Report: Starbucks falls short on vow to make workers' schedules more fair

Despite a public pledge last year to ease scheduling burdens for its baristas, Starbucks has fallen short of its commitment on a number of fronts, according to a new report released Wednesday based on interviews with the coffee chain’s workers across the country.

The report, titled “The Grind: Striving for Scheduling Fairness at Starbucks” (PDF), said Starbucks baristas across the country were still complaining that they often don’t receive their work schedules soon enough before shifts and that they are under pressure to avoid taking sick days.

The New York-based advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy produced the report, which cited survey data collected from more than 200 Starbucks baristas in 37 states and compiled by Coworker.org, an online platform that supports workplace rights.

“More than six months after Starbucks publicly recommitted to scheduling policies and mandated ten days’ notice, the scheduling issues they sought to address still persist in their frontline stores,” the report said.

After a New York Times investigation in August 2014 highlighted the scheduling travails of a Starbucks worker and single mother named Janette Navarro, the company announced that it would strive to improve work schedules for its employees, whom the company calls “partners.” The workers’ survey cited in Wednesday’s report was conducted in March this year.

“Taking care of our partners is a responsibility I take very personally,” Cliff Burrows, a high-level Starbucks executive, said in an internal company email at the time, according to the New York Times and other news outlets. Burrows was quoted as saying the company would work to aid “stability and consistency” in the schedules of its more than 130,000 baristas.

Burrows pledged then that the company would improve its scheduling software to make it easier on employees to plan their lives.

But the directive has only partially trickled down to the company's more than 12,000 U.S. locations, Wednesday's report says.

“They’ve made some improvements, but they’ve been minor,” said Carrie Gleason, co-author of the report. “A fair workweek at Starbucks exists in some stores,” she said, but “the issue is inconsistency.”

Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment on the report's findings before the time of publication. 

The report said many baristas noted a high incidence of so-called “clopening” shifts, in which a person closes and opens in consecutive shifts, often leaving a span of only a few hours in which to return home before working again. 

Last year Starbucks' Burrows pledged an end to the dreaded clopening shifts, saying “district managers must help store managers problem-solve issues specific to individual stores to make this happen.”

But the report indicated that such shifts were still widespread, with nearly a quarter of workers regularly getting them.

“I feel that baristas should have a minimum of 10 hours in between shifts. Everyone should have a fair chance to get home, settled, and be able to sleep for eight hours before having to get up for another shift," the survey report quoted an Illinois Starbucks worker as saying.

But the majority of workers who do clopening shifts are able to get fewer than seven hours of sleep, the report said.

“Because I was frequently scheduled for clopening shifts, I got just four or five hours of sleep a night. I was doing all I could to get ahead, but Starbucks’ scheduling practices made me question whether that was possible,” said Ciara Moran, a former Starbucks barista wrote in a petition she launched with Coworker.org, asking for further scheduling reforms.

The report released Wednesday said that 48 percent of surveyed Starbucks workers said they received their work schedules a week or less in advance, and that 40 percent reported they had experienced pressure to avoid taking sick days.

"Employees say that it can be extremely difficult to take sick days because they face pressure to work while sick, fear negative consequences or are forced to find their own replacement," the report said.

The report suggested that the experiences of individual workers varied considerably, depending on store locations and personnel. 

“Many of us have different experiences at Starbucks, depending on our manager,” Moran said, asking others to support the cause “for consistent protections across the company, starting with healthy schedules across the board.”

“On a corporate level there isn’t that level of accountability. They’re not looking whether their polices are going far enough,” Gleason said. “For Starbucks, it can be a model for the industry for how to deliver a sustainable workweek.”

“I think they need to engage their workforce in a different way,” she said.