A Starbucks worker union claims that the company has banned its employees from displaying pride decorations during Pride Month. This contrasts sharply with past years at the Seattle-based company, where they have very openly supported the LGBTQ agenda.
The union, Starbucks Workers United (SWU), shared a message on their Twitter breaking the news. The letter claimed that “Starbucks has refused to let workers decorate for Pride and is also taking down Pride flags.” The tweet also noted that in past years “workers were allowed, and even encouraged, to put up pride decorations without incident.”
Starbucks has since denied any claims that there has been a policy change, with a spokesperson for the coffee company telling Forbes that there have not been any changes in the policy and calling the allegations made by the union “false information.” The spokesperson also doubled down on the company’s support for the LGBTQ community.
Even with this denial by the company, the SWU says otherwise. Their statement noted that “despite Starbucks claiming that there has been no policy change, workers across the country are speaking out and proving otherwise.” The statement alleges that this discrepancy is an anti-union effort made by the global chain to alienate workers at their workplaces.
The statement includes numerous examples of times when workers were told to remove the alphabet soup displays. There have been varying reasons claimed in the release, running from there “not being enough ‘labor hours’ to schedule [workers] to decorate” to concerns of safety following what has happened in Target stores (which were actually far-left members threatening the stores, as previously covered by the DC Enquirer).
The tweet finished with several overly-dramatic quotes from workers miffed that they can’t shove the ideology down their customers’ throats. Quotes like “Starbucks showed their true colors” and “in the same way Starbucks rejects Democracy by suppressing its workers from organizing, it has betrayed and turned its back on its queer workers.”
The discrepancy between the employee union and the official company does draw some confusion, though individual managers may be policing their stores in a way different from others.
Companies seem to be looking to others like Anheuser-Busch and Target and noticing the absolute clown fiesta that occurs whenever they go out of their way to shove a far-left and sinful ideology into their customers’ otherwise simple shopping experience. Brands should not be using their platforms to push divisive political ideas on either side of the aisle. Consumers should not have to think about what extremist political ideology they’re supporting when they want to buy a coffee.
There is a time and a place to rally behind political ideas, and it is most definitely not within businesses, and the massive backlash companies are getting seems to be teaching them so.
