guy who’s trying to organize a Starbucks labor union. The subhead read, “‘Top Employer’ Starbucks Has a Crack in Its Image.’”

This is silly. The “union” consists of nine stores, and has a couple dozen members. The Starbucks universe has 9,401 stores and 128,000 emplyees. Starbucks employees report overwhelming satisfaction with their jobs, at a clip of about 85 percent. These are astounding numbers given that (a) just about everyone usually gripes about his job, and (b) these are retail/services jobs, which usually rank among the lowest sectors of the economy when it comes to job satisfaction.

In fact, the last time Mr. Gross and his union were in the news, it was when they engaged in a joint campaign with the Center for Science in the Public Interest that bashed Starbucks for offering its employees free coffee drinks and leftover sweets and pastries, which the critics said was making Starbucks employees fat. Free food? The horror! Golly. I can’t understand why Starbucks employees aren’t chomping at the bit to get their union cards.

You have to have a pretty romanticized opinion of the labor movement to think this is a story at all, much less front-page (of the Style section), 3,000-word profile material.

You know what would be a good story? How many self-styled “workers’ rights” groups treat their own workers like crap.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 1:48 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.