There was a time in America when the average guy could work
25, 30 or 40 years with the same company, retire with a defined benefit pension
plan, and (in some case) get a fancy watch.
I know a few people my age who worked a lifetime with one
company, retired with a defined benefit pension, and lived decades after
retirement in comfortable circumstances – but that is no longer the norm.
A few years ago, I read a book titled “How Starbucks Saved My
Life”. In many ways, what Michael Gates Gill experienced was similar to what I
(and thousands of other people) experienced during what normally be their peak
earning years.
When I was 51 years old, the department that I worked in shut
down. Although I tried to find a similar position at another insurance company,
those jobs no longer existed. Ultimately, I got a job as a commissioned life
insurance agent, but my new income was substantially less that I was making
before, so my dream of retiring with $1,000,000 in the bank and a paid off
mortgage became dreams I would never achieve.
In his fifties, Michael Gates
Gill had it all: a big house in the suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at
an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he turned sixty, he had lost
everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First,
he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty-year marriage. Then,
he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined.
Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no
health insurance, and no prospects.
One day as Gill sat in a Manhattan Starbucks
with his last affordable luxury—a latté—brooding about his misfortune and
quickly dwindling list of options, a 28-year-old Starbucks manager named
Crystal Thompson approached him, half joking, to offer him a job. With nothing
to lose, he took it, and went from drinking coffee in a Brooks Brothers suit to
serving it in a green uniform. For the first time in his life, Gill was a minority--the
only older white guy working with a team of young African-Americans. He was
forced to acknowledge his ingrained prejudices and admit to himself that, far
from being beneath him, his new job was hard. And his younger coworkers,
despite having half the education and twice the personal difficulties he’d ever
faced, were running circles around him.
The other baristas treated Gill
with respect and kindness despite his differences, and he began to feel a new
emotion: gratitude. Crossing over the Starbucks bar was the beginning of a
dramatic transformation that cracked his world wide open. When all of his
defenses and the armor of entitlement had been stripped away, a humbler,
happier and gentler man remained. One that everyone, especially Michael’s kids,
liked a lot better.
The backdrop to Gill's story is a nearly
universal cultural phenomenon: the Starbucks experience. In How
Starbucks Saved My Life, we step behind the counter of one of the world's
best-known companies and discover how it all really works, who the baristas are
and what they love (and hate) about their jobs. Inside Starbucks, as Crystal
and Mike’s friendship grows, we see what wonders can happen when we reach out
across race, class, and age divisions to help a fellow human being.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/427475.How_Starbucks_Saved_My_Life
When I lived in Aurora, Illinois, I met a man named Jim who
suffered some enormous setbacks when he was in his 50’s. His story can be read
at the link below:
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-world-trade-center-fell-on-my-head.html
Michael Gates Gill is not the only person whose life was
transformed by Starbucks, but the latest example will surprise you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/business/starbucks-union-rhodes-scholar.html
Jaz Brisack became a barista
for the same reasons that talented young people have long chosen their career
paths: a mix of idealism and ambition.
Most
weekend mornings, Jaz Brisack gets up around 5,
wills her semiconscious body into a Toyota Prius and winds her way through
Buffalo, to the Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue. After a supervisor unlocks the
door, she clocks in, checks herself for COVID symptoms and helps get the store
ready for customers.
“I’m
almost always on bar if I open,” said Ms. Brisack, who has a thrift-store
aesthetic and long reddish-brown hair that she parts down the middle. “I like
steaming milk, pouring lattes.”
The
Starbucks door is not the only one that has been opened for her. As a
University of Mississippi senior in 2018, Ms. Brisack was one of 32 Americans
who won Rhodes scholarships, which fund study in Oxford, England.
Many students seek
the scholarship because it can pave the way to a career in the top ranks of
law, academia, government or business. They are motivated by a mix of ambition
and idealism.
Ms.
Brisack became a barista for similar reasons: She believed it was simply the
most urgent claim on her time and her many talents.
When
she joined Starbucks in late 2020, not a single one of the company’s 9,000 U.S.
locations had a union. Ms. Brisack hoped to change that by helping to unionize
its stores in Buffalo.
Improbably, she and her co-workers have far exceeded their goal.
Since December, when her store became the only corporate-owned Starbucks in the
United States with a certified union, more than 150 other stores have voted to
unionize, and more than 275 have filed paperwork to hold elections. Their
actions come amid an increase in public support for unions, which
last year reached its highest point since the mid-1960s, and a growing
consensus among center-left experts that rising union
membership could move millions of workers into the middle class.
Howard Schultz has written three books about his experience as
the founder of Starbucks – and I have read all of them.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=howars+schultz&i=stripbooks&crid=18X55B0LPNYGG&sprefix=howard+schultz%2Cstripbooks%2C129&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
In comparison to other companies, Starbucks is a pretty good
place to work, due to the benefits it provides to its employees. At a time of
rising prices, record corporate profits, and demanding work conditions, the
time is now ripe for unions to rise again – and the store in Buffalo is no
longer the only Starbucks that has a union.
A few years ago, employees at the Volkswagen plant in
Chattanooga tried to form a union, and several Amazon warehouse locations have
done the same.
Last week, employees of an Apple store in Maryland voted to
form a union.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/technology/apple-union-maryland.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Technology
My dad was a union man.
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2021/05/my-dad-mail-carrier.html
When he joined the Post Office in 1954, union membership was
at its peak. The Republican Party felt that unions were so important that union
membership was a part of the 1956 Republican national platform.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1956
Here’s the relevant portion of the platform:
In addition, the Eisenhower Administration has enforced more
vigorously and effectively than ever before, the laws which protect the working
standards of our people.
Workers have benefited by the progress which has been made in
carrying out the programs and principles set forth in the 1952 Republican
platform. All workers have gained and unions have grown in strength and responsibility,
and have increased their membership by 2 million.
Furthermore, the process of free collective bargaining has been
strengthened by the insistence of this Administration that labor and management
settle their differences at the bargaining table without the intervention of
the Government. This policy has brought to our country an unprecedented period
of labor-management peace and understanding.
We applaud the effective, unhindered, collective bargaining
which brought an early end to the 1956 steel strike, in contrast to the six
months' upheaval, Presidential seizure of the steel industry and ultimate
Supreme Court intervention under the last Democrat Administration.
**********************
The Rhodes Scholarship is
an international postgraduate award for students to study at
the University of Oxford. Established in 1902, it is the
oldest graduate scholarship in the world. It is considered among the most
prestigious international scholarship programs in the world. Its
founder, Cecil John Rhodes, wanted to promote
unity between English-speaking nations and instill a sense of civic-minded
leadership and moral fortitude in future leaders, irrespective of their chosen
career paths. Initially restricted to male applicants from countries that
are today within the Commonwealth, Germany and the
United States, the scholarship is now open to applicants from all backgrounds
and genders around the world. Since its creation, controversy has
surrounded its initial exclusion of women, its historical failure to select
black Africans, and Cecil Rhodes's own standing as a British imperialist. At present Rhodes scholarships are
offered to all the countries both for male and female for postgraduate studies
at Oxford university.
Rhodes scholars have achieved
distinction as politicians, academics, scientists and doctors, authors,
entrepreneurs, and Nobel Prize winners. Many
scholars have become heads of state or heads of government, including President
of the United States Bill Clinton, President of
Pakistan Wasim Sajjad, Prime Minister of
Jamaica Norman Manley, Prime Minister of
Malta Dom Mintoff, and Prime
Ministers of Australia Tony Abbott, Bob Hawke, and Malcolm Turnbull. Other notable
Rhodes Scholars include Nobel Prize-winning scientist and discoverer of
penicillin Howard Florey, Justice of the
Constitutional Court of South Africa Edwin Cameron, Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, Australian High
Court Justice James Edelman, journalist and
American television host Rachel Maddow, author Naomi Wolf, musician Kris Kristofferson, U.S. Secretary of
Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_Scholarship
Some of the people who have been awarded the Rhodes
scholarship have become wealthy – and Bill Clinton is likely the best example –
but that’s not the point of the scholarships.
Listed below are some of the best-known recipients:
https://people.howstuffworks.com/13-famous-rhodes-scholars.htm
There are those who might think that
Jaz Brisack is wasting her
potential by working at Starbucks – but Cecil Rhodes himself would disagree.
In his last will, Cecil Rhodes provided for the
establishment of the Rhodes Scholarship. Over the course of the previous half-century,
governments, universities and individuals in the settler colonies had been
establishing travelling scholarships for this purpose. The Rhodes awards fit
the established pattern. The scholarship enabled male students from territories under British rule or formerly
under British rule and from Germany to study at Rhodes's alma mater, the
University of Oxford. Rhodes' aims were to promote leadership marked by
public spirit and good character, and to "render war
impossible" by promoting friendship between the great powers.
Eventually, women also became eligible for the
scholarships – and Jaz Brisack was not the first woman to be so honored.
Starbucks may not have saved Jaz Brisack’s life
– but she fulfilled Cecil Rhodes’s idea of “promoting leadership by
marked public spirit and good character”.
